Meet Professor Jaye Ellis, Senior Visiting Fellow at Sciences Po Law School

I have a Bachelor's degree in Political Science, and undergraduate and graduate degrees in law. I studied law in a bijuridical faculty in which I studied both civil and common law. My Master's and Doctoral degrees were both in the area of international environmental law. I joined the Faculty of Law at McGill in 2000. Until 2021, I also held an appointment at the McGill School of Environment (now Bieler School of Environment).

I am at Sciences Po for the fall semester, teaching the course ‘Transboundary corporate liability’ in the Master's in Economic Law programme. The course flows from my current research project on the same topic. In this project, I examine the integration of scientific and technical norms into legal and quasi-legal environmental and sustainability standards. Environmental law and policy increasingly relies on metrics, which are condensations of detailed scientific and technical knowledge that are designed to enable evaluations of progress towards environmental and sustainability objectives over time. Such metrics are of particular relevance in corporate regulation and self-regulation. They are often incorporated into standards created and implemented by non-state regulatory authorities which can be highly influential for firms. While these standards are often informally enforced through economic incentive structures, they are also referred to by regulatory agencies, legislatures, and courts. This increased interaction between state-based and non-state legal or regulatory structures makes it easier to impose environmental and other standards on transboundary flows of corporate activity, but they also present challenges. For example, they are not generated or administered through the same channels as state-based law. Drawing on bodies of literature in law, legal theory, sociology, and related fields, I analyse these transnational standards and their interactions with more conventional forms of law.

It is a real pleasure to have the opportunity to teach material that is so closely related to my current research project. The students and I are involved in an interesting collaboration, in that we are all learning and exploring hypotheses about extending law across jurisdictional boundaries. It is fascinating to work through this material in a classroom with students from different countries, having studied different legal systems. 

I am currently working on a project that explores corporate greenhouse gas emission targets. These targets depend heavily on climate models, in particular modelling of Earth systems, on one hand, and of the global economy, on the other. While the methodologies and approaches used to establish corporate emissions targets have important scientific and technical dimensions, this is also a normative project. The targets are, after all, regulatory and governance instruments, and their design and implementation is not only a matter of scientific and economic expertise but also of politics and ethics. As for the role of law, at first glance this can be difficult to discern. I am particularly interested in the contribution of law to issues of process. Given the importance of emissions targets for corporations, it matters a good deal how decisions about such targets are made, by whom, and in light of what broad political, social, and economic objectives.