Stephen Toope | Lecture 3: A New Beginning for the Rule of Law

That a Beginning Be Made: A Rule of Law for Our New Age of Anxiety
Lecture 3: A New Beginning for the Rule of Law

Stephen Toope, Vice-Chancellor, University of Cambridge

Thursday, September 9, 4:30-6 pm
in the series 2021-22 J. V. Clyne Lectures at UBC, hosted by Green College

Lecture 3: A New Beginning for the Rule of Law
The rule of law is a potentially powerful form of “epistemic practical authority” if connected to “interactional law”, a framework with three interrelated elements. First, legal norms arise in the context of social norms based on shared understandings. Second, law is distinguishable from other types of social ordering not because of its provenance from a particular hierarchical “source” of law but by its adherence to criteria of legality. Third, the criteria of legality must be constantly maintained through continuing practices of legality. The rule of law can only be built successfully together in communities of practice that then reach into the wider community. To the extent that participants in law view it as purely instrumental, or as an intellectual game where the consequences for real people are of little import, they are undermining the rule of law and exposing our fellow human beings to potentially devastating consequences.

Stephen J. Toope OC, FRSC, LLD is 346th Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, the first non-UK national to hold the post. He was Director of the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, and President, the University of British Columbia. A former Dean of Law, McGill University and Founding President of the Pierre Eliot Trudeau Foundation, Toope was also Chair of the United Nations Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances. He publishes in global journals on human rights, international dispute resolution, international environmental law, the use of force, and international legal theory, and has lectured at universities around the world. He is married to Paula Rosen, and they have three adult children and three small grandchildren.

The Clyne Lectures at UBC: John Valentine Clyne (1902-1989) was a judge of the BC Supreme Court, Chair and CEO of the forestry company MacMillan Bloedel Ltd, and Chancellor of UBC. The purpose of the Clyne Lectures, funded by an endowment set up in his honour at the end of his service as Chancellor in 1984, is to provide public lectures to UBC and the wider Vancouver community by individuals with outstanding expertise in one or more of the fields in which the honorand distinguished himself, namely Government, Business, Law and the Arts.