McGill Law Journal
The McGill Law Journal is a scholarly legal publication affiliated with the student body of the McGill University Faculty of Law in Montreal, Quebec, published by a non-profit corporate institution independent of the faculty run exclusively by students.
It also publishes the Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation, Canada’s legal citation reference work. The Journal was ranked as the best overall student-run law journal in the world outside of the United States in 2010 by the Washington and Lee University School of Law.
Overview
Over the years the McGill Law Journal has garnered significant recognition in Canada and around the world. Since its first citations in the early 1970s, it has been cited more often than any other university-affiliated law journal in the world by the Supreme Court of Canada. Subscribers to the Journal reside in over forty countries across six continents. In addition, the Journal actively contributes to the development of Canadian legal methodology by publishing the Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation, which has become the standard reference work for almost all Canadian law reviews, Canadian law schools, and courts. The McGill Law Journal's citation style became the official style for Canadian legal citation by the Bluebook, America's equivalent to the McGill Guide, before the first edition of the Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation.Students of the Faculty of Law of McGill University founded the McGill Law Journal in 1952, led by Founding Editor-in-Chief Jacques-Yvan Morin. From that founding, the Journal has promoted the development of legal scholarship by appealing to an audience that includes professors of law, practicing lawyers, and law students. Given that the Province of Quebec is a jurisdiction where the legal traditions of common law and civil law intersect in matters of private law, the first editors of the Journal immediately appreciated its potential as a catalyst for the development of civilian legal scholarship published in English. The Journal is recognized as an important forum for the critical analysis of contemporary legal issues in the realms of public law and private law, as well as international law.
The Journal is a bilingual publication. The editorial team includes both francophone and anglophone students tasked with the selection of articles and their preparation for publication. The Journal publishes a variety of articles pertaining to the civil and common law traditions in both of Canada's official languages. Part of its mandate is to contribute to the development of legal research that is comparative or transsystemic in nature.
Similar to its American counterparts and unlike many of its Canadian competitors, the McGill Law Journal is entirely student-run. In order to ensure the quality of its content, all manuscripts selected for publication are peer reviewed by scholars from Canada and around the world using a double-blind system.
''McGill Law Journal'''s Annual Lecture
Since 2000, the McGill Law Journal has invited an important guest each year to deliver a lecture to the legal community of McGill and Montreal at large. The lecture is published in the McGill Law Journal and is one of the most important events of the year at the Faculty. Before its current incarnation, previous lecturers included Jacques-Yvan Morin and future Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada Beverley McLachlin.| Year | Speaker | Title | Published |
| 2020 | James Tully | “Sustainable Democratic Constitutionalism and Climate Change” | Yes |
| 2019 | Patricia J. Williams, American Legal Scholar | “From Underground Railroad to Overland Migration: When the North Star Can’t Be Found” | No |
| 2018 | Tim Wu, Professor at Columbia Law | “The Curse of Bigness Revisited - Antitrust in the New Gilded Age” | No |
| 2016 | Mari Matsuda, Lawyer, Activist & Professor | “The Next Dada Utopian Visioning Peace Orchestra: Constitutional Theory and the Aspirational” | Yes |
| 2015 | Suzanne Côté, Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada | “The Firsts: Breaking the Glass Ceiling and Provoking Changes” | No |
| 2014 | Mélanie Joly, Canadian Politician | “Le cadre juridique des villes au Canada” | No |
| 2013 | Goodwin Liu, Justice of the Supreme Court of California | “Justice and Distribution of Equal Opportunity” | No |
| 2012 | :fr:Sylvain_Lussier|Sylvain Lussier, Canadian Lawyer | “Equality of all under the law: quand les gouvernements doivent répondre devant les tribunaux” | Yes |
| 2011 | Carlos Fuentes, Mexican novelist | Untitled | Yes |
| 2010 | Rosalie Abella, Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada | “International Law and Human Rights: The Power and the Pity” | Yes |
| 2009 | John Ralston Saul, Canadian philosopher | “The Roots of Canadian Law in Canada” | Yes |
| 2008 | Patrick Macklem, Canadian Law Professor | “What is International Human Rights Law? Three Applications of a Distributive Account” | Yes |
| 2007 | Pierre Dalphond, Canadian Senator | “What is the Future of Doctrine in Quebec” | Yes |
| 2006 | John Gomery, Quebec Superior Court Judge | "The Pros and Cons of Commissions of Inquiry" | Yes |
| 2005 | Thomas R. Berger, Supreme Court of British Columbia Judge | "One Man's Justice: My Life in the Courts" | Yes |
| 2004 | John Fisher, Former Director of Egale Canada | "Outlaws or In-laws?: Successes and Challenges in the Struggle for LGBT Equality" | Yes |
| 2003 | Gérald A. Beaudoin, Canadian Senator | "Le contrôle judiciaire de la constitutionnalité des lois" | Yes |
| 2002 | Kent Roach, Canadian Law Professor | "Did September 11 Change Everything? Struggling to Preserve Canadian Values in the Face of Terrorism" | Yes |
| 2001 | Philippe Kirsch, President of the International Criminal Court | "Negotiating an Institution for the Twenty-First Century: Multilateral Diplomacy and the International Criminal Court" | Yes |
| 2000 | Charles Gonthier, Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada | "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: The Forgotten Leg of the Trilogy, or Fraternity: The Unspoken Third Pillar of Democracy" | Yes |