Abstract — Examining recent (1990 to 1993) reported Canadian cases on custody and access, I document a movement toward a re-privatisation of “family” to a traditional patriarchal nuclear form. Patterns of privatisation, readily apparent in economic and social policy are also evident within family law. Custody and access determinations in a separation or post-separation setting represent a moment where these implicit tactics become visible; the result is serious limits placed on the freedom and safety of women and their children. Focus on issues of custodial mothers' mobility, wife abuse and allegations of child physical and/or sexual abuse reveals a propensity on the part of the judiciary to prioritise paternal access to children as a criterion of the “best interests of the child.” Like joint legal custody, which the Canadian courts are still reluctant to impose on unwilling parents, de facto joint custody is occurring under sole custody orders. These tendencies ensure the separated or divorced “family” will be “re-onstructed” and re-privatised along familiar patriarchal lines.

The constitutional rights accorded francophone minorities in Canada by Section 23 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982 seem fragile in terms of their recognition and their implementation. In this article, we attempt to understand the reasons underlying this situation. To that end, we analyze the ideological forces behind the interpretation and implementation of constitutional rights relating to the education of francophone minorities from 1867 to 1960. One conclusion arises from this analysis: minority education rights, despite their rational and argumentative character which confers upon them a seeming neutrality, do not lie beyond the sphere of social relations. Thy are a social construct deeply rooted in the ideological oppositions and relations of power which cut through society. In this way, the development, interpretation and implementation of minority education rights by virtue of Section 93 of the Constitutional Act, 1867 have been greatly influenced by the tensions existing between adherents of a homogeneist ideology and those of a dualist ideology. In its very conception, Section 93 is marked by the relations of power which prevailed at the time of Confederation. For their part, the courts entrenched the homogeneist ideology by giving Section 93 a static interpretation, the practical effect of which was to guarantee the wave of homogenisation which struck minority francophone schools prior to the 1960s.

Women's perceptions of abuse differ deeply from official characterizations of them and are largely absent from legal discourse on male domestic abuse despite two decades of reform initiatives. This article traces the enforcement of male domestic dominance and violence through the failures of the criminal justice system to incorporate women's perspectives in systemic responses to male spouse batterers. I argue that it is factors such as official labelling of abuse by the juridical system, including police, which determine whether abuse is ‘officially’ recognized as such and whether the male violent family is stabilized by policies, practices, and non-intervention. This interaction between definitions and institutional responses makes it crucial to understand how women define their own experiences of abuse. The article concludes that male domestic abuse remains a contested area of juridical understandings and practices. Insofar as the ‘official’ definition of her situation impacts on the abused woman's self-perception, and on her access to resources she might use to get out of danger, it determines the organization of ‘domestic abuse’ as well.

Causation analysis is densely political in at least three ways. First, because causation is crucial to our system of attributing moral, legal and political responsibility, causation arguments are advanced for purely instrumental purposes. They do political work. Second, because any particular occurrence is the outcome of an almost infinite number of antecedent events, “but for” causation analysis produces trivial results. A judgement about causal significance is required and will depend, in part, on the goals of the analysis. The choice of goals is political, but unstated goals and hidden assumptions often exclude consideration of some possible causes as significant. These politics of causation need to be made explicit. Third, the institutional setting in which official determinations of causation are made influence the outcome. Hence, it is necessary to explore these as well. Each of these three dimensions of the politics of causation is explored through an analysis of the 1992 Westray mine disaster which killed 29 miners in Nova Scotia, and the official responses to it. It is argued that if the goal is to protect workers and nothing else, then the political-economic context that promotes the creation of hazardous conditions must be considered a significant cause of harmful occurrences. It is unlikely, however, that any of the official responses to the disaster will take this approach.

After analyzing the characteristics of prison institutions and the traditional role of the law in such a totalitarian legal order, the author attempts to identify the social factors and movements which, since the end of the 1970s, have contributed to the emergence as norms of fundamental rights for prisoners. She posits that recent developments have resulted from the prisoners' rights movement battling before the courts. As the courts developed criteria to judge the legality of practices or decision-making processes, Canadian legislators, in the course of the 1980s, gradually integrated these jurisprudential requirements. Judicial intervention in Canadian prison law has had a significant impact on the development of new norms of prison justice, establishing prisoners' fundamental rights and the duty to treat prisoners fairly.

The use of human and animal subjects in the field of biomedical research is universally accepted. Without such methods, we are told, what would happen to scientific progress and the relief of suffering in the world? Be that as it may, one fact remains: by its very nature, experimenting on human beings and nonhuman animals demands that we protect those who are the subjects of those experiments. In Canada, what kind of protection is offered to human and animal subjects? In the absence of federal legislation, and in place of it, voluntary systems of control have been put in place by the scientific community. These systems are based on the establishment of institutional ethics committees. They are complemented by an a posteriori control of experiments. In this article, the authors describe and analyze these sytems of control. Indeed, although they appear to be reassuring, these systems nonetheless reveal certain weak points.