This paper outlines the work feminists have done to debunk the effects of the power of the “male gaze”, first upon the construction of their sexual identity and second on the repercussions of the male definition of their women's selves on their treatment in the courts of law. The reader is exposed to two very different feminist perspectives on sexuality and law; one—the radical materialist position, better known than the other—the postmodern and deconstructivist. The author positions herself within the second orientation. She demonstrates the mythical and mystifying character of the male power and ends the second part, on feminism and the law, on a suggestion that has to do with the practice of ethical asymetry but always accompanied by phenomenological symetry in the treament of “others” and “different ones” in the justice system.

Aboriginal perspectives are often not viewed as persuasive or reasonable in contemporary political and legal discourses, and Aboriginal people are compelled to articulate their claims in the normative vocabulary of the majority. Many see this as an injustice. Part I of this essay argues that some incarnations of the idea of public justifiability, a cornerstone of political theory, provide a normative justification for that injustice. Part II argues that the idea is at work in the Canadian courts, even as judges attempt to create space for Aboriginal views. The ambivalent stance of the courts is explored through a case study.

This paper outlines and critically assesses some of the principal attempts to explain state law making in Canada in terms of its constitution as an advanced capitalist democracy. While generally retaining a conception of relative autonomy of the state, stress is laid on the fact that this can be no more than an heuristic approach. Because it cannot be known in advance whether specific conditions represent an authentic threat to capital reproduction and because interpretation of such conditions is a necessary part of the mobilisation of resistance to such conditions, the so-called limits to autonomy represent no more than a shorthand for politically invoked strategies of opposition by agents of capital. Moreover, focus on relative autonomy and the concept of limits focuses attention on the externalities of state agencies and constitutes these as distinct from the processes relativising state autonomy. The paper therefore works toward a conceptualisation of discursive and non-discursive practices which tend to generate capitalistic-reproductive actions by state agencies.

In the mid-nineteenth century, a time when the liberal political order established itself once and for all in Canada, the question of the maintenance of public order took on special importance. The determination of democratic legitimacy required, in effect, a redefinition of the limits within which civil liberties could be expressed. At what point does freedom of speech become a call to revolt? How far can freedom of assembly go without taking the form of riot or rebellion? When does freedom of association transmute into conspiracy against the State? It was to these questions that the first Reform Cabinet adressed itself above all when, in 1843, at Baldwin's instance, it introduced three bills concerning public gatherings, processions, and secret societies. This article analyses the conditions under which these bills were introduced and debated, examines their tenor, and attempts to evaluate their implications for the nascent political order.

Many Canadian Muslim couples are hesitant to resort to civil legal processes and attempt to resolve their disputes within the religious community. Islamic law’s exclusion of non-Muslim judges from holding judicial authority in certain family law matters limits the feasibility of aligning religious commands with family court orders. By extrapolating contemporary legal opinions (fatāwā, sing. fatwā) issued by institutions and narrating experiences of Canadian imams, this article documents the views of both researchers and practitioners, finding that neither holds secular court-ordered divorces contested by the husband to suffice as a form of Islamic marriage dissolution. This article concludes that both Canadian imams and fatwā-issuing bodies call for the development of extra-judicial entities that apply Islamic law’s Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) procedures in a manner recognized by secular authorities.

This article focuses on the underlying sensorial entanglements that linger in spaces and moments of encounter between state violence and its targets. It argues that in Guantánamo Bay, these entanglements become routed through the bodies of the camp’s detainees, and they rely upon a particular reading of religion as being borne by bodies in such ways as to necessitate the use of specific techniques of detention and incapacitation. This discussion is framed using the notion of “apprehension,” in its affective and material forms, wherein perception, dread, and physical encounters in the camp unfold within a framing of Muslims as ontologically and materially distinct, and as being embodied in particular ways. In these processes of apprehension, the techniques and logics of violence deployed in the war on terror become further legitimated, and work reflexively to shape the ways in which the Muslim is known, encountered, and met with violence.

Recent proposals to reform the Young Offenders Act have sought to address the difficult question of the proper response to youth who commit especially serious offences. This article evaluates these proposals from the perspective or recent developments in US juvenile justice policy that have also been designed to meet serious and chronic youth criminality. The article suggests that a series of US state legislative reforms, in which individual responsibility and system accountability replace rehabilitation as the dominant objective of juvenile justice policy, offers a comprehensive, if imperfect, model for reform.

This paper explores various dimensions of the professorial office as a “legal” space. The office of a professor is, in one dimension, just a generic geometric place without a purpose or occupant that embodies potential in purely formal terms. But it is also a site, in that its very location, size and organization reflect functionality—the values, process and decision-making institutions by which occupancy is determined. In addition, the office embraces a stage and role through which occupants interact with colleagues, students and strangers in ways that confirm or disconfirm relationships of power and subordination. At the same time, the professorial office has a performative dimension, through which the normativity of a community—of professors, staff and students—is imagined and acted upon. Still again, in yet another dimension, it is a ritual space where professors work, relax, reflect, and reflexively contemplate patterns and forms of thoughts. Such an office exists wherever its occupants choose to place it. Finally, the office is a non-place of personal discovery—an intimation of space that has no location apart from the relationships that it creates and by which it is created.

Through the journey of one symbolic legal institution—mahr (a form of dowry)—the article follows the ways in which Islamic marriage has travelled to Canada, the United States, France, and Germany, offering a panoply of conflicting images, contradictions, and distributive endowments in transit from Islamic family law to Western adjudication. The author emphasizes the importance of ensuring that distributive consequences, rather than recognition, occupy a central place in the assessment of the legal options available to Muslim women in Western courts. This article represents an important methodological contribution to the debates over the role of identity politics and the (im)possibility of legal transplants in comparative law. The author's argument is that mahr cannot travel to Western liberal courts without carrying with it a very complex interaction among several parties whose interests are often opposed as to its recognition. A legal realist and distributive analysis of Islamic marriage is crucial, she argues, because mahr is often used by the parties as a tool of relative bargaining power in negotiating contractual obligations related to the family. Moreover, Islamic law travels with a multiplicity of voices, and it is this complex hybridity that will be mediated through Western law upon adjudication.

The doctrine of judicial notice has been gaining attention in Canadian jurisprudence. This article begins with an examination of how the doctrine has been recently used in areas such as family law to bring a diversity of community interests into the legal decision-making process. The history of the doctrine in American and Canadian jurisprudence is reviewed along with its principal characterizations in the works of Thayer, Morgan, and Davis. The article goes on to uncover several epistemological problems to which the doctrine is prone and proposes a means of getting out of these philosophical dilemmas while keeping the integrity of the doctrine intact. The article concludes by alluding to the communitarian uses to which the doctrine might be put.

This article examines the phenomenon of interface governance. It uses two interface technologies—Universal Credit’s digital account (United Kingdom) and ArriveCAN (Canada)—to explore how interfaces and their predictable glitches govern relations between state officials and members of the public. Drawing on tools of government literature, it argues that interfaces do not achieve their stated goals evenly (improved efficiency, digital literacy). Instead, they generate several unintended effects, including heightened bureaucratic intensity, diffused responsibility, and even eroded public trust in state agencies. It urges socio-legal and administrative justice scholars to take interfaces seriously and calls on scholars to adopt socio-legal-technical methods to better conceptualize the effects of infrastructure governance and to imagine other possibilities for public administration.

Access to information and freedom of information (ATI/FOI) requests are an increasingly utilized means of generating data in the social sciences. An impressive multi-disciplinary and international literature has emerged which mobilizes ATI/FOI requests in research on policing, national security, and imprisonment. Absent from this growing literature is work which deploys ATI/FOI requests in research on higher education institutions (HEIs). In this article I examine the use of ATI/FOI requests as a methodological tool for producing data on HEIs. I highlight the data-generating opportunities that this tool offers higher education researchers and provide a first-hand account of how ATI/FOI requests can be mobilized in higher education research. I argue that despite the value of ATI/FOI requests for producing data on academic institutions, the information management practices of HEIs limit the effectiveness of ATI/FOI in ways that I detail drawing on my experience using information requests to scrutinize the quality assurance of undergraduate degree programs in Ontario. I suggest that in an age of rankings and league tables HEIs are likely to prioritize the protection of their reputation over the right of access. In conclusion I consider the implications of the article’s findings for higher education researchers and ATI/FOI users.

Following Japan’s 1941 attacks on Hawai’i and Hong Kong, Canada relocated, detained, and exiled citizens and residents of Japanese ancestry. Many interracial families, however, were exempted from this racial project called the internment. The form of the exemption was an administrative permit granted to its holder on the basis of their marital or patrilineal proximity to whiteness. This article analyzes these permits relying on archival research and applying a critical race feminist lens to explore how law was constitutive of race at this moment in Canadian history. I argue that the permits recategorized interracial intimacies towards two racial ends: to differentiate the citizen from the “enemy alien”; and to regulate the interracial family according to patriarchal common law principles. This article nuances received narratives of law as an instrument of racial exclusion by documenting the way in which a new inclusive state measure sustained old exclusions.

This article interweaves the personal and archival by exploring the intersection of official Australian records on the fall of Saigon and government handling of Vietnamese refugees in 1975 with my family history. As transitional justice addresses the legacies of human rights violations including the displacement and resettlement of refugees in post-conflict contexts, Australian responses to the Vietnamese refugee crisis of 1975 provide a relevant case study. Drawing on a wide range of archival documentation at the National Archives of Australia and the National Library of Australia, including policy papers, Senate findings, confidential cables, ministerial submissions, private correspondence and photographs, I trace the effect of government decisions on Vietnamese refugees seeking asylum. In the process I reveal actions by senior bureaucrats and in particular by then Prime Minister Gough Whitlam that are largely unknown. Combining archival research with personal history enables me to not only shed light on past actions of governance and uncover past injustice but also explore the enduring impact of government decision-making on individual lives.

This paper argues that patterns of pervasive police violence can and should be treated as organizational crime in Canada. It uses the documented events of police violence in Val d’Or, Quebec, that emerged in 2015 to show how a similar fact pattern might fit all of the elements of organizational crime as defined in the Criminal Code. The article also suggests that this is an example where legal imagination is important, in order to shift our collective understanding of what organizational crime is and where it occurs.