Thursday 22 October 2009 1700

Venue: University College Goodhart Seminar Room

Organised by Jurisprudence Discussion Group

Speaker: Dwight Newman (Associate Professor of Law at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada, and currently a Visiting Scholar at the McGill Faculty of Law, Canada)

In this paper, I will try to untangle certain problems present in equality-based arguments for Indigenous rights. Will Kymlicka’s seminal Liberalism, Community, and Culture opened the prospect that Indigenous rights might be defended in terms of traditional liberal egalitarian values, claiming to offer an argument for Indigenous rights based on Ronald Dworkin’s account of equality of resources. Patrick Macklem’s monumental Indigenous Difference and the Constitution of Canada built on this approach to seek to justify the Aboriginal rights provisions of a Western democratic constitution, namely that of Canada, through equality-based arguments. Though laudable in intent, I will argue that these and similar arguments unfortunately elide different conceptions of equality that entail inconsistent normative commitments. Rendering analytically more transparent the equality rights implications of different Indigenous rights offers the prospect of revealing better the underlying choices about values in certain decisions about these rights’ extent. This paper seeks to begin that task.

For more information on this event, please contact: Pablo Stafforini