Professor Simeon McIntosh for Bar Association lecture

Law Professor Simeon McIntosh will be the featured lecturer at the Agnes Cato Memorial Lecture hosted by the St. Vincent and the Grenadines Bar Association on March 8, 2012 at the Frenches House.{{more}}

The lecture, entitled “Constitutional Reform: the Inscription of Nationhood”, will focus on constitutional reform in the Commonwealth Caribbean. An abstract from the lecture states that constitutional reform in the Commonwealth Caribbean and in particular the Eastern Caribbean must take account of the fact that we have never constituted ourselves as a soverign People.

It further states that for us in the Eastern Caribbean, the Constitutions we have called our own these past thirty years were largely written by a British Colonial Office and enacted by The Queen’s Most Excellent Majesty in Council; and, on the date of independence, at the first session of our Parliament, these constitutional instruments were handed over to our first prime ministers to mark our formal emergence as independent sovereign States.

What is more, the abstract states, “our retention of the British Monarch as our titular or nominal head of state has indulged the pretension that she is our queen, and we remain her subjects.”

Dr. McIntosh’s paper submits that “constitutional reform must, above all else, engage the citizenry in a process of deliberative and inscriptive politics, as opposed to contested, partisan politics, in exercising their fundamental republican right of self-authorship to fram and enact their own constitution, and thereby formally constitute themselves a soverign nation.”

McIntosh is Professor of Law Emeritus at Howard University School of Law in Washington DC, and a former Dean and Professor of Jurisprudence at Cave Hill. He is currently the lead consultant on constitutional reform in Grenada. He is leading the public consultation process, based on a Working Draft Constitution that he has prepared in accordance with the 2006 Report of the 2003 Constitution Review Commission.

McIntosh, whose main scholarly interests are Jurisprudence and Constitutional Theory, has authored several publications, including the latest, “Rethinking the Grenadian Polity: The Case of Constitutional Reform (West Indian Law Journal 2012)”.

McIntosh has a Bachelor of Arts Degree from York University, Toronto; a Juris Doctor Degree from Howard University School of Law; a Master of Laws Degree from Columbia University School of Law, New York.

Professor McIntosh is a native of Grenada. He was born in Carriacou.