Le Groupe des humanités juridiques vous convie aux Ateliers de droit civil 2024-2026, qu’il co-organise avec le Centre Paul-André Crépeau de droit privé et comparé et qui a pour thème « Maladroit : Les maladresses du droit privé ».

Dans le cadre des Ateliers, Amy Preston-Samson (Ph.D, McGill, 2025) présentera une conférence intitulée « Histories of Legal Reception: Museums of Accidents? » le 10 vendredi avril 2026 de 13:00 à 14:30, à la Faculté de droit de l’Université McGill (salle Scott (salle 16), Pavillon Chancellor-Day, 3644 rue Peel).

Résumé (en anglais seulement) : This paper reflects on the author’s doctoral research on the reception of English law in Australia, focused through the lens of accident and informed by theories of accidental art. Inspired by Paul Virilio’s observation that “to acquire a tool…is to acquire a danger, a particular risk; it is to open one’s door to expose one’s intimacy to hazards, slight or major,” and his idea that “exhibiting the accident” involves “exposing what is improbable, what is unusual and yet inevitable,” it brings together a series of reception artifacts and moments, which represent both accidents themselves and the measures taken to avoid or protect against them. Rather than simply drawing on the thesis, the paper reflects on its methodology, which somewhat unconsciously involved collecting and curating accidents as a means of understanding legal reception. What might be gained by a more self-conscious consideration of these moments not as marginal errors outside reception, but as conditions that make reception itself possible? Attending to accidents in this way also invites us to rethink intentionality and authority in legal texts. What kinds of legal histories, and what kinds of relationships to legal texts, could a museum of accidents make possible?

Biographie (en anglais seulement) : Amy Preston-Samson recently completed her doctorate at McGill University’s Faculty of Law, where she was supervised by Professor Shauna Van Praagh. Her thesis, entitled Layering Down the Law: Four Histories of the Myth of the Reception of English Law in Australia, examines the methodologies that a curious legal scholar might employ to interrogate the founding myth that English law arrived in Australia in the legal baggage of the colonists. Through a careful reading of court decisions, books, lost law libraries, and the silences of legal history, Amy traces how this myth has been constructed, disseminated, and rewritten across time and space. Beyond her doctoral work, she continues to explore the relationships between different genres of texts and communities—real and imagined—and the practices that structure, enable and frustrate collective communication. Her work is also attentive to the role of contingency in legal history—how accidental alignments of texts, institutions, and actors can give rise to narratives that later appear intentional or inevitable.