News

The Schulich School of Law extends congratulations and best wishes to Professor Esmeralda Thornhill, who retired at the end of the 2015/2016 academic year.

Thornhill was admitted to the Bar in Quebec in 1987 and in Nova Scotia in 1998. She joined the law school’s faculty in 1996, after earning an LLB at the Université du Québec à Montréal following an MA at l’Université de Montréal and a BA at McGill. Her research topics were discrimination, legal history, employment discrimination law, race relations, race and the law, critical race and legal theory, anti-racism education, and race literacy.

A former research associate with the Simone de Beauvoir Institute at Concordia University, Thornhill conceptualized, developed, and taught the first Canadian university accredited course in Black Women’s Studies, called “Black Women: The Missing Pages from Canadian Women’s Studies,” in 1983 and 1988. She also served as a faculty member of the Canadian Law Teaching Clinic in 1993 and 1994.

In 1996 Thornhill received an Honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the City University of New York. Since then she has received several other diplomas, degrees, and honours, including being appointed the 2006/2007 Traditional Canada–U.S. Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Temple University in Philadelphia. She has taught in Dalhousie’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and held cross-appointments in Canadian, Gender, Russian and Graduate Studies.

Inaugural Black Canadian Studies Chair

A seasoned human rights educator, Thornhill was appointed the first scholar to anchor and pilot the distinguished James R. Johnston Chair in Black Canadian Studies, which is ensconced in Dalhousie’s Sociology and Social Anthropology Department in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, a Chair she held from 1996 to 2002. Named for James Robinson Johnston – the first African Nova Scotian university graduate, and the first from his community to earn a law degree from Dalhousie in 1898 – the endowed National Senior Academic Chair honours and recognizes the unique historical presence of African Nova Scotians.

The Chair aims to lead and support knowledge mobilization endeavours on Black Canadian and related studies, and to develop and mobilize research on Black peoples in Canada and the African diaspora. Among its many goals, it aims to train young scholars in the diverse disciplines of African Canadian studies and to connect local, national, and international Black communities.

Racial literacy research and advocacy

In addition to an undergraduate joint honours degree in Latin and Spanish from McGill, Thornhill’s academic training includes postgraduate studies in Spanish, French, and pedagogical sciences at l’Université de Montréal, McGill, and the University of Denver. Fluently trilingual, she completed international internships examining race in England and in France at UNESCO headquarters.

From 1987 to 1988, Thornhill spent the year on secondment in Washington, D.C., as an International Fellow doing anti-apartheid legal education and NGO advocacy with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. During that time, she was responsible for the Red Ribbon Campaign, which was launched to save the lives of the Sharpeville Six (six South African protesters convicted of the murder of the deputy mayor of Sharpeville in 1984 and sentenced to death). Her research on the use of the death penalty by South Africa has been reproduced and chronicled in the U.S. Congressional Record.

In November of 2012, Thornhill was the O’Brien Fellow in Residence at the McGill Centre for Human Rights & Legal Pluralism. In a 2013 interview with Contours: Voices of Women in Law, a student-run magazine at the McGill Faculty of Law, Thornhill was asked this question: What hope did she have that the lack of racial literacy and acknowledgment of race in Canada can change, and what form would that take? Her reply reads in part:

“I think that law is too important a tool to abandon ever. So we have no choice but to make the law responsible to us. And that’s why it’s important for students to be critical, to develop that sense of critical thinking. It doesn’t matter what colour they are, it doesn’t matter what persuasion they may be, but that critical understanding is the kind of professional rigour and ethical commitment that one should bring to the profession because law should be liberatory and emancipatory for everyone.”