In 1877, the North-West constitution was amended to provide for the publication of all statutes, or ordinances, in both English and French. In 1905, this provision was carried over into the newly-created provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan; it was not repealed until 1988, shortly after the Supreme Court's ruling in the Mercure case. At the present time, however, there remains only scant evidence that this constitutional guarantee was ever respected: very few French language ordinances are extant. Were the great majority of the ordinances never printed in French? Or, were they printed in French but then destroyed?

This article examines the Canadian North-West's experience with legislative bilingualism from 1870 until 1895, and the circumstances surrounding its rise and subsequent demise. During the early years of territorial government, when responsibility for the publication of the ordinances was vested in a lieutenant-governor appointed by the Canadian government, perfunctory attention was paid to the language guarantees: the French language ordinances were printed, but with a considerable delay, and then they often went undistributed. After 1894, when authority was transferred to an executive committee directly responsible to the legislative assembly, the language guarantees were completely ignored: the French language printings ceased altogether. Minority rights succumbed to majority rule. The North-West experience provides an abject lesson in the failure of a constitution to protect minority language rights, when faced with determined opposition from an unsympathetic majority-controlled government.

Last year, the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto approved a plan that will see tuition fees increase from $12 000 to $22 000 dollars over the next five years. Other Canadian law faculties are beginning to follow, or are considering following, the University of Toronto's lead. In light of this trend toward higher tuition fees, the time is ripe to step back and ask: what will this mean for legal education in Canada? In particular, on the twentieth anniversary of the release of Law and Learning (the “Arthurs Report”), it would seem important to reflect on the impact that higher tuition fees might have on law and learning in Canada. What will dramatic increases in tuition mean for the values and laudable objectives set out in the Arthurs Report? These are some of the issues that I seek to address, partly through a personal reflection on my own experience as a law student and as someone who is near the completion of graduate studies in law.

This paper addresses current tensions and initiatives respecting the manner by which provincial human rights commissions are confronting the pressures of financial restraint. It also focuses attention on theoretical debates respecting the reform or reinvention of governmental bodies. As such agencies are forced to do more with less, we can witness them engaging in an important process of institutional and administrative reconfiguration. This process is significant, touching on matters ranging from case prioritisation, through adjudication, to agency responsibilities regarding public education. The process of change, however, is to be understood more in light of the literature on the reform of government rather than its reinvention. And as all these agencies confront the need to engage in the reform of their services, questions arise regarding the degree to which such reform is subject to public awareness and scrutiny.

The following article attempts to summarize the results of a study of Canadian criminal case law materials relating to aboriginals accused over the last hundred years. The goal of this analysis was to ascertain the openness of Canadian state law to certain forms of legal pluralism. The concept of “dialogism» was used to measure the intensity of recognition or application by a central legal order (Canadian criminal law) of values and norms pertaining to another legal order (legal concepts of aboriginal peoples). Analysis of the case law shows Canadian criminal law slowly evolving towards a weak form of legal pluralism. Early decisions by the courts denote an absence of cultural dialogue, with the exception of those of the circuit court in the Northwest Territories. The more recent case law indicates that if courts are reluctant to recognize the relevance of aboriginal values in the matter of jury selection, trial location and criminal liability, they are more and more receptive to legal pluralism on sentencing issues, where a form of power-sharing is possible between judges and native communities.

The use of human and animal subjects in the field of biomedical research is universally accepted. Without such methods, we are told, what would happen to scientific progress and the relief of suffering in the world? Be that as it may, one fact remains: by its very nature, experimenting on human beings and nonhuman animals demands that we protect those who are the subjects of those experiments. In Canada, what kind of protection is offered to human and animal subjects? In the absence of federal legislation, and in place of it, voluntary systems of control have been put in place by the scientific community. These systems are based on the establishment of institutional ethics committees. They are complemented by an a posteriori control of experiments. In this article, the authors describe and analyze these sytems of control. Indeed, although they appear to be reassuring, these systems nonetheless reveal certain weak points.

Drawing on a series of criminal cases that took place in Hamilton in late 1852, this paper explores the operation of race in law during the period against the backdrop of Hamilton’s geography. The paper sheds light on the living conditions of a segment of the population that has left scarcely a trace in the historical records. As well, a close examination of Hamilton’s census records and physical space reveals that those found guilty in these trials were linked to a particular racially and ethnically charged, vice-prone space rather than the more respectable central part of the city. The author argues that the construction of Prince’s Island, which lay in the marshes just west of Hamilton, as a “den of vice” probably conditioned the findings of guilt and innocence in one of the trials while promoting the impression that justice was “colour-blind.”

Drawing attention to the legal and psychoanalytic genealogy of reparations, this article examines the relationship between reparations and racial difference through an analysis of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s documentary series 8th Fire: Aboriginal People, Canada and the Way Forward. The representational life of reparations in liberal settler colonialism is a repository for addressing the broader landscape of legality—sovereignty, self-determination and anti-colonialism—beyond the confines of international human rights mechanisms. This article considers the following questions: How do forms of testimony animate connections between reparations and racial difference? In what ways do visual and representational practices operate through racial and colonial temporalities central to reparative juridics? What is the relationship between reparations and possibilities for anti-colonialism? I argue that the social, legal, cultural, and representational life of reparations in settler colonialism is structured by racial difference.

Profound transformations of Western democracies are apparent today. These transformations express an insufficiency in traditional forms of social organisation. The question of governance, of its efficiency, has thus progressively become the major theme of our social debates. Law and social sciences have provided two contradictory responses to meet the need for a new approach to governance: either in terms of efficiency or in terms of procedural ethics. Even if both of these perspectives contain an element of truth, they are no doubt perceived to be intuitively unsatisfactory. It is this intuition of the insufficiency of these two solutions which our hypothesis (contextual proceduralization) aims to construct and to overcome. Our hypothesis states that the two solutions share, beyond their apparent opposition, the same presupposition which explains their parallel insufficiency. This common presupposition concerns their answer to the question of the ‘norm's mode of action’. How should we understand the operation by which society aims to regulate itself and to act upon itself by norms which it considers legitimate?

This article considers the problems associated with the international regime addressing the transfrontier movement of hazardous waste. Significant gaps exist within the current regime, it is argued, because historically, policy-making has been predominated by the concerns of developed nations, to the detriment of the developing countries most likely to be the recipients of the waste. To better understand why and how this is the case, the regime is examined through the lens of Critical Race Theory (CRT), a theory advocating, among other things, the need to recognize the context in which the problem is set, outside of the confines of a legal structure defined and changed only incrementally by the enfranchised. The paper begins with an overview of why the problem is of concern, as well as sets out the tenets of CRT to be used as tools of analysis throughout the paper. The paper then highlights the international, regional and bilateral measures that exist, attempting to identify some of the gaps in the regime via application of the tenets of CRT. The final section of the paper offers three suggestions as topics to consider in future negotiations: a call for an ameliorated Prior Informed Consent regime, the establishment of an international fund mechanism and potential options for remedial tribunals.

Barely three years ago, as chairman of the SSHRC's Consultative Group on Research and Education in Law, I released a report entitled Law and Learning. This report — in its diagnosis hardly more than a systematic compilation and empirical verification of “what we knew but could not tell” — contained a series of recommendations for the invigoration of Canadian legal scholarship. Several of these recommendations related to the need to diversify the types of legal research being conducted, to strengthen the research community by the development of networks and centres of activity, and to communicate the results of new research endeavours to relevant professional audiences, as well as to the public.

For me, therefore, the establishment of the Canadian Law and Society Association and the publication of the Canadian Journal of Law and Society are events of special significance. I am pleased — indeed flattered — to be involved in these new and important enterprises, albeit in a largely symbolic way. My pleasure is only enhanced by being afforded both a platform for pontification (the Editor has absolved me from the obligation to provide footnotes), and a collective script to which I can add what amounts to a postscript to our report.

The Liberal government of Oliver Mowat, which held office in Ontario from 1872 to 1896, experimented with legislation providing for a formal arbitration structure to resolve labour disputes. Although labour had not requested the initial legislation, in the context of employer resistance to labour organizations, arbitration was viewed by some labour leaders as one way to get the employer to the bargaining table. Since Mowat's legislation did not compel the submission of disputes to arbitration, it was of little use in achieving this goal. Nonetheless, the legislation was used by the Mowat government as evidence of its commitment to equal justice for all classes.

This article compares the two most significant paradigm shifts in the administration of Aboriginal affairs in Australia's Northern Territory. The Welfare Ordinance 1953 (NT) constituted a then-unique attempt to reclassify the diminished legal status of most indigenous Territorians as justified not by their racial heritage but by their level of social need, while the 2007 legislation behind the “Northern Territory intervention” has jettisoned formal racial neutrality through a campaign to curb the breakdown of “community standards and parenting behaviours” in many remote indigenous communities. The authors argue that while both initiatives had similar fundamental aims—encouraging remote Aboriginal people to adopt social habits generally evident in non-indigenous society—the decision to jettison racial neutrality has ushered in a new era of race relations in Australia, in which race has openly and formally been reestablished as a marker of legal inferiority.

The Assisted Human Reproduction Act seeks to protect egg donors’ health and well-being and prevent trade in their reproductive capabilities. In order to fulfill these objectives, the Act prohibits the buying and selling of ova, and only allows for egg donors to be reimbursed for their expenses. However, no regulations setting out what expenses can be reimbursed were promulgated. Sixteen years later, these long-awaited regulations finally came into force in June 2020. In this study, I rely on data from interviews with sixteen egg donors in order to assess how the new regulations might help or hinder concerns that egg donors have with how egg transactions are regulated in Canada. I argue that the new regulations might hinder, more than help with, addressing current concerns related to egg transactions in Canada. The most likely result is that they will not change the current state of affairs.

This article analyzes the corporate citizenship (CC) practices by which multinational corporations (MNCs), which have invaded the public arena, impose new standards, forcing the collectives to retire from democratic spaces. In order to verify whether this new relationship to the law fosters the emergence of a citizenship regime for everyone, the research studies its configurations based on a MNC, hailed as a role model, in a plant in Canada and a mine in Ghana. The results, which reveal a fragile autonomy in one case and a heteronomy in the other, raise the question of effectiveness of the CC torn between economic liberalism and industrial democracy. The article concludes that, under its neoliberal posture, the CC is far from conciliating its workers’ individual aspirations for equality in their difference and their collective tendency towards homogeneity; both principles articulate liberalism and democracy but do not solve the opposition between liberal individualism and collective action, including union actions, in a flexible business in the era of economic globalization.