This article interweaves the personal and archival by exploring the intersection of official Australian records on the fall of Saigon and government handling of Vietnamese refugees in 1975 with my family history. As transitional justice addresses the legacies of human rights violations including the displacement and resettlement of refugees in post-conflict contexts, Australian responses to the Vietnamese refugee crisis of 1975 provide a relevant case study. Drawing on a wide range of archival documentation at the National Archives of Australia and the National Library of Australia, including policy papers, Senate findings, confidential cables, ministerial submissions, private correspondence and photographs, I trace the effect of government decisions on Vietnamese refugees seeking asylum. In the process I reveal actions by senior bureaucrats and in particular by then Prime Minister Gough Whitlam that are largely unknown. Combining archival research with personal history enables me to not only shed light on past actions of governance and uncover past injustice but also explore the enduring impact of government decision-making on individual lives.

In May 2012, a former research assistant contacted the Montréal police about an interview he had conducted with Luka Magnotta for the SSHRC-funded research project Sex Work and Intimacy: Escorts and their Clients four years previously. That call ultimately resulted in the Parent and Bruckert v R and Magnotta case. Now, a decade later, we are positioned to reflect on the collective lessons learned (and lost) from the case. In this paper, we provide a lay of the Canadian confidentiality landscape before teasing out ten lessons from Parent c R. To do so, we draw on personal archives, survey results from sixty researchers, twelve key informant interviews with qualitative sociolegal and criminology researchers, and documentary analysis of university research policies. The lessons, which range from the clichéd, to the practical, to the frustrating, have implications for the individual work of Canadian researchers and for the collective work of academic institutions.

This paper argues that patterns of pervasive police violence can and should be treated as organizational crime in Canada. It uses the documented events of police violence in Val d’Or, Quebec, that emerged in 2015 to show how a similar fact pattern might fit all of the elements of organizational crime as defined in the Criminal Code. The article also suggests that this is an example where legal imagination is important, in order to shift our collective understanding of what organizational crime is and where it occurs.

A central feature of Canadian history since the mid-twentieth century has been ‘the rights revolution,’ the quest to articulate and give legal protection to human rights and fundamental freedoms. In many ways, as with other Western nations, this struggle has become the country's defining metanarrative, giving identity, normative ideals and purpose to Canadian nationhood and jurisprudence, especially with the entrenchment of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in the Canadian Constitution of 1982. It is the intention of this article to study historically the complex role of religion in an early phase of the human rights narrative in Canada. The focus is on the religious dimension of the passage in 1960 by the Progressive Conservative Government of John Diefenbaker of Canada's first national human rights instrument, the Canadian Bill of Rights. It will be argued that the churches played an important but ambiguous role in relation to the human rights movement which, in some ways, presented perceived challenges to their own religiously-grounded metanarratives of Canadian history, identity, and destiny. A central thesis advanced is that the 1960 Canadian Bill of Rights reflected and legislated a pluralism which was religiously-positive in integrating the nation's principal religious and political values under the formula affirmed in the bill's Preamble: “that the Canadian Nation is founded upon principles that acknowledge the supremacy of God, the dignity and worth of the human person and the position of the family in a society of free men and free institutions (…).”

It is argued that there are no moral or legal rights that may never rightly be overridden no matter what the consequences. There are human rights which are inalienable while still being rightly overrideable in certain circumstances. Even rights-based constructivist accounts of human rights do not provide a grounding for morality that escapes consequentialist critique. But the proper form of consequentialism is a weak form of consequentialism which is distinguished from utilitarian consequentialism.

As copyright is asked to perform a greater role in governing creative activity, its focus on economic values above all others raises concerns. Interviews conducted by the author with Canadian independent music labels suggest that the law and the norms governing labels’ operations are more diverse and include direct subsidies, or grants, from government and the private sector. These grants perform many of the functions expected from copyright. This study concludes that copyright law is often exotic, peripheral, and even irrelevant to those involved in the spheres of remunerative Canadian sound production considered here. This finding suggests a renewed focus on a Canadian narrative of copyright law that puts it in its place alongside other instruments regulating independent music production.

A determining factor in the evolution of their power relationship with the State was the fact that Native groups became conscious of their identity and collective power and that they defined their collective identity using the concept of “nation”. The federal positions have also changed on the question of Aboriginal collective rights and the State has modified certain principles in its policies. The Native groups have redefined their collective rights according to their needs and political objectives. With that concept, they have developed a form of counter-hegemony, releasing them from the domination of the State and enabling them to attain the political autonomy they are seeking.

On July 13, 2013, the Commission for Public Complaints released the Report Following a Public Interest Investigation into the Conduct of RCMP Members in Nova Scotia in Respect to Matters Involving Nicole (Ryan) Doucet. After interviewing all parties involved and reviewing 25 incidences involving Ms. Doucet and Mr. Ryan, the Acting Commissioner, Ian McPhail, concluded the RCMP’s policy regarding violence in relationships “was followed at all times.” According to The Report, the RCMP did not fail to protect Ms. Doucet. These conclusions, however, seem to be at odds with the evidence presented in The Report. After discussing coercive control and reviewing R. v. Ryan, the paper analyses the Commission’s findings to argue that the evidence presented to the Commission clearly illustrates that police ignored Ms. Doucet’s repeated pleas for help. The Commissioner missed a real opportunity to review current RCMP policies on domestic violence to bring them in line with current and on-going research on coercive control.

In my contribution to this discussion or the Arthurs Report twenty years later, I want to talk briefly about the teaching aspect of legal education. I want to be emphatic in my focus on teaching because I fear that teaching is increasingly diminishing as an object of our attention and as a subject of our scholarly work. I fear that, for many of us, teaching is becoming a less and less significant part of our discussions, our hirings, our preoccupations, our energy … To me, this is both short-sighted and sad, particularly for those of us who are committed to a law and society approach to legal education. If we are committed to social change, then education, in the form of teaching and learning, is critically important – that is, what we teach and how we teach, and what we model as teachers and thinkers are important instigators and promoters of change. I make this assertion of a lack of serious interest in law teaching despite the fact that there have been a number of Canadian forums on legal education recently. However, admissions and administrative matters largely overshadowed teaching as issues of primary concern and discussion in the two forums that I attended. I do not think these forums generated the kind of on-the-ground, in-our-work-places re-energization and rethinking of legal education and specifically about teaching that was perhaps hoped for.

This research note on the use of the Canadian and Quebec Charters of Rights in social matters shows that judicial proceedings have limited success. Even reinforced by the Charters, the concept of social cohesion is powerless when faced with legislative changes that have undermined social law. The paper traces broadly some recent modifications to social programs in Quebec and on the Canadian federal level in order to determine their impact on social law. To do so, we focus on the fiscal treatment of such programs.

This essay offers a feminist analysis of the abuse of female lessees and, more specifically, of one solution enacted by the Quebec legislature. Since 2006, article 1974.1 of the C.C.Q. has authorized the unilateral termination of a lease when the safety of a female lessee is threatened. This study questions the effectiveness of this legislative initiative. First, it offers a materialist and radical feminist analysis of the private/public dichotomy that underlies the organization of landlord/tenant law in Civil law. This spatial and legislative division implies a preliminary and implicit characterization of abuse within the home as belonging to the private and individual sphere instead of the social and collective sphere. Within this legal structure, article 1974.1 C.C.Q. takes on a reformist character. Preliminary results of the use of this article before the Régie du logement are then presented. These results highlight four major obstacles to its effectiveness.

The purpose of this paper is threefold. First, we identify the qualities of good justice in Switzerland, as defined by the various actors who form the tribunal in a broad sense (judges, court managers, lawyers, journalists, politicians). Second, we verify if these qualities are compatible with the values conveyed by the managerial universe (NPM). Finally, we evaluate how they coexist (hybridization, dominance over each other, etc.). To do this, we analysed a series of semi-structured interviews (56) conducted in tribunals of first and second instance in civil, administrative, and criminal courts in the three linguistic regions of the country. The results show that the groups of actors interviewed have relatively similar expectations that do not seem to be incompatible with those of the managerial world. However, when describing good justice, the participants refer more frequently to concepts related to the commercial than the industrial world, contrary to other Swiss public servants but in line with those of Quebec, as uncovered by former studies. The article opens up the path to further research whose objective will be to test those conclusions.

In the spring of 1987, Canada's first ministers agreed to a package of proposals for reforming major elements of the country's constitution. The package, which has come to be known as the Meech Lake Accord, contains a number of significant provisions, one of which deals with the federal spending power and national shared-cost programs. This provision stipulates that the federal government must compensate provinces that decline to participate in future national sharedcost programs, but immediately adds that such compensation is conditional upon the non-participating provinces establishing “a program or initiative that is compatible with the national objectives.”

The provision has led to a great deal of debate and discussion. Of special interest, and concern for some, has been the possible effect of the provision on the capacity of the federal government to use its spending power to set up national shared-cost programs. Some contend that Ottawa's capacity would be severely restricted or even eliminated by the provision. Others claim that it would have little or no impact, that the Accord would simply constitutionalize present practices. These conflicting views on the implications of the Meech Lake Accord for shared-cost programs doubtless flow from many sources, but a major one appears to be differing views on the present ability of Ottawa to establish these types of arrangements.

Making sense of the problems which illiterate people face in gaining access to justice puts the foundations of both the ethnography of law and the modern justice system itself into question. The essay explores this thesis with reference to the case of an elderly dairy farmer whose arrest for the mercy killing of his ailing brother attracted intense local and national attention. Documents from the trial which deal with the construction and use of evidence, confession, and testimony, along with schematic representations of the personal, community, and media responses to the case as depicted in the award-winning documentary Brother's Keeper (1992), render visible the textual conventions of a litigious society along with its non-literate and even ritual cultural context. The most troubling issue raised by the case involves a crisis in the bureaucratic organization and expert professionalization of modern litigation when it attempts to address the rights and competencies of relatively illiterate people who appear unable to articulate the values and beliefs of any cultural community at all.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a popular phenomenon that originates at the margins of the legal system. How do CSR practices interact with the law? With the propagation of CSR instruments, the law struggles to prescribe these procedures while favouring an effective application of codes of conduct. Nevertheless, the motivations behind CSR practices stem primarily from a desire to reduce legal risk rather than from a wish to convey a good corporate image. The legal status of the codes is variable, and the jurisdictions participate in the implementation of these regulatory norms of corporate relations. While these acts are intended to protect the fundamental social rights of workers, they sometimes become new legal tools used to make workers subordinate to the corporate ethic. Is it desirable, then, to propose a legal framework for this purely spontaneous and voluntary social phenomenon?