François Tanguay-Renaud brings global experience to a global classroom

François Tanguay-Renaud got his start in the law at an early age, enrolling in McGill University’s combined civil law and common law program right out of high school.

“I’ve never really left. Since I was 19, I’ve been in the legal profession or on the road,” he says of a career that has taken him all over the globe, including stints in Europe and Asia, as well as North America.  

“I have always been open to the world,” he explains.

But in Tanguay-Renaud’s newest role as program director of Osgoode’s Professional LLM in Canadian Common Law, it’s the world that comes to him.

“Many of the students are internationally-trained lawyers who have practised in their home jurisdictions and want to re-qualify here,” he says.

The program’s core courses are specifically designed to meet the requirements of the Federation of Law Societies of Canada’s National Committee on Accreditation, which oversees the licensing of lawyers who completed their legal education outside Canada.

Tanguay-Renaud took over as program director in 2022, but in the decade since the Professional LLM in Canadian Common Law was launched, more than 1,000 students from over 60 countries have graduated, preparing them to begin or re-start their legal careers in their new home country.

“The kinds of conversations that we typically have in Canadian Common Law classes are fascinating. In a way, it reflects the training I got at McGill, which was to tackle problems through a common-law and civil-law lens. It’s just that we have way more lenses in our classes,” Tanguay-Renaud says.

Tanguay-Renaud’s own international journey actually began before his legal one. After growing up in Quebec, he completed his high school education at UWC Atlantic, a pioneering institution in rural Wales that played a central role in the founding of the International Baccalaureate.

Once at McGill, he was determined to make the most of his experience, volunteering at legal clinics and participating in a moot court competition that culminated in a presentation before the International Court of Justice at The Hague, in the Netherlands.

Tanguay-Renaud also secured an internship with the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan in the summer of 2001, where he got a close up look at tribal justice systems in the north of the country, before his time in the region ended spectacularly.

“I caught dengue fever and was repatriated to Canada,” Tanguay-Renaud says. “So it was an interesting experience.”

After his graduation, Tanguay-Renaud attended the University of Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, finding time to clerk for Supreme Court Justice Marie Deschamps before returning to Oxford to earn two masters degree and a doctorate from the same institution.

During his PhD studies, Tanguay-Renaud was recruited by Osgoode Professor Craig Scott to assist with his overhaul of the mandate at York University’s Nathanson Centre on Transnational Human Rights, Crime and Security.

Soon after, Tanguay-Renaud joined the centre’s leadership team when he became a member of the faculty at Osgoode in 2008 and eventually took over as its director when Scott was elected to the House of Commons in 2012.

“I had a ten-year run at the head of the centre, which was quite amazing as a young faculty member and gave me a lot of latitude to try out things and push myself a little bit,” he says.

Since arriving at Osgoode, Tanguay-Renaud has also held visiting professor appointments at the University of Minnesota Law School, the National University of Singapore and the National Law School of India University, among others. His students run the gamut of the legal profession, including law students, practising lawyers and even judges, thanks to his involvement in judicial education.

More recently, he has stepped up his activity at Osgoode Professional Development, where he has participated in the teaching of courses in the Professional LLM in Criminal Law and Procedure and serves as the program director for the Osgoode Certificate in the Law of Emergencies, which focuses on Practical Strategies in Disaster Preparedness, Management and Recovery. The latter role allows Tanguay-Renaud to build on his doctoral thesis on the emergency law, which was completed long before Covid-19 lockdowns and Canada’s Freedom Convoy brought the concept into the mainstream of public awareness.

As a noted expert in the realm of criminal law and procedure, it was natural that Tanguay-Renaud’s initial involvement with the Canadian Common Law LLM was as an instructor for the Canadian Criminal Law course, combining both the substantive and procedural dimensions of criminal law. He has continued teaching the class since assuming program director duties in 2022, along with the Foundations of Canadian Law, where his research interests in criminal, constitutional and public law, as well as their theoretical underpinnings comes into play.

“An academic career gives a lot of flexibility to reinvent yourself and so I started thinking in more applied term,” he says. “For me as an academic, it was a nice complement that presented new challenges compared to what I was doing.”

In the classroom, Tanguay-Renaud aims to do more than simply convey information to his students.

“In a way, people can get that on their own with the legal research tools we have available, which are becoming better all the time with the help of artificial intelligence,” he says. “You need to bring some kind of added value in the classroom and my way of doing that is by really teaching people to come to grips with the foundations of the legal fields that they are studying and what are the implications for the way the law has developed.”

Still, he adds that LLM candidates can gain just as much from engagement with their peers as they do from their instructors.

“Frankly, it is a tremendous resource to have people coming from all walks of life and so many countries in one classroom like this,” Tanguay-Renaud says. “I will present one way of dealing with a problem, which is typically the Canadian way, and someone will say: ‘But in Russia, we have a completely different set of concepts to handle this problem.’ Then we will look at whether or not the result is any different and what that tells us about the kinds of principles that we are using. It helps us shed light on Canadian law in a pretty unique way.”