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.

This paper explores attempts made in North America to govern noise and uses the current debates over the impact of wind turbines on human health as a site for examining the politics of noise regulation. I address a number of key questions: First, how has noise been defined and how have these definitions changed over time? Second, how have we tried to control noise and on what grounds have we done this? Lastly, how have our responses to noise been shaped by who is making the noise and who is being disturbed? I argue that our understandings of noise and how we regulate it cannot be disentangled from the broader social, political, cultural, and technological contexts in which these discussions take place. Ultimately, the debates about noise regulation have as much to do with who is making the noise and who is being disturbed as the noise, itself.

This paper closely studies Scotland v Canada to reveal the normative and substantive justice challenges facing immigration detainees across Canada. The Scotland decision at the Ontario Superior Court certified a habeas corpus writ as an individual remedy to release Mr. Ricardo Scotland from a pointless, seventeen-month incarceration. The decision frames Mr. Scotland’s detention as anomalous or divergent from an otherwise-functioning system. Against this view, this paper argues that access to habeas corpus cannot remedy the detention system’s scale of injustices. The paper contextualizes Mr. Scotland’s incarceration and the Superior Court decision against two primary claims: first, that the Canadian immigration and refugee determination system is arbitrarily biased against certain minoritized individuals, therefore transforming some people into detainable bodies; and second, that the global criminalization of migration trend has nested an arc of penal practices into Canadian policymaking and law, and this arc has seemingly normalized indefinite detention for some migrants. The paper concludes that restoration of access to habeas corpus cannot be understood as a substantive remedy to address the miscarriages of justice in the Canadian detention system.

Cette étude examine les approches réglementaires de dix pays : la France, le Danemark, l’Australie, le Canada, les États-Unis, la Russie, le Japon, le Brésil, la Chine et l’Inde, relativement à la réglementation des antimicrobiens aux trois points d’entrée principaux dans le processus agricole, soit dans le cadre de la médecine vétérinaire, de la production agricole et de la vente des produits agricoles. Pour être efficace, la réglementation doit tenir compte du contexte dans lequel elle s’inscrit. Cette étude tente donc de tirer des leçons des dix juridictions ci-haut à la lumière des réalités qui entourent l’utilisation d’antimicrobiens dans les processus agricoles.

The sense of smell seems to have resisted the kind of objective measurement process that might have facilitated settling competing claims about offensive smells by applying a general rule or standard. As a result, authorities, including courts,cannot avoid making subjective judgements of taste. A nuisance lawsuit out of Ontario regarding a mushroom farm, or rather its smells, is used here as one source of material about the difficulties of adjudication in this subfield of the “law of the senses.” Attention is also paid to a curious quasi-judicial entity, Ontario’s Normal Farm Practices Protection Board, charged with resolving, mainly through mediation, disputes about farm smells between farmers and non-farming neighbours. Overall, the article shows that the ex post facto, situated and complaint-driven logic of nuisance that nineteenth-century law used to govern offensive noises as well as nasty smells, and which left plenty of room for subjective judgements of taste, keeps reappearing in the present day. Nasty smells seem particularly impervious to modernization, that is to being managed through objective measurement and preventive regulation.

This article examines the persistence of the handshake in business circles despite its implication in the spread of communicable disease in contemporary pandemic culture. An examination of business etiquette discourse suggests that even during disease outbreaks or flu season, the business handshake remains an important visual and haptic legal gesture. While it may no longer produce a binding legal contract, it stages the parties as contractable subjects, as claiming the status of autonomous individuals committed to defining their intersubjective relationship through the norms of contract. The business handshake thus operates as a cultural site for the complex interaction of bodies and law, and the production of masculine, haptic-legal subjectivity.

Le tournant sensoriel en droit nous invite à vivre différemment le droit en reconnaissant la centralité de tous nos sens dans l’étude et la pratique d’une vocation qui nous appelle à la quête de sens. Il vise à renverser l’anesthésie générale qui afflige les études en droit, et en droit et société : la juridicité elle-même, c’est-à-dire l’essence du droit – les sens du droit – est une question sensorielle et sensuelle.