Contributor Profiles

Margaret Somerville (Margo) is Emeritus Samuel Gale Professor of Law (the first woman in Canada to hold a named Chair in Law), Emeritus Professor in the Faculty of Medicine, and Emeritus Emeritus Founding Director of the McGill Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law at McGill University, Montreal.. In 2016 she returned to Sydney Australia as Professor of Bioethics at The University of Notre Dame Australia School of Medicine. She plays an active role in the worldwide development of applied ethics, in particular the study of the wider ethical and legal aspects of medicine and science.

Margaret graduated, with distinction, in Pharmacy from the University of Adelaide (1963); in Law, with First Class Honours and the University Medal, from the University of Sydney (1973); and was awarded a Doctorate in Civil Law by McGill University (1978). She has received eight honorary doctorates from universities in Canada and beyond.

Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1991 and the Royal Society of New South Wales in 2022, she is the recipient of many honours and awards, including:

• the Distinguished Service Award of the American Society of Law and Medicine (1985);
• the Pax Orbis ex Jure Gold Medal of the World Jurist Association for support and dedication to the cause of world peace through law (1985); and the Order of Australia (1990) in recognition of her international contribution to law and bioethics.
• She was chosen by an international jury as the first recipient of the UNESCO Avicenna Prize for Ethics in Science (2003) and was made a Dame of the Order of Saint Gregory the Great by Pope Francis in 2020.

A broad intellectual range

In 2006 she delivered the CBC Massey Lectures, published as a book, The Ethical Imagination: Journeys of the Human Spirit (Anansi 2006). Her other books include The Ethical Canary: Science, Society and the Human Spirit (Penguin 2000); Death Talk: The case against euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide (MQUP 2002) and Bird on an Ethics Wire: Battles about values in the culture wars, (MQUP 2015).

Margaret has an extensive publishing and speaking record, both nationally and internationally, on a very broad range of issues, communicating with large audiences, especially through television and radio, on topics that raise complex legal and ethical problems for society. She is deeply committed to the public’s right to be involved in the decision-making which shapes our society and is especially interested in the role that scientific and medical research and technology play in the formation of societal values and paradigms.

Margaret, a dual Australian-Canadian citizen born in Australia, lived in Montreal from 1975 to 2016 when, as a “girl from the Aussie Bush”, she returned to Australia.