This study examines the recent proliferation of manslaughter charges and subsequent prosecutions brought against people who have shared, sold, or provided drugs that have led to overdose death in Canada. It presents a documentary analysis of news media coverage, court decisions, and Access-to-Information and Freedom-of-Information requests of materials from criminal legal institutions. The analysis finds that the vast majority of those who face manslaughter charges are engaged in the lowest tiers of the drug trade, are themselves people who use drugs, and are often intimately known to the deceased. Messaging by police, prosecutors and the courts mobilize the overdose crisis as rationale for these charges and prosecutions, positioning them as a form of redress to impacted communities. This phenomenon illustrates how punitive criminal legal responses to the overdose crisis have deepened alongside the retreat of criminal law in other circumstances, contradicting claims of a therapeutic turn in Canadian drug policies.

Human rights instruments are but one of many legal advocacy tools used by trans people. Recent legal scholarship emphasizes that human rights laws are not sufficient to address legal challenges facing trans people, particularly intersectional and systemic barriers. This article looks to Canadian trans case law outside of human rights law to reveal the many instances in which trans people’s fight for legal recognition and redress occur outside of the human rights arena. It focuses on trans case law in three areas: family law, the use of name and gender in court, and access to social benefits. Canadian trans jurisprudence illustrates that not only are trans legal strategies outside of human rights plentiful and effective, they are also imperative. An agile and pragmatic approach to trans rights is necessary, particularly when minority rights are under threat, and for trans people on the margins of trans law reforms.

Understandings of the public interest underpin many law reform processes. The public interest is not a fully definable term and so reform bodies have to engage with a range of articulations of that interest. The negotiation of the different articulations, however, has not been explored empirically before. This article reports on a study of the claims to the public interest in a public Australian inquiry into potential abuses of the patent system by pharmaceutical companies. More specifically, submissions to the Pharmaceutical Patents Review are analysed and the results show “oligopolistic” tensions between competing views of the public interest—and with these views claiming primacy over more technical understandings of the issues. This lack of a single “public interest” allows dominant players to frame the debate to reflect their interests; and the tension between these players means that the debate, and the underlying problem, has not been subject to a resolution.