2026 IECL Annual Lecture: Memory and Movement in the Comparative Law Construction of an International Law of Slavery

2026 IECL Annual Lecture: Memory and Movement in the Comparative Law Construction of an International  Law of Slavery

Short Summary:

Professor Adelle Blackett’s Institute of European and Comparative Law Annual Lecture draws on a chapter from her current book project on the 1926 Slavery Convention.  Under contract with Cambridge University Press, the book offers an invitation to consider how it is that a century on, contemporary legal invocations of slavery—rightly concerned as they are about the magnitude of human suffering—seem to have parted company so resolutely with historical analyses of Atlantic slavery as a global institution.

The IECL presentation focuses on the actors in the comparative law construction of an international law of slavery as an act of memory, favouring a particularly close look at the work of pan-Americanist lawyer and diplomat from Haiti, Dantès Bellegarde.  Bellegarde was the only participant in the Temporary Slavery Commission established by the nascent League of Nations in 1924 who was the descendant of enslaved Africans.   Indeed, most members, including Lord Lugard, had been colonial administrators.  Their approach to comparative law for international law-making was subtly but unmistakably challenged by Bellegarde’s insistence on the need for steadfast engagement with the implications of the past alongside its persistence into the present, notably in the practices of servitude through forced labour across distinct colonial regimes.  Bellegarde, insoumis, and referred to by African American sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois as no less than as the “international spokesman of the Negroes of the World”, embodied the paradox of the objectification of the comparative law subject.   In other words, Bellegarde urged fellow members of the Temporary Slavery Commission to understand law-making on slavery and servitude, as worldmaking on work in freedom.

Adelle Blackett is Professor of Law and Canada Research Chair in Transnational Labour Law and Development at McGill University.  She holds an LLM and doctorate in law from Columbia University, civil law and common law degrees from McGill University, and a BA in History from Queen’s University.  A Titular Member of the International Academy of Comparative Law, her recent publications include a co-edited volume in the IACL’s ius comparatum series on Critical Approaches to Contemporary Slavery, special issues of the International Labour Review and the American Journal of International Law (Unbound) on Transnational Futures of International Labour Law, and an award winning manuscript entitled Everyday Transgressions: Domestic Workers’ Transnational Challenge to International Labour Law (Cornell University Press, 2019). Internationally, she has been the principal architect of ILO Convention No. 189 and Recommendation No. 201, prepared a draft Haitian labour code, and most recently was appointed Senior Advisor to the Director-General of the ILO.  In Canada, she has chaired the Employment Equity Act Review Task Force, served as a Quebec human rights and youth rights commissioner, and chaired the Human Rights Experts Panel of the federal Court Challenges Program.  She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, an Advocate Emeritus of the Barreau du Québec and recipient of its Mérite Christine Tourigny.  She has been awarded honorary doctorates from Queen’s University, UC Louvain and Simon Fraser University, and has been honoured both with the Bob Hepple Lifetime Achievement Award in Labour Law and the Chief Justice Bora Laskin Award for Distinguished Contributions to Canadian Labour Law.