Annual Sefton-Williams Memorial Lecture
Join us for the 2024 Sefton-Williams Memorial Lecture, Whither the Transformative Framework to Achieve and Sustain Employment Equity, One Year Later?, delivered by Adelle Blackett, Professor of Law and the Canada Research Chair, Transnational Labour Law at the Faculty of Law, McGill University.
We will also present the Sefton-Williams Award for Contributions to Labour Relations to Arbitrator Owen Shime, with a reception to follow.
This is a free event and all are welcome. Seating is limited, so please ensure you RSVP to attend in-person. Alternatively, you can live-stream the event via Zoom (link forthcoming).
The Sefton/Williams Memorial Lecture series presents topics of interest to scholars and practitioners of labour-management relations, and is jointly delivered by Woodsworth College and the Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources at the University of Toronto.
Professor Adelle Blackett
Professor Adelle Blackett, FRSC, AdE, is the Canada Research Chair in Transnational Labour Law. In Fall 2024, she is the William Hughes Mulligan Distinguished Visiting Professor at Fordham Law School. Her scholarship focuses on building emancipatory approaches to labour law. Her 2019 book manuscript entitled Everyday Transgressions: Domestic Workers’ Transnational Challenge to International Labor Law (Cornell University Press) garnered the Canadian Council on International Law’s (CCIL) 2020 Scholarly Book Award. Her SSHRC-funded research on slavery and the law, conducted initially for a general rapporteurship for the International Academy of Comparative Law (IACL) in which she is an associate member, reconsiders the founding framing of the 1926 Slavery Convention, and rethinks the relevance of Atlantic slavery for contemporary understandings of labour exploitation. Her research on trade and labour standards theorizes social regionalism and distributive justice alternatives. The founding director of the Labour Law and Development Research Laboratory, her emerging research and teaching is on social justice for peace-making through alternative dispute resolution.
Professor Blackett's labour law leadership includes serving as the lead ILO expert in a treaty-making process on decent work for domestic workers, and preparing a draft Haitian labour code in a deeply collaborative, tripartite-plus law reform process. She was unanimously appointed by the National Assembly of Québec to the Commission des droits de la personne et des droits de la jeunesse. She also chaired the Human Rights Experts Panel of the federal Court Challenges Program. She was appointed by the federal Minister of Labour to chair Canada’s Employment Equity Act Review Task Force. She is also the principal drafter of the Scarborough Charter on Anti-Black Racism and Black Inclusion in Canadian Higher Education.
An elected fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, she has been awarded the Bora Laskin National Human Rights Fellowship & the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Fellowship. An innovative pedagogue, she has received the McGill Principal’s Prize for Excellence in Teaching (Full Professor category), the Canadian Association of Law Teachers’ Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Award, and the inaugural McGill Graduate Law Student Association’s Excellence in Supervision and Mentorship Award. Professor Blackett’s contributions have also been recognized by the Barreau du Québec’s Christine Tourigny Award of Merit and the status of Advocate Emeritus, the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal, and the Canadian Association of Black Lawyers’ Pathfinder Award. She has been awarded honorary doctorates in law from Queen’s University, Université Catholique de Louvain, and Simon Fraser University. The Labour Law Research Network awarded her its Bob Hepple Award for Lifetime Achievement in Labour Law.