The Faculty of Law welcomes back Professor Annalise Acorn from McGill University Faculty of Law. Professor Acorn returns from participating in a two day workshop with world renounced sociologist of science Bruno Latour on his book An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence. Bruno Latour was the winner of the 2013 Holberg Prize and gave the 2014 Tanner Lectures at Yale University entitled: "How Better to Register the Agency of Things." The McGill workshop focused on bringing grievances against Latour's articulation of different modes of existence in his book and staging a diplomatic encounter to mediate between Latour's explanation of contemporary ontology of law and other ways of being and the lived experience of people within these disciplines. Professor Acorn spoke on behalf of LAW as a mode of existence and her remarks focused on the way in which contract and property law can orient humanity toward collective action failure in facing the challenge of climate change. She argued that clarity of purpose and the eschewing of intellectual pretence are necessary conditions for combating climate change.
The workshop was the second of two exceptional academic events organized by Professor Richard Janda recently. In February Professor Janda organized the now legendary Symposium: Unbounded Level of the Mind: Rod MacDonald's Legal Imagination.
While at McGill, Professor Acorn also gave a Legal Theory Workshop entitled: "Epic Lives and Ardent Souls: reflections on the emotions of hero worship". This talk was, in some measure, given as an addendum to the MacDonald Symposium which was among other things, an outpouring of the emotions of hero worship and gratitude for the extraordinary contribution and influence of the larger than life personality, the much admired and beloved, Professor Roderick A. MacDonald, OC, F.R.Scott Chair of Constitutional and Public Law.