In Canada, there are persistent allegations and some empirical evidence suggesting racialized police bias; certain (non-White) groups appear to face over-enforcement as criminal suspects and under-enforcement as victims. Yet, it is challenging to prove or disprove these claims. Unlike other countries, where governments routinely publish police-reported crime and criminal court data identifying the race/ethnicity of criminal suspects and victims, Canada maintains a ban on the publication of such data. In this article, using an intersectional and critical analysis, we examine 127 prosecuted (predominantly domestic sex) trafficking cases and explore related claims of racial and gender bias together with sensationalism in the enforcement of Canadian anti-trafficking in persons laws. Our findings align with other empirical research observing the racially selective identification and prosecution of sex trafficking cases through a heteronormative and gender binary lens. Whether real or perceived, racial—alongside gender, sexuality, economic, citizenship, and occupational—bias has significant adverse consequences for the equality, liberty, security, mobility, labour, and access to justice rights of the Indigenous, Black, Arab/Muslim and other racialized communities being policed. Our data reveal a clear and pressing need to publish race-disaggregated crime and criminal court data and to challenge deeply ingrained stereotypes using various means.

The debate over the collection of justice statistics by race continues to hinge on the same key issues that were central to the debate when it arose in the early 1990s. There has been one major change, however: whereas racial minority groups were once vehemently opposed to the collection of justice statistics by race, for fear that such statistics would be used to justify discriminatory policies, many minority groups are now advocating for the collection and publication of this data as a means to redress racial discrimination in the administration of justice. Having discussed the lack of available data on racial and ethnic statistics in the Canadian justice system, the authors sought support from the Canadian Law and Society Association (CLSA). At the 2009 annual general meeting of the CLSA, a motion for the association to take an official position in support of the collection of justice statistics by race was put forth by the authors and accepted by the association. At this time it was also decided that a committee would be established to conduct relevant research and to lobby for the collection of pertinent data. At present we are asking interested individuals or organizations who fall into one or more of the following categories to contact the first author:

(1) Those with arguments relating to the collection of justice statistics by race that have not been articulated in the debate that has taken place over the past two decades.

(2) Those with information pertaining to the collection of justice statistics by race that is not readily available or that has not been documented in the academic work referenced herein.

(3) Those who are interested in participating in the work of the committee outlined at the end of this paper.

This article is based on fieldwork conducted in Montreal and Ottawa, between 2005 and 2009, with homeless persons in the criminal justice system and actors working at various levels in the criminalization and prosecution process. It analyses the strategies of control applied to homeless persons and their experiences in the judicial system in relation to criminal offences associated with their use of public spaces. The authors suggest that the issue of the visibility or invisibility of homeless persons is central to the tensions that characterize their dealings with the criminal justice system: although their visibility in public spaces contributes to their identification and profiling based on social characteristics, invisibility leads to violations of their fundamental rights and is a barrier to access to justice when they become involved with the justice system.

Refugee law posits the refugee as a rights-bearing subject prior to legal recognition. The determination procedures from which legal protection may be availed to a person escaping persecution demand that the applicant be recognizable as a subject entitled to law’s power to name her as a refugee. In this article, I draw on speech act theory to investigate the rhetorical structure of refugee recognition. Viewed as a performative speech act, refugee subjectivity emerges as a result of repetition and citation of tropes of “refugee-ness,” which function to legitimate and naturalize certain representations as evidence of the grounds for protection. This places applicants in a paradoxical position: they must attempt to deliver their evidence as a performance of refugee-ness, but in making the narrative recognizable and understandable according to the norms of the legal process, the singularity, and possibly the authenticity, of the account may be lost. The argument is supported by empirical research conducted at the Australian Refugee Review Tribunal.

This paper examines the growth in numbers of lawyers in Canada and British Columbia, and the attrition rates of members from the Law Society of British Columbia. It then reports on the results of a survey of former members of the Law Society of British Columbia which examines the reasons why these former members did not renew their memberships in the Law Society, their perceptions of gender bias in the legal profession in British Columbia, their suggestions for improving the legal profession, and some of the implications of such recommendations.

The author seeks to make sense of the political and ethical cleavages associated with inner city gentrification in Vancouver, by an examination of the differing perspectives on real property deployed by the opposing constituencies. He identifies a marked division between dominant and community-based readings of property as an economic, political and legal category, associated with opposed visions of space, place and history. Conclusions are drawn relating to the significance of a geographically informed theorisation of decentred legalities, and the complex politics of power, resistance and domination.

Contemporary Marxist theorizing on law has produced a number of different ways of conceptualizing the class character of law within a capitalist society. The main focus of these approaches has largely been on the role of law in maintaining and reproducing an unequal, exploitative system. As a consequence, the issue, even the possibility of using law as a mechanism for securing substantial social change has been downplayed and, in some cases, precluded.

The purpose of this paper is to argue for a rethinking of law, especially in terms of its potential as an agent for social transformation. The discussion will be divided into two main sections. The first involves theoretical considerations. Problems encountered with existing approaches to law vis-à-vis their implications for change will be examined and the direction in which a theoretical reformulation might proceed will be outlined. The second involves practical considerations. Here the focus will be on the kinds of legal strategies and particular forms and conditions of law that could be extended or developed in order to move in the direction of a socialist society.

This paper offers a sociological interpretation of the Canadian Comprehensive Land Claims (CLC) process, arguing that CLC is a strategy used by the state to dispossess Aboriginal peoples. CLC does this through leveraging the cession of Aboriginal rights and the relinquishing of indigenous lands. Drawing upon the ongoing Innu Nation Tshash Petapen (‘New Dawn’) agreement, I examine four related aspects of the process and the agreement which operate to dispossess the Innu: (1) the undemocratic social and political contexts in which agreement is elicited, (2) the depletion of Aboriginal rights of the indigenous party, (3) the depletion of indigenous lands, and (4) the creation of wealth and debt. Finally, I will interpret these processes as building on social changes inflicted on the Innu. These are characterized by imposed law and the state of exception.

In this article I explore judicial interpretations of the relationship between digital technology and non-consensual intimate image distribution (NCIID) (i.e., “revenge porn”). Drawing on my analysis of forty-nine Canadian cases of NCIID, I show that judicial interpretations of digital technology have important influences on how NCIID is understood and responded to in the law. I find that the majority of judges perceive digital technology as making NCIID easier to commit—with the simple “click of a mouse”—and as increasing the amount of harm caused by this act—as digital nude/sexual photos are seen as lasting “forever” and thus as resulting in ongoing and immeasurable harm to victims. These perceptions have substantive impacts on legal rationales and sentencing decisions, with the affordances of digital technology regularly being treated as justifying harsher sentences to denounce and deter this act.

The central argument of this article is that within the discourse around the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), many scholars have insufficiently applied the concept of an indigenous African worldview in their analysis of the TRC’s work, leading them at times to describe the process as coerced, contradictory, and politically manipulated. Using the different stages of my research as well as the different texts that “lit up” every phase, I argue that through a focus on language and translation, the pervasiveness of a particular worldview of interconnectedness can be traced that enabled the commission to execute its mandate creatively and without incidences of revenge. The acknowledgement of an indigenous interconnectedness has wide implications for the concept of transitional justice as it rejuvenates the main concepts of healing, amnesty, and reconciliation. As a journalist who reported on the daily activities of the commission, I move in this piece between the different epistemic communities of journalism, writing, and academia in order to understand the way in which language and its underlying epistemology provides an important access route to understanding the workings of the TRC and the testimonies provided by witnesses.

Labour and environmental law operate in silos. This is equally true in the transnational sphere, despite the 2011 endorsement of UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. Labour rights as human rights appear easier to grasp than environmental human rights, and the UNGPs specifically highlight the work of the ILO. Due to egregious events such as the Bangladesh Rana Plaza factory collapse, transnational governance regimes have emerged to better ensure building safety and respect for labour rights. Yet the process of production of “fast fashion” is not only a problem for workers whose health and safety are put at risk, but also for children and families who live in the vicinity of polluting factories and experience “slow death” as a result of contaminated air and water. This paper will explore how a reconceptualization of the worker as a relational being and corporeal citizen might bridge the silos.

Given the recent penetration of the judicial profession by women, and concomitant speculation about the possible impact of women judges upon judicial decision-making, the authors examine criminal appeals to the Alberta Court of Appeal between 1985 and 1992 to address in general statistical terms the parameters of the participation of women judges. The results suggest that there is little statistically identifiable difference in the performance of men and women judges, even on specific issues such as sexual assault offenses, and what modest differences can be found are in the opposite direction from those suggested by comparable research in the United States

In this article, I argue that precarious migration status can be used as an organizing concept for an analysis of (im)migration law in Canada. After situating the regulation of precarious migrants in the historical context of the liberal/neo-liberal shift of the 1970s, I argue that the increase in migrant precariousness over the past few years is likely to increase as a result of recent legislative changes in both refugee and migrant-worker law. Finally, I offer a critique of the traditional liberal argument for migrant rights, inviting an alternative approach to establish migrant rights on the basis of economic participation.

In this article, the author examines the problem of representing SM practice and practitioners. In particular the author is critical of the tendency to dismiss SM practitioners' self-representations as inadequate accounts because they are either symptomatic of their perversion or are simply indicators of practioners' internalization of patriarchal values and ideology, suggesting that an adequate analysis of SM can only be rendered by nonpractitioners. In conjunction with an analysis of a British House of Lords decision which upheld the convictions of SM practitioners for assault (R. v. Brown), and several feminist critiques of SM practice, the author attempts to demonstrate that nonpractitioners' representations of SM are themselves inadequate accounts insofar as they generally rely on the deployment of cultural stereotypes of “the sadomasochist,” or reflect cultural biases against ritual practices which involve the use of violence and pain. Proposing these as impediments to “seeing SM differently,” the author constructs a conflicting vision of the aims and form of SM practice and relations.

Decisions about taxation and government spending have great political significance: they affect the distribution of income and wealth and the nature and degree of class, gender and other social inequalities. However, tax and budgetary issues are frequently constructed as technical matters that can be resolved rationally according to economic, mathematical or other ostensibly neutral principles. The author examines the debate around budget deficits and recent sex equality challenges to the income tax system, and argues that both illustrate how technical discourses tend to deny the normative content of fiscal law and policy and to disqualify political opposition to the prevailing fiscal order as irrational, ideological and inexpert. The paper concludes by examining the discursive strategies of feminists and others interested in fiscal change. The author considers how feminists might respond to, and even harness, the power of technical knowledges in struggling for tax and expenditure reforms while also challenging the oppressive features and depoliticizing tendencies of such discourses.

This paper chronicles the role of British Columbian provincial authorities and medical practitioners in engineering the deportation of psychiatrically disordered and cognitively disabled immigrants out of the province between Confederation and 1939. Approximately 750 mental patients were removed from BC during the 1920s and 1930s alone, and more than 5000 had been deported from the country as a whole by the outbreak of World War II. With the use of provincial and federal government records and correspondence, institutional documents, print media clippings and patient files, I probe the professional practices and discourses that fuelled this movement to banish asylum inmates. Across these seven decades, medical authorities, in alliance with bureaucrats and various anti-immigration forces, succeeded in assembling a powerful and efficient system for screening out and expelling those new Canadians who ostensibly failed to meet the mental standards for Canadian citizenship. Bolstered by theories of eugenics and race betterment, and drawing on public fears about the unregulated influx of aliens and the associated scourge of madness, officials turned to deportation as an expedient means for ridding hospitals of their least desirable denizens. I argue more generally that the deportation of ‘insane’ and other ‘unfit’ immigrants was nourished by the flood ofnativist, rac(ial)ist, exclusionist, eugenist, and mental hygienist thinking that dominated British Columbian and Canadian political and public culture throughout this ‘golden age’ of deportation.

Indigenous scholars and leaders have long been interested in reducing the role of the Canadian state in their political, economic, and social lives. This paper explores the extent to which digital currencies, such as Bitcoin or MazaCoin, might be used to facilitate Indigenous self-determination, political autonomy, and economic prosperity. Based on our review of the literature, we argue that cryptocurrencies demonstrate some potential for advancing these goals but that there are a number of potential roadblocks as well. Future research should investigate how Indigenous communities might use digital currencies and other related technologies to further their political, economic, and social goals.

Women who are released from prison continue to face challenges stemming from their imprisonment. This article discusses the ways in which the prison and, by extension, the state follow women out of prison into their communities. While the state attempts to ensure “successful reintegration” for ex-prisoners, its policies, which reflect a neoliberal agenda of individual responsibilization, may in fact hinder women's chances of integrating into their communities. The article explores women's experiences of (re)integration through the voices of female ex-prisoners who served long prison terms, their families, and their advocates. The control experienced in prison echoes in women's lives on the outside: they experience dislocation, marginalization, and a need to (re)negotiate their lives. While women may physically leave the prison, the experience remains imprinted on their minds and bodies as the state continues to govern them from a distance, both through the after-effects of imprisonment and through continued surveillance.

Building on a cultural studies framework, this article addresses the implementation of the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement by cataloguing specific reconciliatory events, public forums, and media coverage that occurred in 2010. Revealing the contradictory nature of Canada's reconciliation project, the author situates the IRSSA within a larger infrastructure of policies and procedures that have limited Indigenous nationhood and autonomy in the Canadian settler society. Specifically, this article identifies a need to trouble categories of trauma and victimhood that may engender outcomes of cure, which ultimately constitute a foreclosure on the past in Canada's reconciliation process. While therapeutic language is less apparent in the IRSSA, the author suggests, it is still deployed under the guise of closure and “settlement.”