McGill University Professor Adelle Blackett—who spearheaded critical pedagogical initiatives at the Canadian institution, including the development of a critical race theory course and teaching Slavery and the Law as a specialized topic course—will be lending her expertise to Fordham Law School. At Fordham, Blackett will teach Slavery and the Law: Comparative and International Perspectives in her role as the William Hughes Mulligan Distinguished Visiting Professor during the fall 2024 semester.
Blackett, law professor and the Canada Research Chair in Transnational Labour Law at McGill University, is a widely-published expert on topics such as trade and labor standards and is the recent chair and author of a 2023 Canadian federal task force force report entitled “A Transformative Framework to Achieve and Sustain Employment Equity.” A former official of the International Labour Office (ILO) in Geneva, she was the lead ILO expert in a treaty-making process on decent work for domestic workers (2008-2011), and preparing a draft Haitian labor code in a deeply collaborative, tripartite-plus law reform process (2011-2014). She is the author of Everyday Transgressions: Domestic Workers’ Transnational Challenge to International Labor Law (Cornell University Press, 2019).
“We are thrilled that Adelle Blackett will be joining us this semester as a visiting professor,” said Dean Joseph Landau. “She is a tremendous legal scholar on matters of trade, race, and labor. Our students will greatly benefit from exposure to Professor Blackett’s research and teaching, and we look forward to her engagement with our scholarly community.”
Blackett says her course at Fordham Law will survey of the law pertaining to Atlantic slavery and the slave trade. It will consider how international law on slavery and the slave trade developed as well as explore the impact of slavery on basic private law principles and the relationship between slavery and legal tradition.
“Today, people talk about contemporary or modern slavery in terms of working conditions, but tend to divorce the concept from the history of slavery—in other words, using the language of slavery as if it were a metaphor,” Blackett said. “Part of what I hope students will grapple with is how it is that we’ve come to embrace an understanding of modern slavery that might lead us away from understanding the deep messages that emerge out of careful study of Atlantic slavery—including the need to address systemic change if we are to eradicate slavery and its legacies.”
Professor Tanya K. Hernández, who visited Blackett’s class at McGill to discuss her book, Racial Subordination in Latin America: The Role of State, Customary Law, and The New Civil Rights Response (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2013) in 2015, emphasized why she believes Fordham Law is fortunate to have Blackett serve as this year’s visiting professor.
“When you think of international law or international labor law, it’s often reduced to the idea of trade and corporate interests. But Professor Blackett’s scholarship, praxis, and involvement in the world is centered on the way in which invisible categories of people get caught up in international labor markets,” Hernández said, referring to Blackett’s influential book Everyday Transgressions.
Hernández added, “Professor Blackett also doesn’t treat these things as if they were colorblind dynamics; she’s very attentive to the role of race and racism. She is one of the central critical race theorists in Canada, and I’ve always valued her work in and contributions to the field, including serving as the lead International Labour Organization expert [in a treaty-making process on decent work for domestic workers and preparing a draft Haitian labor code].”
During her time at Fordham Law, Blackett will also be working on a book that explores the 1926 Slavery Convention, focused on a reconsideration of the founding framing of the convention and a rethinking of the relevance of Atlantic slavery for contemporary understandings of labor exploitation.
