The Tŝilhqot’in Nation has had ample experience exercising its laws and jurisdiction to manage emergencies during record-breaking wildfires and the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the Nation’s unique opportunity to formally describe and advance its jurisdiction through its landmark Aboriginal title declaration and beyond, in these crises, Crown actors have defaulted to well-worn patterns of colonialism. Through a detailed analysis of recent Tŝilhqot’in experiences of emergency, we argue that provincial and federal responses to these extreme events reveal constitutional habits: patterns of decision-making that emerge in the immediate response to an emergency, so as to appear automatic. Crown emergency responses assume exhaustive Crown jurisdiction and its corollary erasure and dispossession of Tŝilhqot’in jurisdiction. Fortunately, however, habits can change. We show how Tŝilhqot’in responses to emergency reveal alternate constitutional possibilities: habits of coordination, which, through their attention to responsible relationships, build capacity to respond to emergencies and, more broadly, a changing world.

Cet article traite du concours « Le bon juge que j’aime le plus » organisé par la Cour Populaire Suprême de Chine (CPS) en 2017. Nous expliquerons l’importance du concours et les fins véritables qu’il sert dans le contexte judiciaire chinois marqué entre autres par l’exode des juges de la profession et la campagne anti-corruption du Parti Communiste Chinois. Les dossiers des dix juges modèles lauréats seront analysés afin de dégager certaines des attentes qui pèsent sur les juges chinois et le regard de la CPS sur divers enjeux de la justice. Le concours s’inscrit dans une tradition chinoise qui a traversé les siècles, le recours aux personnages modèles.

Women's perceptions of abuse differ deeply from official characterizations of them and are largely absent from legal discourse on male domestic abuse despite two decades of reform initiatives. This article traces the enforcement of male domestic dominance and violence through the failures of the criminal justice system to incorporate women's perspectives in systemic responses to male spouse batterers. I argue that it is factors such as official labelling of abuse by the juridical system, including police, which determine whether abuse is ‘officially’ recognized as such and whether the male violent family is stabilized by policies, practices, and non-intervention. This interaction between definitions and institutional responses makes it crucial to understand how women define their own experiences of abuse. The article concludes that male domestic abuse remains a contested area of juridical understandings and practices. Insofar as the ‘official’ definition of her situation impacts on the abused woman's self-perception, and on her access to resources she might use to get out of danger, it determines the organization of ‘domestic abuse’ as well.

La présence accrue de justiciables non représenté·e·s devant les tribunaux est régulièrement attribuée à un manque de confiance envers le système judiciaire, notamment à l’égard des avocat·e·s. Agir seul·e devant les tribunaux serait donc un choix délibéré. Un sondage réalisé dans la population générale au Québec permet de démontrer au contraire que la grande majorité des citoyen·ne·s redoutent de faire face seul·e·s à la justice et souhaitent avoir accès aux services d’un·e professionnel·le du droit pour les représenter. Il permet aussi d’établir des liens entre certaines composantes de la localisation sociale des répondant·e·s – âge, condition socioéconomique, scolarité et genre – et leur opinion sur le système de justice et la non-représentation. Il faut en conclure que le rapport au droit et à la justice est la conséquence directe de structures sociales dont il faut tenir compte dans la compréhension de la réalité de la non-représentation.

This paper reflects on the moralization of the sex industry and the implications thereof in a case study of erotic dance in Ontario since the year 2000. It examines how subjects, objects, and practices are discursively formed and moralized in regulatory discussions of stripping and how subjects engage in and resist moralization. This article argues that in spite of the development of a labour discourse, a discourse moralizing stripping as prostitution, which is, in turn, framed as harmful and deviant, continues to inform regulation.

This article explores the inequality inhering to low-wage migrant labour and critically evaluates the current capacity of human rights law to account for and address this inequality. This article uses two recent human rights tribunal decisions as case studies through which to conduct this examination: PN v FR, 2015 BCHRT 60, and OPT v Presteve Foods Ltd, 2015 HRTO 675. While these cases establish the positive role of human rights law in accounting for the wider context in which inequality impacts on migrant labour, this role is also inherently limited by the purpose, scope, and function of the Tribunals. This article will identify and discuss issues illustrated in the cases that are reflective of deeper systemic and structural inequalities attending low-wage migrant labour, including: the underlying reasons motivating low-wage labour migration; the legal regulations governing migrant workers’ status and employment conditions; and, the racialization of migrant workers.

This paper conducts a feminist analysis of Canadian prostitution control during the period between 1914 and 1970. The major intent of this analysis is to outline the manner in which the prostitution-related vagrancy provisions were enforced from the beginning of the First World War through to their repeal in the early 1970s. The effects of two world wars, the eugenics movement of the 1920s, the Great Depression and the liberalized sexual mores of the 1960s on prostitution control are assessed. Throughout this analysis, it is noted that Canadian prostitution control was characterized by an underlying chauvinist bias which overrode all other factors. Furthermore, it is also noted that feminists generally declined to become involved in the prostitution debate, and that many women's groups and organizations sided with the male-dominated military and criminal justice systems.

The author begins with an evaluation of the topic of the present issue, “Law as an exclusion factor”, by fleshing out the strong polysemantics of expressions and concluding that relations between law and exclusion are probably ambiguous. To compare the different meanings and to play with the ambiguity generated by their coexistence, is the object of this article which relates to penal law because the suspicion of exclusion takes a large part of it. However, the penal theory presents it, on the contrary, as an effort to tear the humanity out of the archaic game of vindication. On the contrary, relying on recent anthropological works, the author suggests visualizing both the vindictive and penal spheres as two forms of legality equally regulated, of which the most exclusionary is the latter. But since nothing is simple in this game of law and exclusion, the author searchs next to verify the affirmation in examining the contemporary operations of penal law -the creation of incrimination and its application. By demonstrating different scenarios, the author finally achieves the demonstration of the complexity of the relation between law and exclusion and the impossibility of a too brief or a priori conclusion.

Memory is primarily valued in Canadian and American legal systems as an evidentiary tool and object. Remembering, however, is seen as a moral and cultural act among anthropologists. This article examines historical and contemporary cases and statutes involving the treatment of dead bodies in search of legal recognition of memory as “moral practice”. The contemporary cases analyzed construct indignities offered to human bodies as affronts to memory. The United States' Native American Graves and Repatriation Act has been interpreted so as to recognize connections between the worlds of the living and the dead. Ontario's Cemeteries Act, however, which sets procedures for managing all unmarked graves, has been interpreted so as to exclude aboriginal views of connections between the living and the dead. Legal recognition of memory of the dead in these cases does open an avenue for justice claims, but it is a narrow one.

Central to any consideration of “culture in the domain of the law” is whether and to what extent culture is justiciable, litigable, and subject to being adduced as evidence before courts and tribunals. Experts, usually from social science and humanities disciplines, will often be called upon to present this kind of evidence. While the Supreme Court of Canada has developed screening criteria for expert evidence, these criteria can be more difficult to apply when the evidence sought to be adduced is “cultural,” as opposed to classically scientific. Concern for the reliability of the expert evidence is multiplied when a jury is acting as trier of fact. This comment reviews a recent decision of the Nova Scotia Supreme Court in a racially-charged defamation case, using it as a platform for discussing the unique issues that are raised when cultural evidence is sought to be adduced in civil matters.

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.

This article examines Canada’s first internet gambling website blocking scheme, which was enacted in Quebec as part of the implementation of the province’s 2015 budget. Using qualitative research methods, the article illustrates the complexities of regulating online gambling. Influenced by critical sociological and anthropological studies of gambling, and taking a socio-legal, governmentality perspective, it shows how socio-legal studies can illuminate research on the regulation of gambling, and how the study of online gambling can, as a sentinel site for the regulation of online consumption, contribute to the development of socio-legal studies. Our analysis shows that the governmentality of online gambling is framed so as to exclude 1) a range of risks (e.g., related to consumer profiling and the capacity to stimulate “addictive consumption”), 2) the heterogeneity of everyday experience that connects online gambling with online addictive consumption more generally, and 3) a range of possibilities for governing online gambling otherwise.

The empirical literature on plea decisions shows that rational motives and coercion may coexist, but there is uncertainty with regard to whether accused feel that their decision is voluntary or made under considerable pressure. However, in most jurisdictions, the legitimacy of the plea bargaining process rests on the Court’s obligation to ensure that the guilty plea is entered voluntarily and knowingly. This study proposes to understand how the accused interpret the rational or coercive elements of their decision-making process and the extent to which their decision to plead guilty is voluntary. Based on semi-structured interviews with twenty convicted individuals, we describe the different decision-making processes, from free and informed decisions to forced decisions to plead guilty while innocent.

This article examines shifts in the regulation and governance of business crime in competition and deceptive trade practices law. It traces policies and enforcement in Canada's Combines Investigation Act/Competition Act from 1975–2005, a period of seismic shift in regulatory law during which formerly dominant Keynesian welfare-state discourses, practices, and policies were replaced by those characterizing the neo-liberal regulatory state. The Competition Bureau was a key player in this transition, by which competition policy became the primary regulatory mechanism of the modern state. The article's purpose is to analyse enforcement records, annual reports, and other documents from the Competition Bureau to show how priorities and practices have changed and to link these changes to shifts in governance associated with the transition from Keynesian economic philosophies to those of the neo-liberal state.

In this paper I consider the image of the reasonable person in criminal law and its relationship to larger theoretical controversies concerning abstract universal principles and the particularities of individual experience under conditions of diversity. Using Seyla Benhabib's dichotomy of the concrete and generalized other as an illustration of this conflict, I argue that the image of the reasonable person in criminal law lies at the juncture of the abstract and the concrete, and of normative and empirical reasoning. As a result, the image of the reasonable person is often the focal point of critiques of the marginalizing effect of abstract universalism in criminal law. However, in some cases the image of the reasonable person acts not as a universal standard of conduct but as a site within which claims for recognition of various types of concrete experience can be made. While the reasonable person is sometimes a general normative standard against which concrete actions are evaluated, concrete reality also acts as a normative standard against which various assumptions about the reasonable person are evaluated.

The interrelationship between Halakhah (Jewish law) and Aggadah (Jewish Legend) evokes potent insights, relevant to most disciplines that investigate law as a cultural practice, especially in the present-day Law and Literature field. This contention will be elaborated by proposing the two phased paradigm of literature alongside law. According to this paradigm, after considering the limits and sometimes failures of law, the next step is the attempt to deal with those effectively and to keep striving towards truth and justice within difficult realities. The Halakhah and Aggadah combination reflects the literature alongside law paradigm by creating a dynamic model of interpretation that is derived from a canon that is “both sealed and open”, and from the extensive use of narrative. Thus the Halakhah and Aggadah juxtaposition creates an authentic balance that while being aware to the weakness of law, continuously re-establishes it as a vital effort, characterized by failures and disappointments, but also by vision and achievements.