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Robert Leckey

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Dean, Faculty of Law, Full Professor, Samuel Gale Chair
McGill University
Robert Leckey, Ad. E., is a full professor at the Faculty of Law, where he teaches constitutional law and family law. He served as director of the Paul-André Crépeau Centre for Private and Comparative Law from August 2014 to June 2016. On 1 July 2016, he began a five-year term as Dean of the Faculty of Law. In December 2020, McGill’s Board of Governors reappointed him for a second five-year term, starting 1 July 2021.
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From 2002 to 2003, he served as law clerk for Justice Michel Bastarache of the Supreme Court of Canada. From 2003 to 2006, he undertook doctoral studies in law at the University of Toronto as a Trudeau scholar. His dissertation, which received the Alan Marks Medal for best graduate thesis in 2006, was published as Contextual Subjects: Family, State, and Relational Theory, by University of Toronto Press in 2008. In 2005-2006, he worked as a visiting scholar at the Centre de recherche en éthique de l’Université de Montréal (CRÉUM). He joined the Faculty of Law in July 2006 and was named a William Dawson Scholar by McGill University in 2011. During his sabbatical leave in 2012-2013, he was a special visitor at the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada.

He has been a member of the Law Society of Ontario since 2003 and an advocate of the Barreau du Québec since 2020. From 2017 to 2020, he was a solicitor of the Barreau du Québec. From 2008-2011, he chaired the McGill Equity Subcommittee on Queer People. In 2010-2011, he served as director of research for the Inquiry Commission on the Process for Appointing Judges (the Bastarache Commission). From 2011 to 2015, he was the president of Egale Canada. From 2011 to 2016, he chaired its Legal Issues Committee. From 2020 to 2022, he served as president of the Council of Canadian Law Deans.

Robert Leckey has received the Prix de la Fondation du Barreau du Québec (2007); the Canadian Association of Law Teachers' Scholarly Paper Prize (2009); the McGill Law Students’ Association’s John W. Durnford Teaching Excellence Award (2009); the Canada Prize of the International Academy of Comparative Law (2010); the Principal's Prize for Excellence in Teaching (2010); and the Principal’s Change-Maker Prize for his public engagement through media in 2020.

In 2014, he was selected for membership in the Global Young Academy. In 2017, he was elected an associate member of the International Academy of Comparative Law. In 2020, he was elected a member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists. In 2021, he received the Barreau du Québec’s Advocatus Emeritus (Ad. E.) distinction.