Remembering Inninimowin is a two-year-long documentary film project on the personal journey of a Cree woman, Jules Koostachin, a member of Attawapiskat First Nation, as she starts to remember her first language, Inninimowin (Cree).

Although challenges and barriers to researchers' access are common across any number of empirical sites in socio-legal research—as suggested by the very nature of this special issue and the call for papers that generated it—it has been suggested recently that prisons and other institutions of penal confinement provide a particularly troubling case study. For instance, Loïc Wacquant argues that “the ethnography of the prison thus went into eclipse at the very moment when it was most urgently needed on both scientific and political grounds.” Although the causes of the decline as understood by Wacquant transcend problems with access (principally, for Wacquant, a transition from the “maternalist (semi-) welfare state to the paternalist penal state”), access, by all accounts, is an ongoing and significant concern. As Kimberly Jacob Arriola summarizes, “conducting research in correctional settings is extremely difficult. Inmates (and any other institutionalized population for that matter) are considered a special population deserving of additional research protections… Moreover, many correctional administrators may not see research as a priority and not want researchers ‘poking around’ for fear that they may discover something less flattering.”

Of course, one must be careful not to overstate the paucity of research inside penal institutions, especially given that the decline was probably less severe outside the US, and given that the last half dozen or so years have marked somewhat of a renaissance of scholarship on life inside carceral facilities. Also, the partial decline should not be taken as grounds for lionizing those researchers who do gain/have gained access to prisons and jails to carry out socio-legal research.

Though described as the first milestone towards securing Canada’s critical infrastructure (CI), the 2009 National Strategy for Critical Infrastructure is the most recent effort in decades of federal engagement with the problem of how to secure the material elements that underpin state, economy, and society. In this article, we show how a little-known civil defence program initiated after WWII to protect important industrial facilities from military enemies has transformed in the contemporary period into the monitoring of a range of political and social movements as perceived dangers to what is understood today as CI. We view these changes as indicative of transformations in the exercise of police power through which the contemporary colonial-liberal order is enacted.

Protecting research confidentiality is an integral principle of all social sciences and humanities ethics codes. But what if a court were to want access to confidential research information, either in pursuit of civil litigation or a criminal case? In Canada, only Statistics Canada research information enjoys an evidentiary privilege—a court cannot compel its disclosure. All other researchers would have to turn to common law to defend confidential research. The onus would be on them to prove on a case-by-case basis that confidential research information should remain confidential, thereby creating the possibility that a court might order its disclosure. The first part of the article identifies five problems arising from this current state of the law. Statute-based protections of research confidentiality would go a long way toward resolving these problems. But what would these protections look like? Who would administer them? The second half of the article examines statute-based protections of evidentiary privilege, including the Canadian Statistics Act and Canada Evidence Act, and US “confidentiality certificates” (for certain kinds of health research) and “privacy certificates” (for certain kinds of criminological research) with an eye toward formulating criteria that a Canadian research shield law might emulate.

This article uses one case study to explore the use of criminal hate speech provisions against populist politicians. In a high-profile Finnish case, a populist politician was found guilty of hate speech after a four-year criminal process. Though the prosecution was ultimately successful, the various problems with the case helped boost the political popularity of the accused who was turned into a well-known public figure and member of Parliament. The case might thus be seen to warn against tackling populist politicians by means of criminal law. However, further analysis of the political context and a comparison with the Dutch prosecution against anti-immigration politician Geert Wilders complicate this conclusion. This article examines the consequences of hate speech prosecutions of politicians and sheds light on the conditions under which they can achieve (some of) their aims. The case also has lessons for other jurisdictions about when hate speech prosecutions of politicians are likely to be successful in terms of countering prejudice and disempowering those who spread it for electoral purposes.

During the 2015 Maclean’s election debate, Stephen Harper commented, “we have more private member’s legislation that has gone through Parliament under this government than multiple governments before us.” This statement is borne out by empirical evidence: more private member’s bills (PMBs) have become law during Harper’s time in government, compared with most previous parliaments. However, PMBs are subject to less analysis than government bills and do not receive legal scrutiny by the Department of Justice, potentially implicating the protection of rights. Moreover, while one might assume that PMBs concern innocuous local and/or specialized interests, many Harper era PMBs effect substantive legal change to national issues like criminal justice policy. This paper examines the law and order trend in PMBs and addresses the following: why would the PMO under Stephen Harper, noted for its centralized control over all aspects of public policy, permit backbench MPs a role in criminal justice policy, through PMBs?

In R v Gladue, the Supreme Court of Canada famously remarked that the incarceration of Indigenous people represents a “crisis.” Since Gladue’s release, the language of “crisis” has been used with frequency in Canadian legal discourse. In this article, I analyze how this language has shaped the broader legal understanding of Indigenous mass imprisonment. My focus is not on specific iterations or uses, but on the cumulative impact of the language of “crisis” over the last twenty years. I suggest that however well-meaning these representations may be, their cumulative impact is harmful. In the face of the relentless intensification of Indigenous mass imprisonment, the language of “crisis” has operated to subtly entrench the colonial structures it purports to disrupt. Urging a shift away from its use, I argue that the language of “crisis” is not only ill suited to address the problem, but is part of the problem.

This paper is about critical connections that the law obscures in a liberal democratic, colonial context. It is about how law produces and sustains a racial social order by ruling out of order and irrelevant violent histories of Aboriginal dispossession. On November 1st, 1995 the Speaker of Manitoba's Legislative Assembly delivered a ruling that defined the word ‘racist’ as “unparliamentary language.” Thus, by means of parliamentary law a Cree Member of the Opposition was silenced, and ultimately expelled from the House. To explore the underbelly of Canadian ‘universal’ equality, and to underscore the systemic violence inherent in Mr. Oscar Lathlin's legal eviction from the House, I engage in a provincial counter - mapping which firmly reconnects the MLA to some of the racialized spaces he was elected to represent. I illustrate how the law produces racialized zones as well as subjects who are forced to exist outside the protected bounds of ‘equal’ personhood. At the same time, I point to the indispensable role of law in the making of the moral, white subject: a subject who remains unobliged, even in the face of deeply distressing evidence, to know him or herself as both perpetrator and benefactor of contemporary colonial relations of dominance in Canada.

Human rights instruments are but one of many legal advocacy tools used by trans people. Recent legal scholarship emphasizes that human rights laws are not sufficient to address legal challenges facing trans people, particularly intersectional and systemic barriers. This article looks to Canadian trans case law outside of human rights law to reveal the many instances in which trans people’s fight for legal recognition and redress occur outside of the human rights arena. It focuses on trans case law in three areas: family law, the use of name and gender in court, and access to social benefits. Canadian trans jurisprudence illustrates that not only are trans legal strategies outside of human rights plentiful and effective, they are also imperative. An agile and pragmatic approach to trans rights is necessary, particularly when minority rights are under threat, and for trans people on the margins of trans law reforms.

Addressing criticism that bail blurs the line between prevention and punishment, the Supreme Court of Canada unanimously agreed “it is time to ensure that bail provisions are applied consistently and fairly” (R v Antic 2017 SCC 27, [2017] 1 SCR 509). Rather than reform bail, this decision simply reaffirmed the existing legal mandate: using the ladder principle, accused must be released with the fewest conditions necessary to prevent them from absconding, reoffending/interfering with the administration of justice, and/or bringing the criminal justice system into disrepute. We analyze 480 bail hearings in Ontario, Canada, that occurred pre- and post- the R v Antic decision. Our results reveal that justices are more attentive to the ladder principle post-Antic, such that more accused are released on their own recognizance than in the past. While post-Antic trends show a reduction in the use of certain behaviour-modifying conditions, bail supervision programs are used more frequently. We discuss the implications of these findings in light of Canada’s “broken bail system.”

In 75 years of cannabis prohibition in Canada, the latter third have been marked by considerable debate as to the propriety of invoking a criminal response to behaviour that is so prevalent and widely tolerated. The movement for reform of the laws prohibiting simple possession and use of the drug has intensified in recent years. Pragmatic adaptations on the part of Canadian legal institutions, aimed at mitigating the social and personal consequences of enforcing these sanctions, are applied routinely though selectively today. Nonetheless, actual policy reform seems far from inevitable, despite the increasing endorsement of factual evidence and widespread support for decriminalization. Given the legal-political impasse characterizing the cannabis controversy today, this paper examines the grounds on which prohibition may be viably opposed on the basis of respect for human rights. These moral grounds and remaining obstacles to legal reform are developed in view of the key contested arguments in R. v. Clay (1997), a landmark constitutional challenge as to the designation of cannabis as a prohibited substance in Canada.

This article employs recent writings on governmentality to make sense of the ways that labour on the margins of the market and morality are being re-configured in late modernity. By tracing the trajectory of Ottawa strip clubs from 1974 to 2000, the authors demonstrate how the industry and its workers are (re)constituted by shifting discursive contexts, and by economic, legal and social processes. During this time period the restructuring of the labour process from entertainment to service interacted with regulatory strategies including moral contamination arguments, city planning and health management. The authors illustrate how within the normative parameters established by the courts, questions of morality, responsibility and risk get played out. Within this context, and consistent with neo-liberalism, strippers are increasingly constituted as self-regulating moral subjects. On the margins however, her «freedom» is conditioned by a complex web of legal, community, as well as labour discourses and practices.

It is commonly thought that the watershed Supreme Court of Canada cases on Aboriginal rights represent a gradual trend wherein Aboriginal peoples have gained increasing protection under Canadian common law. However, this paper argues the contrary. Despite judicial decisions dealing with Aboriginal rights under section 35(1), the rights of Aboriginal peoples in Canada have not gained greater protection and they certainly have not expanded to encompass the right of self-determination. Instead, it is argued that judges have introduced and applied various legal tests which have ultimately resulted in further impediments to the expansion of broad Aboriginal rights under section 35(1). It is interesting to discover that the level of political and governmental recognition of Aboriginal peoples and their rights, including the right of self-determination, has been greater than at the Supreme Court of Canada. This is despite the destructive treatment of Aboriginal peoples by the Canadian state. On the whole, the Government of Canada has been willing to recognise the inherent right of self-determination as applied to Aboriginal peoples. This is due to the changing legal status of who constitutes “peoples” under international law and the role of the Canadian government as a signatory to various relevant international covenants and declarations, alongside more recent government policy statements and developments in comprehensive land claims and self-government negotiations. Ultimately, it is argued that the Canadian government has tended toward higher levels of support for more extensive rights for Aboriginal peoples than has the judiciary, and most notably, the Supreme Court of Canada.

The author examines the current Canadian approach to the recognition of the rights of Aboriginal peoples. The discussion focuses especially on the conceptual and legal problems at the centre of the Supreme Court's cultural discourse. The Court's approach to culture, “cultural distinctiveness” and “cultural rights” does not concord with current anthropological or historical conceptions of culture. With this approach Aboriginal cultural rights tend to appear “frozen in time”. The Court's cultural ideas are based in part on expert testimony (from the perspective of Aboriginal peoples, amongst others), on human rights and on public opinion, but they also have their own inherent logic. They are essentially oriented toward political questions surrounding the sovereignty of the Crown and the claims of indigenous peoples to self-determination. The cultural discourse of the Court is inseparable from the tension between the liberal politics of equality and the specific rights and claims of distinct peoples.

Whilst the law maintains a right to silence, the sensorial and performative dimensions of that silence are seldom considered. This paper adopts an interdisciplinary approach, informed by legal theory and scholarship in the performing arts, such as theatre, performance studies, and music, as a way of understanding how silence plays in the court. The paper offers a typology to navigate the interpretation of silence in legal performance—both verbal and environmental—and to frame discussion of silence’s impact on the legal audience. The author concludes that silence is used and experienced in a similar way in legal and theatrical performance, namely as a means of attunement. The paper contributes new insights into the existing scholarship on acoustic jurisprudence and invites listening to the gaps in speech, the pauses, the background noise, and the silence in the court.

There is concern among socio-legal scholars about the relationship that has formed between scholarly research and public policy. Pat Carlen contends that in the case of criminology, this relationship sees scholars increasingly struggle to maintain their critical capacity. The problem, according to Carlen, is that scholars trying to increase research output through partnership with policy makers often find this partnership hinges on an agreement that any research produced will conform to the parameters of the policy makers' needs. Furthermore, when scholars do not seek partnership with policy makers, they may face political hurdles in gaining access to institutional data. Scholars may be required to demonstrate the direct policy relevance of their research before policy makers will consider the type and extent of access granted. These kinds of barriers to data access have the potential to adversely impact the critical merit of socio-legal scholarship.

This paper employs my own research as a case study to explore some of the foundations for socio-legal scholars' concerns about the appearance and impact of barriers to institutional data. My research aimed to explore how correctional agencies approach the offender rehabilitation principle of responsivity in relation to Indigenous offenders. Contemporary correctional literature states that to be responsive, correctional agencies must identify variances among offenders that may affect the delivery and reception of programs. Significantly, however, it is unclear what, if anything, correctional agencies should do to accommodate variances once identified. Accordingly, I sought access to correctional agencies to interview staff working in the areas of Indigenous offender rehabilitation policy and service who could elaborate on their agencies' approach to Indigenous offender responsivity. Agencies in four jurisdictions were approached. In seeking access to this institutional data, I encountered two main barriers that impacted the scope and direction of the project in unexpected ways.

Comparatists usually describe mixed legal systems as being built upon dual foundations of Romano-Germanic civil law and Anglo-American common law. This widely accepted description examines mixed systems from a formal internally legal perspective. My paper offers a new yardstick for investigating mixed systems by posing an external perspective for examining the complex interplay between law and culture in a mixed jurisdiction. The case study is the codification of private law in the mixed system of Israel. A civil code does not reflect the inner logic or history of the Israeli legal system, as this system has been mostly shaped along Anglo-Saxon lines which generally discourage the enactment of codes. But seen from a cultural perspective, a civil code is not alien to Israeli society because its perception as a symbol of legal independence and modernization is inherent in the European political culture that most Israelis are familiar with. The story of civil codification in Israel demonstrates that beyond the common-law-civil-law “mixedness” in Israeli law, the Israeli legal system is also mixed in a more profound sense: while the country's law is primarily (though not exclusively) influenced by the Anglo-Saxon tradition, its political culture is mainly inspired by ideas embedded in continental Europe which were imported to Israel by Jewish immigrants.

Many earlier studies of Canadian child custody determinations have been written from ideological and feminist viewpoints. This study attempts to look at this subject from an empirical and sociological stance, within its historical context. Several related issues are considered, including the central issue of sexism, and the effects of legislation and case law on these determinations. Models of how custody cases settled by trial affect those negotiated outside the courtroom are explored. This study analyzes decades of Canadian child custody orders and other evidence to shed light on trends in judicial decision making and their causes.

This paper examines the Chinese Canadian pursuit for head tax compensation through an exploration of the social and political discourses surrounding redress and through the legal case itself, Mack et al. v. The Attorney General of Canada. Although the case never reached the courts, except to determine whether calls for redress had any basis in Canadian law, the juridical reasoning alongside public and state contestations reveal the complex ways in which these claims may be influenced by dominant Canadian national mythologies. My central argument is that the courts, politicians, and the public have read the Chinese Canadian redress campaign through two liberal national-racial myths that circulate within and sustain Canadian discourses of multiculturalism. Throughout, I show how these mythologies – of immigration as “choice” and Chinese Canadians as “model-minorities” – have both influenced and shaped the juridical, political, and social responses to head tax compensation in ways that have diminished Chinese Canadian struggles for justice. In the conclusion, I consider the valuable lessons that we may learn from the Mack case and from the Chinese Canadian redress movement more generally.

Drawing on unpublished material on the history of the Culbertson Tract, records obtained through access to information requests, and firsthand knowledge from the community, we trace Mohawk legal and extralegal strategies aimed at reclaiming the Tract to show how Canada legitimizes and manages the continued dispossession of land from the Mohawks of Tyendinaga. Through the criminalization of community members opposing settlement terms under the land claims policy, we conclude that the policy of extinguishment contained in the land claims policy is furthered by policing resistance with the use of security forces on the ground.