The Opening of the First Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia by H.R.H. The Duke of Cornwall and York (later H.M. King George V), May 9, 1901 “The Big Picture” Tom Roberts, 1903

Embracing the Human: Reflections of a Recent Graduate on the Inaugural Meeting of the Canadian Network of Law and Humanities

Without the various human litigants, advocates, witnesses, decision-makers, teachers, and researchers who populate the legal milieu, law as a social institution would be decidedly empty and purposeless.  

It is therefore appropriate that the inaugural meeting of the recently created Canadian Network of Law and Humanities—which I attended and helped organize as a research assistant in August 2022—focused on interrogating the ‘human’ in law. Over two days, four panels, a documentary screening, a keynote presentation, and a nature walk, the Network’s convened members gathered for a workshop titled “Reimagining ‘the Human’ in Research, Teaching, and Innovation.” In doing so, the participants sought to wrestle with the role of human creativity, subjectivity, experience, expression, and cultural/colonial encounter in rigorous legal study and pedagogy. Indeed, the various panel’s themes evidence these priorities, ranging from presentations on: colonial spaces and contexts; (re)educating lawyers; the close reading of laws, texts, and artifacts; and gender roles, patriarchy, and playing roles. 

Yet I believe the workshop exceeded its intentions. A meeting of likeminded academics billed as an opportunity to ‘re-imagine’ the human seemingly transformed to a workshop defined by the human’s unabashed embrace. The assembled law professors, who recent law graduates and other readers of this blog may associate with dry recitations of ratio decidendi or fear-inducing use of the Socratic method, breathed fresh and engaging air to the workshop’s proceedings by relying on humour, personal experience, story-telling, visual art, and performance—decidedly human elements conspicuously lacking in many legal classrooms and in the academy.

The workshop’s keynote speaker, Professor Desmond Manderson of the Australian National University, provides a compelling example. Professor Manderson’s presentation, titled “The Big Picture: Towards Unconstitutional Law,” touched on the intersections of settler-indigenous encounters, visual art, and myth-building with respect to constitutional law in Australia. Specifically, Professor Manderson examined various art pieces contained within the Parliament of Australia, as well as Indigenous artistic works that ironically comment on the Parliament’s art. Although Professor Manderson did so to primarily glean insights into colonial, ‘home-grown,’ and Indigenous conceptions of Australian sovereignty, his observations on the value of artistic expression and irony in both engendering and dismantling political and legal dogmas are of a much wider and apparent relevancy. 

Other presenters focused on the more personal and individual experiences of humans as legal subjects and participants in law. An example that has remained front of mind for me since the workshop is a presentation on application forms by Professor Patricia Cochran of the University of Victoria. Professor Cochran provided an eye-opening account of the ways in which filling out application forms related to disability benefits both generates and constrains the possibilities for recognition of diverse human experiences. Professor Cochran compellingly showed that seemingly innocuous choices by drafters of application forms, like the amount of space available for an applicant to describe the impacts of their disability on their lives, can have consequences for how persons with disabilities internally understand and externally communicate their needs and entitlements. 

Others still examined the role of human storytelling in legal analysis. One memorable instance was University of British Columbia Professor Joel Bakan’s screening of his film The New Corporation: The Unfortunately Necessary Sequel. Both in the film and roundtable discussion that followed, Professor Bakan outwardly acknowledged and embraced his own political beliefs and priorities in using storytelling to challenge the developing conventional wisdom that corporations, bestowed as they are with legal personhood, can simultaneously pursue profit and social, ecological or political good. In another example of storytelling-as-law, Professor Mary Liston, also of the University of British Columbia, examined the complexities of authorial responsibility in drafting legal texts, with a particular focus on the fictionalization of the wrongful conviction of British solicitor George Edalji in Julian Barnes’ 2005 novel Arthur & George. These presentations reinforced, among other things, the importance of studying the interactions and intersections of law with storytelling—i.e., a universal and persistent human endeavour. 

Finally, the group was encouraged to remain alive to its own embodied humanity throughout the proceedings. A prime example came on the first day of the workshop, when the participants left behind their presenting, analyzing, questioning, and debating to embrace their senses. The participants did so as they engaged in a mindful nature walk guided by Holly Schmidt, the Belkin Gallery’s Artist-in-Residence. In planning this walk, the workshop’s conveners aimed to disrupt the participants’ conventional ideas on the proper scope of communal ‘academic’ work. As well, the conveners saw the mindful walk as a means of ensuring that participants became and remained grounded, as persons, with the land on which they met, namely, the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Musqueam people on which the University of British Columbia stands. Finally, the walk’s guided activities further served to highlight the participants’ humanity, as well as its consequences. Namely, among the walk’s highlights was an activity in which participants were tasked with visualizing on paper the numerous sounds they heard in the forests surrounding UBC in just a few minutes of silence. A review of the participants’ visualizations revealed not only different visual languages but also different priorities, interests, and blind spots. The same is, of course, true in legal analysis and advocacy: we can all observe and interpret the same situation and reach very different conclusions owing, in part, to our diverse human experiences. 

Ultimately, I came away from the inaugural meeting of the Canadian Network of Law & Humanities with an affirmed belief in the importance of human experience, subjective as it may be, in guiding legal research, teaching, and practice. To that end, the experiences and lessons of this workshop—taken by its participants to their various institutions and classrooms—will certainly serve the academic, pedagogical, and professional networks of which these participants are a part. But my broader hope, and one I believe is shared by the Network’s members, is that the work this workshop highlighted, and the future work it no doubt inspired, will cause a wider, enriching, and important embrace of the Canadian legal world’s humanity.

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Omri Rozen is a recent graduate of the Peter A. Allard School of Law and a current law clerk at the Supreme Court of British Columbia. None of the views expressed in this blog post represent the views of the Court. The views expressed in this blog post are intended and are to be taken strictly as the personal views of the author only.