This paper explores results from a survey of fifty-four trans students in two major universities in Ontario that sought to evaluate participants’ access to on-campus facilities. Although both universities have made efforts to accommodate trans students in their use of washrooms, locker rooms, and student housing, the numerous barriers that participants encountered signals stark gaps in access. The results invite a critical reflection of three accommodation models that may be undertaken to address these barriers. By addressing each model’s benefits and limitations, wherein the journey towards trans inclusion may generate a new set of exclusions, this paper complicates the notion of increasing access. This paper concludes by offering recommendations across these three models but concedes that challenges may persist until better facilities are reimagined and redesigned going forward.

L’objectif de cet article est de divulguer des résultats de recherches exploratoires sur le rapport entre le système judiciaire canadien et les victimes d’actes criminels dans le contexte de la détermination de la peine. De manière plus précise, l’auteur s’intéresse au processus de mise en forme des attentes des victimes qui opère à ce stade des procédures judiciaires. Pour observer ces mises en forme, l’auteur s’appuie sur des décisions judiciaires qui ont été rendues par les tribunaux canadiens. À partir de son corpus empirique, l’auteur décrit comment certaines attentes victimaires sont plus audibles que d’autres et comment leur intégration dans le processus de détermination de la peine varie en fonction du type d’attente et des circonstances à l’intérieur desquelles elles émergent.

This paper seeks to explore the logic and manner of regulating tort situations in daily life. Based on interviews, it seeks to tease some societal sense out of the reactions of individuals faced with such situations. It hypothesizes that informal regulation is neither inconsistent nor amorphous and that, just like formal institutions, it contributes to the organization, facilitation and preservation of societal life and cohesion. The normative principles and the practical methods of regulation found by the research suggest that there is a perception that the cohesion of societal life is being continuously fashioned and renewed due to its conflictive nature, and that the containment of societal life within viable parameters is up to each one of society’s members.

The Liberal government of Oliver Mowat, which held office in Ontario from 1872 to 1896, experimented with legislation providing for a formal arbitration structure to resolve labour disputes. Although labour had not requested the initial legislation, in the context of employer resistance to labour organizations, arbitration was viewed by some labour leaders as one way to get the employer to the bargaining table. Since Mowat's legislation did not compel the submission of disputes to arbitration, it was of little use in achieving this goal. Nonetheless, the legislation was used by the Mowat government as evidence of its commitment to equal justice for all classes.

Dans cet article, nous empruntons le vocabulaire des études cinématographiques pour visualiser le droit tel qu’il est utilisé, interprété et construit du point de vue des personnes en situation d’itinérance. Nous avançons que les modalités du droit s’expriment différemment dans les lois élaborées pour règlementer les personnes en situation d’itinérance. Les techniques cinélégales que nous proposons sont au fond des métaphores qui permettent de mieux nuancer les représentations sceptiques et instrumentalistes du droit. Ces façons d’éprouver la réglementation des personnes itinérantes peuvent également favoriser l’incarnation de la perception des interactions urbaines entre les personnes en situation d’itinérance et leurs interlocuteurs.

Profound transformations of Western democracies are apparent today. These transformations express an insufficiency in traditional forms of social organisation. The question of governance, of its efficiency, has thus progressively become the major theme of our social debates. Law and social sciences have provided two contradictory responses to meet the need for a new approach to governance: either in terms of efficiency or in terms of procedural ethics. Even if both of these perspectives contain an element of truth, they are no doubt perceived to be intuitively unsatisfactory. It is this intuition of the insufficiency of these two solutions which our hypothesis (contextual proceduralization) aims to construct and to overcome. Our hypothesis states that the two solutions share, beyond their apparent opposition, the same presupposition which explains their parallel insufficiency. This common presupposition concerns their answer to the question of the ‘norm's mode of action’. How should we understand the operation by which society aims to regulate itself and to act upon itself by norms which it considers legitimate?

This article compares the two most significant paradigm shifts in the administration of Aboriginal affairs in Australia's Northern Territory. The Welfare Ordinance 1953 (NT) constituted a then-unique attempt to reclassify the diminished legal status of most indigenous Territorians as justified not by their racial heritage but by their level of social need, while the 2007 legislation behind the “Northern Territory intervention” has jettisoned formal racial neutrality through a campaign to curb the breakdown of “community standards and parenting behaviours” in many remote indigenous communities. The authors argue that while both initiatives had similar fundamental aims—encouraging remote Aboriginal people to adopt social habits generally evident in non-indigenous society—the decision to jettison racial neutrality has ushered in a new era of race relations in Australia, in which race has openly and formally been reestablished as a marker of legal inferiority.

In history of legal ideas of the last generation in Canada, legal pluralism deserves an important place. There is a Quebec genre in the legal literature on pluralism that, for reasons one might well suspect, is less well-known elsewhere. The scholarship of Professor Jean-Guy Belley, one of the leading figures in the field, is deserving of a wider readership among non francophones. A translation on one of his most important papers, published at a critical moment in his personal development as a scholar, is presented here in the hope of introducing his work to new readers.

Last year, the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto approved a plan that will see tuition fees increase from $12 000 to $22 000 dollars over the next five years. Other Canadian law faculties are beginning to follow, or are considering following, the University of Toronto's lead. In light of this trend toward higher tuition fees, the time is ripe to step back and ask: what will this mean for legal education in Canada? In particular, on the twentieth anniversary of the release of Law and Learning (the “Arthurs Report”), it would seem important to reflect on the impact that higher tuition fees might have on law and learning in Canada. What will dramatic increases in tuition mean for the values and laudable objectives set out in the Arthurs Report? These are some of the issues that I seek to address, partly through a personal reflection on my own experience as a law student and as someone who is near the completion of graduate studies in law.

The implemention of a liberal normative system during the XIXth century was a phenomenon whose complexity we are still grappling with today. Concretely, for societies undergoing deep political and economical mutations this implies a capacity to adapt laws to meet the new imperatives of democracy and the market economy, the two central forces that effect the mode of regulation employed throughout Western societies. The difficulties of implementing a legal system and the development of legal institutions are compounded by the historical weight of this process. The freedom of association which is at the heart of the liberal regime brings to light a potential contradiction between the rights of individuals and of collectivities. The author exposes the evolution of this contradiction and its implications.

Barely three years ago, as chairman of the SSHRC's Consultative Group on Research and Education in Law, I released a report entitled Law and Learning. This report — in its diagnosis hardly more than a systematic compilation and empirical verification of “what we knew but could not tell” — contained a series of recommendations for the invigoration of Canadian legal scholarship. Several of these recommendations related to the need to diversify the types of legal research being conducted, to strengthen the research community by the development of networks and centres of activity, and to communicate the results of new research endeavours to relevant professional audiences, as well as to the public.

For me, therefore, the establishment of the Canadian Law and Society Association and the publication of the Canadian Journal of Law and Society are events of special significance. I am pleased — indeed flattered — to be involved in these new and important enterprises, albeit in a largely symbolic way. My pleasure is only enhanced by being afforded both a platform for pontification (the Editor has absolved me from the obligation to provide footnotes), and a collective script to which I can add what amounts to a postscript to our report.

Drawing attention to the legal and psychoanalytic genealogy of reparations, this article examines the relationship between reparations and racial difference through an analysis of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s documentary series 8th Fire: Aboriginal People, Canada and the Way Forward. The representational life of reparations in liberal settler colonialism is a repository for addressing the broader landscape of legality—sovereignty, self-determination and anti-colonialism—beyond the confines of international human rights mechanisms. This article considers the following questions: How do forms of testimony animate connections between reparations and racial difference? In what ways do visual and representational practices operate through racial and colonial temporalities central to reparative juridics? What is the relationship between reparations and possibilities for anti-colonialism? I argue that the social, legal, cultural, and representational life of reparations in settler colonialism is structured by racial difference.

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.