Introduction

The McGill Law Journal’s Equity Statement reflects the Journal’s commitment to equity, diversity, and inclusion (“EDI”) in all of our operations.

Each year, a select number of Journal editors and managers serve on the EDI committee, which seeks to promote an equitably inclusive environment within the Journal and legal academia. This has included special events aimed at platforming diverse speakers, EDI-specific training sessions for editors, and now, in collaboration with the Journal’s Executive Board, our Equity Statement.

These measures aim to develop, support, and implement initiatives in recruitment and academic publishing to ensure quality research, address historical inequalities, and better reflect the diverse legal society our Journal serves. The Journal emphasizes both self-reflection on our own representation and history—requiring a proactive approach that uplifts and advocates rather than reacts or tokenizes—and a commitment to thematic and demographic inclusiveness across legal academia. This Equity Statement both reflects on past and emerging approaches to equity, and aims to underscore the importance of understanding how certain groups have been excluded in highlighting why targeted inclusion is so important today.

The Past and Present: Background and Inward Reflection

The Journal commits to taking a proactive, reflective approach to equitable inclusion. For this reason, we begin with an inward reflection on historic and ongoing exclusion of members of certain groups by the Journal itself.

For instance, despite women being part of the Journal’s executive team since its first volume in 1952, it took 20 years to for the board to elect a female editor-in-chief, Me. Laura Falk Scott, in Volume 21—with only nine women having served in the executive roles before her. It would take another decade before the Journal saw greater racial and ethnic diversity, reflecting the McGill Faculty of Law’s broader diversification. To date, fewer than 10 editors-in-chief have been people of color; 2022’s Volume 68 marked the election of the Journal’s first Black editor-in-chief, Ms. Ommu-Kulsoom Abdul-Rahman. It is likely not a leap to say that this limited diversity is the result of decades of inequality within Canada, the law, and the Journal itself—also affecting the inclusion of other groups, such as members of the 2SLGBTQI+ community and people with disabilities.

We wish also to acknowledge that as our journal has become more diverse, it has actively contributed to initiatives that foster deepened understandings of equitable inclusion in law. Me. Scott notably published the Journal’s first special issue on “Women and the Law in Canada,” a pioneering effort with respect to student-led legal publications. Since Volume 60, alongside the Journal’s increasing editorial diversity, it has published significant scholarship on legal issues affecting members of diverse groups, including Professor John Borrows’s influential speech, “Creating an Indigenous Legal Community” (2005) in Volume 50. (Notably, Borrows’s speech was cited by the Supreme Court of Canada in R v. Desautel, highlighting the importance of Indigenous perspectives in interpreting aboriginal rights under section 35(1) of the Constitution Act, 1982.)

We acknowledge these initiatives not to self-aggrandize, but to give credit where credit is due to those members of the Journal who made great strides to render it a more inclusive space. In building off these milestones, we continue to look toward the future and have initiated several aims, principles/objectives, and initiatives to sustain our continuous prioritization of EDI.

Towards the Future: Our Aims

The Journal is committed to promoting EDI internally and in legal scholarship by reflecting the ever-increasing diversity of Canada and the legal field. Given that the Journal operates on the unceded land of the Kanien’héha:ka Nation, further embedded within our conception of EDI is a commitment to truth and reconciliation, defined by the Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada as “establishing and maintaining a mutually respectful relationship between [Indigenous] and non-[Indigenous] peoples in this country.” To build this relationship, the Journal is actively curating and reframing our projects/publications by interrogating our existing processes with the generous guidance of Indigenous advisors, community members, and knowledge keepers.

Further, we take seriously our responsibility as an established legal publication to support substantive equality in legal academia by ensuring equitable publication opportunities for a wide cross-section of scholarship from a diverse range of scholars. Legal scholarship is enhanced by a diverse interplay of ideas and life experiences, including those based on one’s identity, including sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, race, Indigeneity, religion, first language, disability, pregnancy or parental status/responsibility, age, and career stage. Thus, we are committed to platforming historically underrepresented voices alongside more traditional perspectives in the texts we publish, the events we hold, and the editors and advisors we recruit.

Additionally, given the Journal’s reach, we understand the career paths the Journal can open to members of groups who have historically been excluded from legal academia. Thus, it is our goal to make the opportunities we provide equitably inclusive, reflecting our commitment to inclusive research excellence within the legal field as a whole.

Towards the Future: Our Concrete Principles and Objectives

In working towards the aims indicated above, the Journal is also committed to:

• Ensuring inclusive excellence in research and publishing within the Journal—as well as Canadian legal academia as a whole—through the active inclusion of diverse voices and perspectives within the Journal and across the broader legal academic community;
• Upholding standards of ethical behaviour in publishing, including (but not limited to) anonymous peer review;
• Remaining cognizant of demographics of published authors and recruited editors, actively soliciting submissions and applicants where the Journal fails to reflect the diversity of the Canadian legal field;
• Addressing unconscious biases and existing inequalities in the Journal processes through soliciting feedback from stakeholders and advisors;
• Preventing and eliminating harassment and discrimination in all its forms;
• Recognizing its limits and working with knowledge keepers and community members to see its EDI-related projects through, and;
• Upholding the value of respect in all its endeavours.

Towards the Future: Recent and Ongoing Initiatives

In line with the Journal’s aims and principles/objectives, its current EDI-related initiatives include, but are not limited to:

• The establishment of our EDI Committee, which oversees the vast majority of our EDI programming;
• The introduction of our multi-year Indigenous Legal Citations Project, which aims to establish a unique approach to Indigenous sources of knowledge through the 11th edition of the Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation;
• Regular consultation with faculty and professional advisors—as well as other student-led organizations—to diversify and expand our Editorial and Managerial Boards, as well as encourage submissions from underrepresented groups;
• The development of an internal inclusive French-language writing guide for use by Journal authors, and;
• Initiatives aimed at increasing the accessibility of legal academia, such as our podcast and the eventual introduction of accessible, plain-language summaries of the Journal’s core publications.

The Journal looks forward to offering a meaningful contribution to equitable inclusion in the Canadian legal community. We also welcome feedback from all community members, which can be directed towards our Executive Board at journal.law@mcgill.ca.