Étienne Cossette-Lefebvre

Étienne Cossette-Lefebvre is a lawyer, a PhD candidate in law at the University of Toronto, and an adjunct assistant professor and fellow in property law at the Faculty of Law at Queen’s University. He is a Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar (2021-2024) and a recipient of a doctoral scholarship from the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarships Program in honor of Nelson Mandela (2021-2024). His dissertation offers innovative trans-systemic perspectives on the idea of self-ownership to explain a person’s rights over their body, image, voice, and personal information. He feels privileged to be a collaborator at the International Observatory on Human Rights at the UN.

Étienne obtained his B.C.L./LL.B. (Honours) from the Faculty of Law at McGill University in May 2014. His time at the Faculty earned him several excellence awards, and his name appears on the Dean’s Honour List. He also received the prize for the essay competition of the Quebec Association of Comparative Law in the undergraduate category (2013-2014). During his post-secondary studies, Étienne continued his high-level training in classical piano.

After completing his Bar, where he achieved the second-highest score in his cohort (2014-2015), Étienne worked as a research lawyer at the Quebec Court of Appeal. In 2018-2019, he was a law clerk at the Supreme Court of Canada for the Honourable Russell Brown. A Junior Fellow at Massey College, he obtained a Master of Laws from the University of Toronto in 2020. During the 2020-2021 academic year, he was a lecturer at the Faculty of Law at McGill University and Deputy Director of the Paul-André Crépeau Centre for Private and Comparative Law. His research focuses on personal law, property law, obligations law, succession law, comparative law, legal theory and philosophy, and legal history.