Condominium is an architecture of land ownership that produces separate, privately owned units within multi-unit developments. Condominium also constructs a form of private, democratic government, described as a fourth order of government, that acts beneath federal and provincial governments, and alongside municipal government, to govern owners and their property. This article considers a conflict between residential-unit owners and a commercial-unit owner within a condominium development in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Drawing from material produced in litigation, the article situates the dispute within its property and urban contexts to argue that condominium government requires attention, and not just for its impact on owners, or even residents within, but also because cities must now account for, work alongside, and, in some circumstances, contend with these rapidly proliferating sites of government that are helping to shape who has the right to live in the city.

In 1975, the Bourassa government received legal advice that the James Bay Northern Quebec Agreement exceeded provincial jurisdiction. Legal counsel advised the constitutionality of the Agreement be secured through formal constitutional amendment. No such amendment was sought. Based on authorized access to Premier Bourassa’s archived dossier on the Agreement’s negotiation, this article sets out the following: 1) why the provincial government sought to encroach on federal jurisdiction; 2) the strategic means employed to insulate the Agreement from s. 91(24) litigation; and 3) provincial negotiators’ views on how judges would approach the Agreement going forward. This article confirms theoretical expectations about when governments might coordinate to transgress federalism’s division of powers: a high probability that courts would find a transgression occurred, and a high political cost should governments not coordinate on a transgression strategy.

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.

Cet article analyse un jugement de la Cour suprême du Canada rendu en 2017, en le comparant à un cas semblable survenu en 2002 en Nouvelle-Zélande. La première cause visait à accorder une protection juridique à « l’esprit de l’ours Grizzly » habitant un mont de Colombie-Britannique sur lequel des promoteurs voulaient construire une station de ski et la seconde visait à protéger une créature spirituelle vivant dans les eaux du ruisseau. Dans les deux cas, la question posée aux juges revient à statuer sur l’existence de créatures métaphysiques, et donc à trancher un conflit ontologique. Les juges canadiens et néo-zélandais vont refuser d’étendre le domaine d’application du droit à la protection des objets de ces croyances. Leur conclusion peut se comprendre à la lumière du fait que le mode d’argumentation juridique, de par sa nature rationaliste et naturaliste, n’est pas en mesure de penser les entités métaphysiques à partir du cadre conceptuel que lui a légué la révolution scientifique du XVIIe siècle.

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.

In the past decade there has been a distinct increase in literature on Indigenous laws. Calls to teach about Indigenous laws in postsecondary institutions in Canada have also intensified. This growth and these calls are significant, yet as with all fields of inquiry and teaching, there are also gaps. Gender continues to be under-addressed in work on Indigenous legal education. Drawing on interviews with twenty-three professors who teach about Indigenous law at postsecondary institutions in Canada, I examine the challenges in gendering Indigenous legal education. The professors all expressed that it is important to engage with gender when teaching, but the majority were experiencing significant challenges in actually doing so in practice. It is essential to understand how these challenges are entangled with gendered power dynamics and broader structural barriers, as they will continue to limit Indigenous legal education if not directly deconstructed and changed. Overall, the interviews signal the need for increased institutional support and change, more educational resources, eliminating discrimination, and ongoing discussion about gender and Indigenous law.

En se basant sur les travaux de Sally Engle Merry, cet article étudie le parcours du droit au consentement préalable, libre et éclairé des peuples autochtones en droit interaméricain, et met en lumière les dynamiques de glissement, d’effacement et de confusion qui opèrent entre cette norme et le droit à la consultation active. En prenant en considération le contexte d’intervention des instances interaméricaines, l’article met en lumière la vulnérabilité des juges interaméricains dans leur rôle de « traducteurs » et identifie des pistes de réflexion quant aux répercussions de ces glissements discursifs sur les relations entre les peuples autochtones et les États.

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.

Dans cet article, nous empruntons le vocabulaire des études cinématographiques pour visualiser le droit tel qu’il est utilisé, interprété et construit du point de vue des personnes en situation d’itinérance. Nous avançons que les modalités du droit s’expriment différemment dans les lois élaborées pour règlementer les personnes en situation d’itinérance. Les techniques cinélégales que nous proposons sont au fond des métaphores qui permettent de mieux nuancer les représentations sceptiques et instrumentalistes du droit. Ces façons d’éprouver la réglementation des personnes itinérantes peuvent également favoriser l’incarnation de la perception des interactions urbaines entre les personnes en situation d’itinérance et leurs interlocuteurs.

The 1983 case Racine v Woods is the leading child protection case from the Supreme Court of Canada, distinguishing bonding and/or attachment as a more important determinant of best interest for an Indigenous child than cultural connection. Using this case, courts are upholding the permanent placement of Indigenous children in non-Indigenous homes as opposed to placement within their culture. Racine v Woods reflected knowledge of attachment and family at that time but runs counter to current knowledge. Reconsideration of the factors to decide cross-cultural adoption is needed. The essential point is that attachment assessment draws from a dyadic relational theory and is being applied to communal family systems, such as Indigenous systems. Such a review is consistent with the calls to action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as well as its predecessor, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP), and recent Canadian Human Rights Tribunal (CHRT) decisions.

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.

Sensory trademarks present a compelling case in which to explore the senses as “containers of possibility,” and this article explores the emergence and logic of sensory trademarks from a legal and marketers’ perspective. Using sensory trademark cases from the United States, I suggest that the current socio-legal environment opens a conversation about what I would call sensory capitalism—the monetization of the senses rather than the propertization of the senses—that requires intellectual property law to properly function. I argue that the sensory model espoused by the trademarking of the senses is one of the mass sensorium, whereby the “audience” universally recognizes marks as designating a particular source or origin of goods. The mass sensorium offers something quite novel, however, because embedded in it is the (corporate) promise of a lingua franca that valorizes all of the senses and generates a type of mediated affect that is shared.

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.

Air strikes are the signature modality of violence used by NATO militaries. When civilian victims of NATO air strikes have turned to courts in NATO countries, they have generally not been successful. What are the legal techniques and legal knowledges deployed in Western courts that render Western aerial violence legal or extralegal? The article analyzes the responses by European courts to two sets of NATO bombings: the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia and a September 2009 air strike near Kunduz, Afghanistan. The judgments rely on two forms of “legal technicalities”: the drawing of jurisdictional boundaries that exclude the airspace taken up by the bombers and the ground on which victims stood when they were killed as well as particular visual regimes that facilitate not seeing people on the ground as civilians.

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.

Wagnerism has been at the centre of Canadian labour relations since the end of World War II. Wagnerism rests on a so-called balance between workers and employers. Between 2007 and 2015, the Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that the constitution includes protections for good faith collective bargaining and to strike. In these cases, the Court stated that it is not constitutionally enshrining Wagnerism, yet it also leaned heavily on Wagner principles in arriving at its decisions. Building on interviews with national union leaders, I argue that the ambiguity between the Court’s decisions and Wagnerism has left workers uncertain about how these rights alter the material conditions of unions. I conclude that the court’s embrace of labour freedoms will only have material benefit if workers are willing to use these newfound freedoms to build working class capacities to directly confront ongoing attacks by governments and employers on core union freedoms.

This paper traces the sensory dimensions of nuclear imperialism focusing on the Cold War nuclear weapons tests conducted by the United States military in the Marshall Islands during the 1950s. Key to the formation of the “nuclear sensorium” were the interfaces between vibration, sound, and radioactive contamination, which were mobilized by scientists such as oceanographer Walter Munk as part of the US Nuclear Testing Program. While scientists occupied privileged points in technoscientific networks to sense the effects of nuclear weapons, a series of lawsuits filed by communities affected by the tests drew attention to military-scientific use of inhabitants’ bodies as repositories of data concerning the ecological impact of the bomb and the manner in which sensing practices used to extract this data extended the violence and trauma of nuclear weapons. Nuclear imperialism projected its power not only through weapons tests, the vaporization of land and the erosion of the rights of people who lived there, but also through the production of a “nuclear sensorium”—the differentiation of modes of sensing the bomb through legal, military, and scientific discourses and the attribution of varying degrees of epistemological value and legal weight to these sensory modes.

Cette étude s’intéresse au discours des juges du Tribunal administratif du travail du Québec en matière de harcèlement sexuel à partir d’un échantillon de 12 décisions rendues entre 2014 et 2017. Dans la moitié des décisions analysées, les motifs du juge reposent sur une logique binaire. Des binômes (femmes/hommes; subjectivité/objectivité; émotionnalité/rationalité, etc.) se glissent dans l’appréciation de la preuve, perpétuant des mythes qui banalisent le harcèlement sexuel. Une logique binaire est généralement associée au rejet de la réclamation. En revanche, dans l’autre moitié des décisions, les motifs du juge prennent en compte le contexte ainsi que la complexité du harcèlement sexuel. Nos résultats illustrent comment le discours des juges sert soit à perpétuer, soit à remettre en question les stéréotypes négatifs relatifs au harcèlement sexuel des femmes au travail, et ce, dans un cadre juridique identique.