Buried within the everyday deployment of business vehicles by Indigenous governments as a seemingly neutral way to pursue economic development are also legal notions of corporate personhood and representation. While it is occasionally suggested that corporate law is itself part of the problem of colonialism, the idiomatic notions of “representation,” “legal personhood,” and “business as neutral” form an opaque curtain that hides colonizing tendencies within the legal structures used by Indigenous peoples. This article explores these colonial tendencies at play in Canadian corporate law, showing how corporate law’s deployment of the “legal person” sits at odds with Indigenous juridical orders.

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.

The Ontario Review Board (ORB) makes and reviews dispositions that limit the freedoms of individuals found not criminally responsible (NCR) due to a “mental disorder.” Their dispositions must be responsive to the risk NCR individuals pose to the public. To assess how risk is measured, the authors studied twenty-six publicly accessible court files pertaining to the appeal of ORB dispositions. The authors studied hospital reports, the ORB’s dispositions, and transcripts of ORB hearings found in the court files. In this paper, the authors draw on institutional ethnography and critical legal theories of jurisdiction to analyze how certain citational practices—namely citation of closely related statutes and the ORB’s procedures—participate in structuring the ORB’s analysis of risk. The authors argue that risk becomes legible to participants in the NCR process through the intertextual mediation of these citations, which legitimize and naturalize the NCR individuals’ dependence on forensic institutions.

Cet article s’intéresse aux inégalités numériques qui touchent l’accès aux services publics, et plus précisément à la justice. Au Québec, les plumitifs sont des registres publics qui retracent l’historique judiciaire des justiciables, et ils sont disponibles en ligne. Dans une perspective d’accès à la justice, cet article aborde la tension existante entre les objectifs de la numérisation des services publics et les inégalités d’accès au numérique, en s’intéressant au cas des plumitifs au Québec. Nous retraçons l’évolution des approches en termes d’inégalités numériques en insistant sur la nécessité de dépasser la question de l’accès matériel aux services numériques pour nous intéresser aussi aux inégalités socio-économiques préexistantes. Nous analysons les difficultés d’accès aux plumitifs et l’usage qui en sont fait à la lumière des différentes dimensions de l’accès numérique selon Jan van Dijk (2006) afin d’envisager des pistes de solutions concrètes et efficaces pour améliorer l’accès aux plumitifs et plus largement à la justice.

We examine the use of forced confinement and isolation to limit the spread of COVID-19 in Ontario prisons and jails. Drawing on interview data, we illustrate how a reliance on forced confinement and isolation has exacerbated harms experienced by prisoners in relation to physical, mental, and social health. Through discourse analysis of grey literature, we then discuss the politics and governance of carceral institutions during the pandemic, focusing on how practices of isolation were legitimized during the pandemic, despite recent rulings establishing isolation and segregation as torture. We close by arguing that the case of isolation during the pandemic is one example which highlights the systemic and ongoing nature of rights violations in Canadian prisons and jails. To address these harms, we must shift focus away from reform and towards decarceration.

This article offers the first scholarly analysis of the shift from revolvers to semi-automatic handguns in Canada to contribute to our knowledge of police militarization. In the 1990s, most Canadian police handed in their venerable service revolvers and received modern semi-automatic pistols. Advocates of new weapons pointed to relatively rare but high-profile shootings of police to show the dangers of law enforcement work and the need to have better firearms. The gun industry encouraged the rearming of police through an aggressive marketing campaign emphasizing that modern police forces required more advanced weapons and the military lineage of their products. The transition to semi-automatic handguns sometimes proved controversial, as human rights advocates believed the new handguns could result in excessive use of force. Despite this concern, most police were rearmed by the beginning of the twenty-first century.

This paper rereads the tort of intrusion upon seclusion, as it was adopted by the Ontario Court of Appeal in Jones v Tsige, to include a fuller account of online privacy. It proposes that the Court’s stress on informational privacy forfeits a more dynamic and “spatialized” conception of privacy harm. This paper develops a relational account of spatial privacy using the work of Iris Marion Young, Virginia Woolf, and Jennifer Nedelsky based on three features—embodied habits, narrative, and experimentation—to supplement the informational reading of privacy in Jones. While Jones is not a case about young people, this paper nonetheless takes the Court’s emphasis on digital technology as an invitation to reflect on young people’s privacy. Using different accounts of young people’s online experience, it proposes that while privacy is certainly transformed by the online world, its basic spatial features have not changed as dramatically as the Court in Jones suggests.