This paper briefly and systematically examines H. L. A. Hart's life and work in the philosophy of law and jurisprudence. The author discusses his most important contributions and attempts to demonstrate the originality and innovation of Hart's philosophy, which, more than 40 years ago, revolutionized the philosophy of law in English-speaking countries.

This paper argues that the effort to teach law critically from the external viewpoint reinforces the ideological and social function of a professional law school in a modern state. One should realize that law is a language, a secondary language that conceals suffering as it parasitically assimilates all primary discourses. The professional law school of a modern state aids in the production of such concealment. Examples are offered from different areas of legal discourse as well as from the author's experiences. The suffering arises from the concealment of the languages of embodied subjects, whose harm can only be recognized through the chains of authoritative signifiers that the professor pro-fesses. The secondary legal language either excludes the primary languages or redefines the subject's experience. Further, the legal language is inculcated into the subject's language to the point that the citizen must identify with the secondary legal language or, if not, may be authoritatively en-forced to do so. The second sense of suffering aggravates the first.

A social activity is characterized and understood, this paper argues, only after one has found a place to put it among one's more general understandings and a frame to put around it to render it discrete and prevent its escape into chaos. Framing and reframing are the concomitants of social struggles for and against closure and exclusion. The paper sees critique as a form of practical and scholarly struggle against disciplinary closure, doubting question posed to disciplines. Law school education in Australia, because it offers guaranteed universal knowledge about its object, law, is unsympathetic to critique.

The social sciences have been prominent in demonstrating that the legislative approach of the early years to systemic discrimination was erroneous insofar as the individual and intentional foundation of this phenomenon is concerned. Sociological studies have identified sources and socio-cultural effects that have brought to light the collective and perceptual dimensions of a phenomenon that proves to be social and complex before it is individual. Further, an overview of the major decisions by the Supreme Court of Canada shows the legal evolution of the notion of discrimination itself toward recognition of a singular concept with variables that are simple or multiple, homogeneous or complex, but above all inseparable. This article concludes with a brief presentation of the systemic approach, an analytical framework for complex phenomena introduced as a useful and pertinent tool in the study of situations involving discrimination.

In Moore v. Regents of the University of California, the Supreme Court of California held that the human source of blood and tissue used by his physician and other defendants in potentially lucrative medical research without his permission could not assert a legal claim that, in doing so, the defendants had deprived him of any property right in these materials or the cell line developed from them. He was, however, permitted to proceed with his claim that there had been a failure to obtain his informed consent to the excision or removal of these materials, given that their end uses were not disclosed. The decision in Moore is but one example of the range of new legal problems created by the many and rapid advances in biotechnology, and of the attempts courts are making to respond. The judgment raises questions about whether these types of issues as between the patient and medical, research, and pharmaceutical concerns can or ought to be analyzed in terms of property rights. Are the general justifications for recognizing proprietary rights that have traditionally been influential in judicial decisions useful or helpful in this context? And what of the identity of the decision-maker? In Moore, the majority was content to effectively delegate much of the decision-making authority to the U.S. Patent Office and the Office of Technology Assessment. While there are no Canadian decisions directly on point as yet, the pace of technological advances, the potential for economic gain, and the international nature of biotechnology enterprises all set the scene for these issues' coming before our courts in the near future. This paper begins to explore the implications of adopting an analytical model based on property rights and to address the fact that the biotechnology industry already operates on the premise that such material can be owned. It concludes that the current legal regime needs to be modified to allow effective control of these new realities and suggests principles that might be adopted to address important concerns that are raised by the transformation of human tissue and cells into economic goods.

Our system of justice is generally referred to as an “adversary system,” although this term is used very loosely. At times, the term is used in a technical way to refer to a system with structured rules of evidence, party presentation of evidence, and a neutral decision-maker. At other times, the phrase seems to be given a broader meaning, referring to the way in which law is practised—that hard-headed competitiveness is the proper, and normal, approach. In fact, neither the rules of our justice system, whether criminal or civil, nor the way in which lawyers behave most of the time are best described as “adversarial.” The current situation, in which largely nonadversarial behavior and rules are described as an adversary system, gives rise to confusion and, more importantly, to unethical action. A possible solution is to cease calling our system an adversary one, and to acknowledge that other rules and behavior are more defining.