Due to illness, this event has been postponed to a later date.

Viscount Bennett Lecture and Seminar

The UNB Faculty of Law is holding its 31st annual Viscount Bennett Lecture, to be given by Professor Stephen Clarkson of the University of Toronto, on October 29th, 2009 at 5:30 p.m. in the Mary Louise Lynch Room at Ludlow Hall, UNBF. Professor Clarkson’s lecture title is “Globalization’s Paradoxical Challenge: Constraint for Canada’s Governments, Opportunities for Canadian Citizens.”

We invite you as well to a seminar discussion on the subject of the globalization of Canadian law and governance by Professor Clarkson on October 30th, from 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. in Room 2B, Ludlow Hall.

This year’s lecturer is Professor Stephen Clarkson. Following graduate studies at Oxford (as a Rhodes scholar) and the Sorbonne in Paris (where he did his doctorate), Professor Clarkson has been teaching political economy at his alma mater, the University of Toronto. There his first research focus involved the relations between the Soviet Union and India, and its large, strategically located, but weaker neighbour to the south.

As a young professor, he developed a growing fascination with the relationship of the other superpower with its large, strategically located, but weaker neighbour to the north, Canada. In the summer of 1981, during a severe crisis between Pierre Trudeau’s Ottawa and Ronald Reagan’s Washington, the Canadian Institute for Economic Policy commissioned him to do a study of this unequal relationship's bilateral agenda. The report was published as Canada and the Reagan Challenge and won the John Porter prize. After Pierre Trudeau’s retirement from active politics in 1984, Clarkson spent a decade co-authoring with his late wife, Christina McCall, a two-volume biography of Canada’s most charismatic prime minister, which won the Governor-General’s award. He also wrote a book on the Liberal Party, The Big Red Machine.

Clarkson’s primary research and teaching remains focused on Canada’s integration in North America, now in the context of NAFTA and more general globalizing pressures. Thanks to a fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, he was able to research and write Uncle Sam and Us, which assessed the impact of globalization and free trade on the Canadian state.

His last book, Does North America Exist? Governing the Continent after NAFTA and 9/11, was published in October of 2008. His current work, co-authored with Osgoode Hall's environmental law professor Stepan Wood, is entitled A Perilous Imbalance: The Globalization of Canadian Law and Governance. It will be published by UBC Press later this fall.

He has been elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Waterloo.

• The lecture on October 29th is open to the public and is followed by a reception in the Student Lounge.

• The seminar discussion on October 30th is open to interested members of the UNB and STU academic community. If you would like to attend the seminar, please advise Christine Landry (clandry@unb.ca) in the Dean’s office at the Faculty of Law by Monday, October 26th so that we can make appropriate arrangements in terms of space and refreshments.