Reforms to Canadian sentencing law in 1996 and the Supreme Court of Canada decision R. v. Gladue [1999] opened the door to a new normative set of legal practices that endeavour to integrate racial knowledge about offenders’ collective and individual experiences of race relations and oppression into traditional legal criminal practices. One outcome of the reforms and court cases was the formation of dedicated Gladue courts for Aboriginal peoples. This paper explores the formation of Gladue courts, the legal techniques used to produce contextualized racial knowledges, how this information is admitted as evidence before the court, and how this knowledge is used to reframe legal subjects and the risk they pose.

There have been two significant legal challenges to research confidentiality in Canada. The first occurred because of a Coroner’s subpoena, with the researcher invoking the Wigmore criteria and winning a researcher-participant privilege. A second case saw two University of Ottawa researchers served with a search warrant for the tape and transcript of an interview they had conducted years earlier with an individual subsequently accused of murder. The researchers defended research confidentiality in Quebec Superior Court, winning a qualified researcher-participant privilege in the process. This article discusses implications of the court’s decision for researchers, research ethics boards, and universities for the future defence of research confidences. All have a role to play in designing research that anticipates the court’s evidentiary requirements when a claim of privilege is invoked to help ensure future jurisprudence is as favourable to research participants and as respectful of academic freedom as possible.

This article will explore data obtained through interviews with UK family law practitioners and clients with experience of financial relief on formalised same-sex relationship breakdown. It will focus on questions around how solicitors have approached and argued their dissolution cases (and the extent to which they have drawn upon heteronormative arguments and case law), and whether both they and the clients believed that civil partnerships are, and should be, treated similarly to marriages. The discussion will examine the different understandings of ‘equality’ employed, and question the ways that the participants relied on ideas of sameness and difference. It will be argued that the solicitors placed particular stress on sameness, and that heteronormative constructs of gendered inequalities have been transplanted into same-sex cases, in a system where practitioners’ submissions are based on ‘what works.’ This is despite the fact that lesbian and gay couples do not map onto the ‘template’ under which the parties have been subjected to different gendered expectations. Conversely, the clients were less willing to take on the full legal implications associated with (heterosexual) marital breakdown and less receptive of the solicitors ‘translating’ their matters to pigeonhole them into the existing framework.

Family policies in France and various European countries, like pension schemes, involve mechanisms to compensate for inequality between women and men associated with the organization of the family. The compensation is sometimes tied directly to the marriage, or more broadly to the couple, and sometimes to parental investment and time devoted to the maintenance and welfare of family members. In this article, we examine the principles of compensation applied in the legislation of five European countries characterized by different social protection systems. We use the concept of familialization to characterize the rationales underlying women’s social rights in different systems, and to understand their processes by connecting the developments in family/social policies with the dual process of de-familialization of parental activities and de-specialization of gender roles.