Tamara Thermitus and Hugo B. Lafrenière return to the Faculty of Law as visiting scholars
The Faculty of Law is delighted to welcome two accomplished jurists as visitors for the 2023-2024 academic year.
Mtre Tamara Thermitus, Ad E, LLM’13, joined us as Boulton Senior Fellow on 1 September, and will be visiting until 31 August.
Hugo B. Lafrenière, BCL/LLB’15, joined us as Boulton Junior Fellow on 1 August, and will be visiting until 31 July.
Called to the Quebec Bar in 1988, Tamara Thermitus holds an LLM from McGill. She negotiated the nature and scope of the mandate of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Mtre Thermitus was Chair of the federal Department of Justice's Advisory Committee on Visible Minorities (2004-2010) and Chair of the Cultural Communities Committee (Quebec Bar). She instigated training on the social context of the law at the École du Barreau. It was under her leadership that Développements récents en profilage racial (2009) was published, the first book on racial profiling in Quebec. Mtre Thermitus regularly publishes articles in various media on issues such as racism, intersectionality, reconciliation with Indigenous peoples, and violence against women. A laureate of the Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee Medal (2012), she has earned numerous awards, including the Mérite du Barreau du Québec (2011), becoming the first Black lawyer to receive such recognition. She has also been awarded the Employment Equity and Diversity Leadership Award (Department of Justice, 2010 and 2016).
Hugo B. Lafrenière joins McGill from the Institut d’études politiques de Paris (Sciences Po), where he teaches moral and political philosophy as a postdoctoral fellow. He has obtained a BCL/LLB with a minor in philosophy from McGill (2015), as well as an LLM (2017) and JSD (2022) from New York University, where he received the John Bruce Moore Award for excellence in the area of law and philosophy (2017). His research is at the intersection of moral, political, and legal philosophy. He is especially interested in the relation between an individual’s autonomy and distributive justice, and its implications in the field of property law and private law more broadly. He has also published scholarship on theories of legal pluralism and the history of “transsystemia”.
