People

Heather is a human rights lawyer and an expert on citizenship, statelessness, legal identity and personhood under the law. She has a PhD in international law and ten years of experience as a consultant for the UN, the US State Department and various universities, including Carleton University, the University of Melbourne and the European University Institute. She was a lawyer for UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, in Chad, Sri Lanka, Kosovo and Côte d’Ivoire. She co-founded United Stateless, an advocacy group on citizenship rights, and is a former US Peace Corps Volunteer. She is a member of the CRÉ, the Centre de recherche en éthique. Her comment, The United Nations and Robot Rights, was published in the Canadian Journal of Law and Technology in 2023. Her book, The Nationality and Statelessness of Nomadic Peoples, was published by Oxford University Press in 2025.

Jonathan is an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at the Université de Montréal. He is an affiliate of the Centre de recherche en éthique (CRÉ), the Groupe de recherche interuniversitaire sur la normativité (GRIN), the NYU Global Institute for Advanced Study project on Space, Time and Consciousness, and the Canadian Metaphysics Collaborative. His research is in the philosophy of consciousness, artificial intelligence, the metaphysics of science, applied ontology, moral psychology, value theory, and legal and political philosophy.

Frédéric is a lawyer specializing in cyberjustice, technology, and artificial intelligence, with a focus on optimizing judicial processes and access to justice. He is currently a Master’s student in philosophy at Université de Montréal and also has a Master’s degree in Business Administration (MBA). His current interests include artificial intelligence (studied from a philosophical and legal perspective), governance, and international (global) law. He works with different professors (at the Université de Montréal and Université de Sherbrooke) in philosophy, philosophy of law, and international law and technology as a research assistant, and is currently exploring issues related to the metaphysics of personhood and the potential attribution of rights to advanced robotic agents, questioning their agency and their legal status (as both objects and subjects of law).