Bruce Pardy

Bruce Pardy, Professor of Law at Queen’s University, is a “wandering hedgehog”, as defined in Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay about the hedgehog and the fox. He has written on a wide range of legal subjects as distinctive parts of a single coherent system, including environmental law and governance, climate change and energy policy, property and tort theory, human rights and freedoms, university governance, free markets and the rule of law. He began his legal career as a civil litigator at Borden Ladner Gervais LLP in Toronto, has taught at law schools in Canada, New Zealand and the United States, and served for almost a decade on the Ontario Environmental Review Tribunal as adjudicator and mediator.

Lecture: We have met the enemy

Citizens of Western nations in the 21st century have more freedom, prosperity and peace than most of the rest of the world at most other times in history. Yet these cultures have never been at greater risk. The threat is not climate change, nuclear war, famine or disease but something more insidious: the affliction of self-hate. A growing proportion of people, especially within the chattering classes, now reject the pillars upon which their own thriving societies are built: the sovereignty of the individual over the group; private property and capitalism; industrialism and fossil fuels; and freedom of speech and the rule of law. The present period of relative liberty may be fading fast—a fragile blip in a panoply of misery. From within are sown the seeds of our undoing.