Keith Cherry, University of Victoria

Keith has been invited to the Center for Globalisation and Governance to study in Research Area 4: Global Governance, Constitutionalism and World Society, exploring practices of Legal Pluralism in a comparative context.

Please find the abstract of his project below:

Keith’s interdisciplinary scholarship works at the intersection of law, political science, political economy, and philosophy, focusing on issues of deep legal pluralism. Keith’ present research concerns how legal orders can and do interrelate in ways that challenge traditional concepts of sovereignty and the broader practices and epistemologies of final authority on which they are built. In particular, Keith is interested in emerging forms of social coordination which do not rely on a single ultimate authority to maintain order, but rather function through the ongoing and non-hierarchical negotiation of persisting, fundamental differences. Ultimately, his interests are theoretical, as he hopes that these emerging forms of coordination might help us to imagine more radically, deeply pluralistic forms of social interaction.

His current project explores these challenges by comparing the relationship between Indigenous and settler-Canadian legal and political systems with the relationship between the European Union system and those of its member-states.

Academic Career at a Glance:

Keith Cherry is a SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier Doctoral Scholar and sessional Instructor from the University of Victoria, Canada.

Keith received his BA in Political Science from the University of Ottawa in 2010 and his MA in Political Studies from the University of Ottawa in 2012, studying under Drs. Dimitri Karmis, Paul Saurette and Hilliard Aronovitch. Keith’s master’s thesis concerned how legal hermeneutics might respond to cultural and normative diversity, and drew primarily on the work of Robert Cover and Ronald Dworkin. Keith is currently a PHD candidate in Law and Society at the University of Victoria, working with Professors Jeremy Webber, John Borrows, Oliver Schmidtke and James Tully. Keith benefits from the generous support of the SSHRC, the Irving K Barber One World Scholarship Society, and the University of Victoria Faculty of Law.