Law prof and student to help chart a course for aboriginal self-governance



Osgoode Hall Law School Professor Kent McNeil (right) and Osgoode PhD student Janna Promislow have been selected to participate in a five-year, $2.5-million project to develop models of aboriginal self-governance.


They are among 39 researchers from 21 Canadian universities selected to take part in the Indigenous Peoples and Governance project, announced Monday by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.


Pierre Noreau, professor in the Faculty of Law at the Université de Montréal and director of the Centre de recherche en droit public (Public Law Research Centre), will lead the project. Researchers in constitutional studies, economics, anthropology, philosophy and political science will work with the Law Commission of Canada, the Royal Society of Canada and nine aboriginal associations to propose models for aboriginal governance and for relationships among sovereign peoples that draw on the best in both modern scholarship and ancient traditions.


McNeil recently received a Killam Research Fellowship to research indigenous sovereignty and European colonization of western North America. (See YFile, March 3, 2006)