Biography
René Provost is the James McGill Professor of Justice Beyond the State at the Faculty of Law of McGill University. He holds a Bachelor of Laws from the Université de Montréal, a Master of Laws from the University of California at Berkeley, and a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford. He served as law clerk to the Honourable Justice Claire L’Heureux-Dubé at the Supreme Court of Canada in 1989-1990, and taught international law at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania in 1991. He joined the Faculty of Law of McGill University in 1994, first as a Boulton Fellow (1994-1995), then as Assistant Professor (1995-2001) Associate Professor (2001-2015), Full Professor (from 2015), and James McGill Professor (since 2023). He was the Associate Dean (Academic) of the Faculty of Law from 2001 to 2003.
From 2005 to 2010 he was the founding Director of the McGill Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism. Professor Provost teaches Public International Law, International Human Rights Law, International Humanitarian Law, International Environmental Law, Legal Anthropology, and various courses in legal theory. He is the author of International Human Rights and Humanitarian Law (Cambridge University Press, 2002), and Rebel Courts – The Administration of Justice by Armed insurgents (Oxford University Press 2021, winner of the 2022 ICON-S Prize for Best Book in Public Law, 2023 ASIL Certificate of Merit for Creative Scholarship), the editor of State Responsibility in International Law (Ashgate-Dartmouth, 2002), Mapping the Legal Boundaries of Belonging: Religion and Multiculturalism from Israel to Canada (Oxford University Press, 2015), Culture in the Domains of Law (Cambridge University Press, 2017), and co-editor of International Law Chiefly as Applied and Interpreted in Canada, 7th Ed. (Emond Montgomery, 2014), Confronting Genocide (Springer Verlag, 2011), Dialogues on Human Rights and Legal Pluralism (Springer Verlag, 2013). He was the president of the Société québécoise de droit international from 2002 to 2006. In 2015, he was named a Fellow by the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation for his contribution to the advancement of knowledge in the social sciences and humanities.
The Québec Bar Association appointed him senior counsel (Ad.E.) in 2017 in recognition of his exceptional contribution to the legal profession. In 2019, Professor Provost was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.