Cases might be valuable for more than the legal lessons they offer. This paper argues that cases present an archive of evidence that can help us reason backward to better understand the fissures in the ways humans interact and how our social, political, and economic systems generate tensions in their lives. More specifically, the paper looks through a small window into the lives of the people who find themselves caught between our collective and individual expenditure aspirations. It explores the circumstances in which individuals find that their outstanding tax debts pose a threat to their ability to maintain ownership of their home.

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.

Using the Safe Schools Act in Ontario as an example of a school zero-tolerance policy, I demonstrate that there are more implications for governing students through these policies than the literature tends to suggest. The push to exclude students found in zero-tolerance policies co-exists uneasily with the liberal democratic pull to an inclusive education. Principals negotiate the contradictory positioning of students as simultaneously excludable and includable uniquely. There is also an insertion of ‘choice’ as a strategy to resolve these tensions. Inappropriate conduct conceived as the students’ choice signals a reorientation of the main function of the school, to an institution now interested in managing its own reputation by devolving the responsibility of good behaviour onto the student.

Youth without housing experience more regulation and conflict with criminal justice than their housed counterparts. Using in-depth qualitative interviews with fifty-one young people, we focus on how efforts to move away from homelessness towards long-term housing stability are impacted by conflict with law, a term referring to a broad range of experiences with various authorities in the legal system, social services, shelters, etc. Our paper comes out of a yearlong longitudinal study of the factors and processes affecting the transition away from youth homelessness in Toronto and Halifax. We consider practical barriers generated by conflict with law, but also the role that it can play in shaping the identity processes at the heart of successful transitions. Our findings highlight how conflict with law and regulation—even occurring before and during homelessness—has serious repercussions for young people well after they have left the streets.

When lawyers elect the leaders of their self-regulatory organizations, what sort of people do they vote for? How do the selection processes for elite lawyer sub-groups affect the diversity and efficacy of those groups? This article quantitatively assesses the demographic and professional diversity of leadership in the Law Society of Upper Canada. After many years of underrepresentation, in 2015 visible minority members and women were elected in numbers proportionate to their shares of Ontario lawyers. Regression analysis suggests that being non-white was not a disadvantage in the 2015 election, and being female actually conferred an advantage in attracting lawyers’ votes. The diverse employment contexts of the province’s lawyers were also represented in the elected group. However, early-career lawyers were completely unrepresented. This is largely a consequence of electoral system design choices, and can be remedied through the implementation of career-stage constituencies. The Law Society’s “benchers” are more demographically diverse than other elite lawyer sub-groups, such as judges, and the open and transparent selection process may be part of the reason.

Bigamy has been a crime against morality since the earliest days of New France. Of the 385 cases identified in our study of bigamy in Quebec (1763–1960), although priests were often called on to attest to the validity of a marriage or the morality of their parishioners, very few of them played the role of informer. Rather, they turned to the criminal courts only when they were unable to quell a scandal by their own methods. It is apparent that not only did the Catholic Church prefer to handle this offence against monogamous marriage by itself, but most importantly, given the small number of cases taken before the criminal courts, it continued to exercise its monopoly over the institution of matrimony during the first half of the twentieth century, even though the civil authorities sometimes flouted canon law. At the individual level, we would note that the institution of marriage remained fundamental throughout the period studied.

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.