Cultural studies provides an interesting conceptual perspective on legal pluralism for a number of reasons. Rather than asking ontological questions about parallel legal systems, cultural studies frameworks encourage questions about the meanings which might be generated for “law” at the plural sites of intersection of regulatory phenomena: legal meanings must defer to questions about how a subject is positioned, subjected. Narratives of culture, broadly conceived, also allow us to notice the diverse, fluid and often contradictory patterns of regulation and discipline created when there are politically powerful beliefs in the singularity of order and certainty. The efforts in Anglophone cultures to create an “English” heritage safe from various threatening others is echoed in jurisprudential specifications of the criteria of legality.

Air strikes are the signature modality of violence used by NATO militaries. When civilian victims of NATO air strikes have turned to courts in NATO countries, they have generally not been successful. What are the legal techniques and legal knowledges deployed in Western courts that render Western aerial violence legal or extralegal? The article analyzes the responses by European courts to two sets of NATO bombings: the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia and a September 2009 air strike near Kunduz, Afghanistan. The judgments rely on two forms of “legal technicalities”: the drawing of jurisdictional boundaries that exclude the airspace taken up by the bombers and the ground on which victims stood when they were killed as well as particular visual regimes that facilitate not seeing people on the ground as civilians.

En droit de l'environnement et de l'aménagement du territoire, comme dans l'ensemble du droit public, le droit apparaît comme un système de communication, mais un système univoque: un système de communication formulé en termes de normes, pour assurer la réalisation d'un mode de production et d'échanges économiques et sociaux, un système de communication qui obéit tantôt davantage à certains aux nécessités de l'échange et de la circulation, tantôt davantage à certains impératifs de la reproduction des rapports sociaux, mais qui ne change jamais desens.

Présupposé de l'échange et de la circulation, appareil de reproduction des conditions de la production, appareil idéologique et répressif d'Etat, enjeu et forme du pouvoir, le droit représente un agencement et une représentation du réel. D'une part, il justifie les rapports sociaux et, d'autre part, il tente de les rendre “naturels.” Ainsi le droit devient principe de vie en exprimant la réalité sociale à travers le prisme de l'Etat. Et, en même temps qu'il en concrétise les règles, il en travestit la forme dans un langage et un code abstrait. Une telle représentation a notamment pour objet de légitimer et de valoriser l'ordre social et spatial existant.

Current interest in the non-medical use of cocaine in Canada can be gauged by the attention this drug is getting in the various media. Not surprisingly, researchers have now entered the arena in the hope of answering some of the questions posed by this phenomenon. A similar trend occurred in regard to marijuana more than a decade ago when popular concern led to a federal commission that eventually recommended the repeal of the offence of cannabis possession. The wave of concern created considerable scholarly interest in Canada's approach to the control of narcotic drugs, including cannabis, which had been defined as narcotic for legal purposes. Much research followed on various fronts, from studies on the effects of cannabis on health to the social consequences of punishment.

Several studies have examined the origins of Canada's legislative response to narcotic drug use. A principal conclusion from these studies is that legislation became possible because of hostility toward minority groups associated with drug use, specifically, the Chinese who were known for their use of opium. In the present paper, however, we see that drug control grew as much out of a “cocaine scare” as out of concern with opium use. Moreover, cocaine attracted attention in part precisely because its use was not confined to despised minorities, but permeated society as a whole, affecting “young people as well as seniors,” “men and women,” those from “poorer classes,” those from “respectable families” and those “who should and do know better.”

In Canada, Treaty 1 First Nations brought a claim against the Crown for land debt owed to them since 1871. In 2004, Crown land in Winnipeg became available that, according to the terms of the settlement, should have been offered for purchase to Treaty 1 Nations. Similarly, in New Zealand, the Waikato-Tainui claim arose from historical Crown breaches of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi. In 1995, a settlement was reached to address the unjust Crown confiscation of Tainui lands. Despite being intended to facilitate the return of traditional territory, compensate for Crown breaches of historic treaties, and indirectly provide opportunity for economic development, in both cases, settlement was met with legal and political challenges. Using a comparative legal analysis, this paper examines how the state continues to use its law-making power to undermine socio-economic development of Indigenous communities in Canada and New Zealand, thereby thwarting opportunity for Indigenous self-determination.

One of the recommendations made in Law and Learning is that “[t]he teaching of law in the liberal arts and other faculties should be encouraged.” Earlier in its report, the authors acknowledged the existence of legal studies programs outside law faculties in Canada and emphasized that in these programs legal doctrine exerts much less influence on the direction of study than in law schools. Law teaching in these programs, the Consultative Group explains, “has many attractions. It relieves the subject of its professional training connotations, facilitates integration of legal study and research with parallel activities in other disciplines, and recognizes that law ought to be understood by and subject to the critical scrutiny of as many citizens as possible.”

Although the praise in Law and Learning for legal studies programs outside law faculties and especially in faculties of arts and social sciences in Canadian universities is considerable, it is significant I believe that the report does not explain why the teaching of legal doctrine – legal rules – is not central to these legal studies programs, and in particular law and society undergraduate programs. Indeed, the demand from incoming undergraduate students and ordinary citizens is overwhelmingly for these programs to offer courses on legal doctrine. And some programs in Canadian universities comply. Why not teach legal doctrine in these programs? Why should the study of law in these programs be so different from that found in Canadian law schools?

The system of temporary protection set out in accordance with the conclusions of the Executive Committee of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (Excom) offers the necessary guarantees for the protection of the refugee under such a system. However, regimes of temporary protection recently established in a number of states (for example Germany and the United States) do not respect the conclusions of Excom nor the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees of 1951 and are based on the objective of controlling migratory flows.

The relationship between scientific knowledge and legal discourse is raised once again by a recent decision of the Supreme Court of Canada, a case involving a young Aboriginal woman who was pregnant and ordered by the court to remain in a drug treatment program at a health center until the baby was born. Her glue-sniffing habit was deemed dangerous to the normal development of the fetus. The Court held that her solvent-dependency did not justify the original court action, but both the Court and the various interveners disregarded the current state of our knowledge on the fetal syndromes. There is thus a continuing disconnect between the scientific understanding of fetal risk and the development of Constitutional law around women's reproductive rights. This paper reviews the case and follows it through the appellate process; we examine the research literature on fetal syndromes tracking the changes over time. Finally we comment on the interventions by the Winnipeg Child and Family Services, the Women's Health Rights Coalition, by The Canadian Civil Liberties Association, and both The Canadian Abortion Rights Action League and the Women's Legal Education and Action Fund.

The paper explores the limitations of class instrumentalist analyses of law in accounting for the failure of the criminal justice system to control corporate crime. The first part of the paper examines current theoretical perspectives in Canadian corporate crime research, with particular emphasis on the class instrumentalist analyses of law which predominate in the literature. The remainder of the paper seeks to develop a critical analysis of corporate crime which avoids the reductionism of such class instrumentalist analyses. In particular, it is argued that attempts to theorize the failure of the criminal justice system to respond to corporate crime require investigation not only of external factors influencing the enactment and enforcement of legislation, but also of the manner in which ideological discourses are articulated through the form and content of criminal law in such a way as to reproduce the popular consent for the differential treatment of suite and street crime. Failure to problematize the ideological role of criminal law in legitimating the differential treatment of corporate and street crime is likely to undermine attempts to make corporate offenders more accountable for their illegal behaviour by further criminalizing certain types of corporate behaviour.

We have rediscovered the social diversity of law. From now on, legal pluralism becomes a paradigm to win over our preconceptions and ideologies of law, a fact to be constructed on the basis of a multidisciplinary theorization.

This article offers a narrative analysis of the two CBC Fifth Estate investigative documentaries about Ashley Smith (“Behind the Wall,” 2010; “Out of Control,” 2010) and juxtaposes the documentary narratives against claims made by feminist criminologists with respect to women’s corrections. Examining the coherent ‘through narrative’ that is constructed in each documentary, we claim that The Fifth Estate uses dominant medicalized conceptualizations of mental illness and mental health treatment to frame the Smith case, leaving questions about the gendered nature of her criminalization, imprisonment and mistreatment unasked. Considering the socio-political context of neoliberal and post-feminist individualism, we argue that The Fifth Estate presents the case in a way that maintains the status quo and may resonate with their national audience, but which also reinforces the pathologization of women prisoners and upholds gendered stereotypes.

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.

Canada can boast of having one of the highest rates of naturalization in the world. In the past five years, the government has introduced a series of amendments to citizenship rules, with the majority having a direct impact on the naturalization process. From a sociological viewpoint, we seek to answer the following question: Is naturalization as “liberal” in Canada in the early twenty-first century as it was in the 1990s, or are we seeing a trend toward re-nationalization, as is currently the case in many European countries? Our findings seem to indicate no substantive change in political regime since the arrival of the Conservative Party in power, given the actual scope of the majority of the amendments. However, a discourse increasingly centered on identity and the protection of a specific way of being Canadian reflects a new rhetoric about Canadian citizenship, one that is very close to the “nationalist” concept of naturalization.

Cet article traite du concours « Le bon juge que j’aime le plus » organisé par la Cour Populaire Suprême de Chine (CPS) en 2017. Nous expliquerons l’importance du concours et les fins véritables qu’il sert dans le contexte judiciaire chinois marqué entre autres par l’exode des juges de la profession et la campagne anti-corruption du Parti Communiste Chinois. Les dossiers des dix juges modèles lauréats seront analysés afin de dégager certaines des attentes qui pèsent sur les juges chinois et le regard de la CPS sur divers enjeux de la justice. Le concours s’inscrit dans une tradition chinoise qui a traversé les siècles, le recours aux personnages modèles.