Positions held

Biography

Anne Iavarone-Turcotte is a lawyer and holds a Ph.D. in law. After a few years of practicing litigation, during which she represented victims of medical and hospital malpractice in civil liability lawsuits, she pursued a master’s degree in law at McGill University (2013), eager to engage in an informed manner in the debate on reasonable accommodations. At the end of this process, she produced a thesis from which the article “Law 62 and ‘Arbitrariness’: Myths and Limits of Law in the Management of Religious Accommodations” was derived (published in Les ateliers de l’éthique in 2017). Wanting to address a delicate question left unresolved in this context – the thorny issue of minorities within minorities (or “internal minorities”) – she continued her doctoral studies (2015) under the supervision of Professor Daniel Weinstock. In this context, she developed a critical reflection on the central paradigm guiding the main philosophical and legal responses to the problem of internal minorities in liberal democracies: that of “choice.” This led her to propose a model for rethinking theoretically and legally framing the “choice” of practices (minority or majority) that carry a potential for sexist oppression, a model she tested in a case study: religious divorce settlements and their “secular” equivalent, private mediations and arbitrations in family law. As part of a postdoctoral fellowship at the Centre de recherche en éthique (CRÉ) and the Canada Research Chair in Feminist Ethics (CREF), she intends to explore the potential of her model in other contexts involving women’s rights, such as sex work, sexual consent, or cosmetic surgery.

anne.iavarone-turcotte@mail.mcgill.ca