No Toilets in Park

68 Pages Posted: 14 Jan 2009

See all articles by Roderick A. Macdonald

Roderick A. Macdonald

McGill University Faculty of Law

Jason MacLean

School of Environment and Sustainability, University of Saskatchewan

Date Written: 2005

Abstract

The undergraduate law curriculum adopted at McGill University in 1998 - the transsystemic programme - was born of the unique political, social, and intellectual histories of its Faculty of Law. This essay reviews these contexts and characterizes the programme as an ongoing conversation about law, language, and knowledge that has animated the teaching programme since the faculty's founding, 150 years ago. The essay begins by juxtaposing the phrases "No Vehicles in Park" and "No Toilets in Park" to suggest that law and legal education are hermeneutic endeavours embedded in social experience. At McGill, this interpretive practice may be described as "constitutive polyjurality" - a term the authors coin to capture the theoretical ground of transsystemic leaching, an epistemological and pedagogical practice at once pluralist, polycentric, non-positivist, and interactive. Using the first-year introductory course Foundations of Canadian Law as an illustration, the authors suggest new directions for the programme. They argue that one of the key goals of the transsystemic programme is to increase opportunities for students to become the agents of their own education and, concomitantly, to participate in the reconstruction of law and legal knowledge. The transsystemic programme challenges orthodox practices and established categories of knowledge. Curricular configurations, however, cannot be frozen: even constitutive polyjurality may one day lose its privileged place as an interpretive theme at McGill.

Suggested Citation

Macdonald, Roderick A. and MacLean, Jason, No Toilets in Park (2005). McGill Law Journal, Vol. 50, 2005, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1327982

Roderick A. Macdonald (Contact Author)

McGill University Faculty of Law ( email )

3644 Peel Street
Montreal H3A 1W9, Quebec H3A 1W9
Canada

Jason MacLean

School of Environment and Sustainability, University of Saskatchewan ( email )

College of Education
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan S7N 5A7
Canada

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