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.

This Article discusses Emilios Christodoulidis’s The Redress of Law as a major contribution to contemporary critical constitutional theory, with a focus on its relationship with other lines of critical thought; with systems theory and societal constitutionalism; and with legal pluralism and the global constitutionalism discourses. It argues that the most valuable contribution of The Redress of Law lies in its capacity to innovate current theoretical discourses, too often closed in on their conceptual assumptions, in turn modelled on liberal political theory.

This comment aims to show how Klaus Eller's paper on ‘The Political Economy of Tenancy Contract Law’1 raises the stakes of private law scholarship and contributes to the larger project of remodeling legal institutions in a progressive direction. The comment starts by contextualising the rapid spread of the Law and Political Economy (LPE) movement; illustrates through examples the generative impact of LPE on contemporary contracts scholarship; and highlights two strands of Eller’s original contribution to such literature: a welcome reflection on the value and limits of Materialisierung, and a radical widening of the private law inquiry to include institutional dimensions of legal reform. The point of fostering such new directions is not to ditch the very logic of private law and its endogenous mechanisms of justice, which are still essential to progressive legal work. What is no longer tenable is to keep seeking socially oriented solutions exclusively within the private law arsenal of possibilities, even when it has become obvious that only a synergic approach can produce accurate diagnoses of – and perhaps cures for – the structural predicaments of the market economy.

While legal analyses of political economy typically centre on events and processes within the market, this discussion argues that contemporary dilemmas requires attention to labour and productive activity at its edges and beyond. Questions surrounding labour provide an unparalleled vantage point from which to assess how groups are differentially situated within the economy, especially at moments of economic crisis and transformation. The constitutive role of law in market relations, in turn, makes legal analysis fundamental to understanding how risks and rewards at work are distributed.

Reflecting on the role of macroeconomic governance to work, evident in times of crisis in particular, and drawing upon concepts and tools developed within critical legal thought, this paper analyses two sites of labour, unpaid household care work and informal labour, that are at the centre of distributive struggles around work now. As the historical separation of the household and market labour discloses, transformations of legal form, and classification played a critical role in the simultaneous production of waged labour and valueless care. Similar processes are underway in labour markets now; thus, understanding the legal constitution of value and of work itself remains central to questions of inequality now.

Bargaining analysis as well as taxonomies of family law suggest the significance of a wide range of legal rules and their interaction to labour market outcomes and the position of workers. The analysis of informal work points in a similar direction, as contract, competition, and corporate law and beyond are all implicated in the growth of informality and precarity at work. Finally, uncovering the legal foundations of racial fragmentation at work requires attention to multiple legal regimes as well as the conceptual and ideological commitments that sustain them. All engage questions about the role, and transformation, of legal form, classification and consciousness within contemporary political economy.

When listening to a recently rediscovered home cassette recording of South African musician and activist Hugh Masekela, which was a gift from the late legal theorist Peter Fitzpatrick in 2004, unleashed are a series of recollections and reflections on the distinctiveness and significance of Fitzpatrick's scholarship, especially in relation to the emerging field of critical legal studies in improvisation. This short piece recalls Peter's boundless wisdom, kindness and generosity, and the lasting impact that his thought and texts have had on his students, colleagues and readers the world over.

This article tracks the activism of the mining justice social movement since the late 1990s. As a starting point, this movement is conceptualized as a transnational political project that seeks to transform the terms of corporate resource extraction pursuant to the political and legal arrangements of neo-liberal economic globalization. In this context, the author reflects on the movement’s most significant human rights-oriented law reform projects in the Americas: Indigenous peoples’ right-to-consultation legislation in several Latin American countries and a series of non-judicial grievance mechanisms in Canada in response to the right to remedy norm in international law. Drawing on existing research, the author concludes that in both cases the state has responded with law and policy reforms that fall far short of achieving advocates’ objectives. The author argues that these shortcomings are due in part to the persistence of three liberal/neo-liberal ideologies in the reforms in question: formalism, voluntarism, and privatism. To better understand and explain these findings, the author turns to three critical theories of human rights legal activism: pragmatism, left critique/critical legal liberalism, and counter-hegemony. Examining the work of a range of scholars writing under the banner of each theory, the author identifies key debates and insights that may be instructive as the mining justice movement, and related social and environmental justice movements, continue to aspire towards a law reform agenda capable of addressing pressing global environmental and social justice issues.

An increasing number of international law scholars over the last few years have started to turn their attention to the study of political economy. To what extent can this trend be considered an indication of an underlying ‘disciplinary turn’? How should one understand the phenomenon of disciplinary turns? The answer we propose to this question in this article proceeds from the assumption that not all disciplinary shifts follow the same logic. Unlike the linguistic or the historical turn, the turn to political economy in contemporary international law does not represent an exercise in inter-disciplinary exploration. The concept of political economy used in international law has very little to do with the actual discipline of political economy. It is much more diffuse and unfocused in theoretical terms. What gives it its essential sense of identity is not any form of distinct methodological orientation, but rather its basic usefulness as a potential marker of critical self-distancing vis-à-vis the mainstream international law tradition and its ideological function as a mediating device for the expression of a deep-seated concern about the structural injustices of modern capitalism.

A certain body of mythology has emerged in recent years around Martti Koskenniemi's From Apology to Utopia (FATU). At its heart lies a group of received wisdoms that tell us that FATU should essentially be considered a work of postmodern scholarship, that it provides a typical illustration of the so-called deconstructivist approach, and that its single most significant contribution to the field of international legal theory lies in its discussion of the subject of legal indeterminacy. In this article, I seek to challenge and displace this set of narratives, by excavating and restoring to the surface FATU's original intellectual project: a highly ambitious attempt to revive the traditional enterprise of ‘legal science’ by marrying Kelsenian legal positivism with Saussurean structuralist semiotics. In doing so, it succeeded in developing a set of analytical idioms and reasoning protocols that gave the international law profession not only a reason but also the necessary intellectual materials to revolutionize its day to day understanding of the essential character of international legal practice. Thus, far from being a manifestation of any kind of postmodernist sensibility, FATU, I am going to argue, represents, in fact, the exact opposite of it.