Jean-Frédéric is a Ph.D. student in the Faculty of Law’s Civil Law Section, under the supervision of Professor Mona Paré. His doctoral studies seek to better understand how to integrate children’s rights into the legal and policy frameworks that govern Canadian primary and secondary schools.
A member of the Interdisciplinary Research Laboratory on the Rights of the Child, Jean-Frédéric’s doctoral project lies at the intersection of administrative law principles of fairness, critical and democratic pedagogies, and rights-based approaches to research. To ensure his research is itself respectful of children’s rights, he seeks to engage directly with children and centre their views in his findings. His project is an extension of his LL.M. research at Osgoode Hall Law School on student participation in discipline proceedings under Ontario’s Education Act, aspects of which were published in 2020 in the Canadian Journal of Children’s Rights.
Immediately prior to beginning his Ph.D. at the Faculty of Law, Jean-Frédéric spent five years as counsel at the Office of the Ontario Ombudsman. There, his work focused on reviewing and investigating complaints from the public relating to education, municipalities, administrative tribunals, and French-language services. His experience led him to think more deeply about what it means to be treated fairly in public administration, and in particular how fairness translates in contexts affecting children. Jean-Frédéric remains an active member of the Ontario Bar Association’s Education Law and Child and Youth Law sections, where he contributes to professional development programming.
In addition to his LL.M., Jean-Frédéric holds a B.C.L. and LL.B. from McGill University, and a B.A. and M.A. in translation from the University of Ottawa. He is a licensee of the Law Society of Ontario and a certified French-to-English translator in Ontario and Quebec. Before studying law, Jean-Frédéric spent a decade working for the federal public service in Ottawa in various capacities across three ministries.