Globalization has effectively enabled Canada’s domestically incorporated mining companies to escape the jurisdiction of the courts of the world, allowing them to carry out human rights abuses abroad with impunity. In February 2020, however, the Supreme Court of Canada issued a landmark judgment, Nevsun Resources Ltd v Araya, which attempted to address this jurisdictional gap. This decision held that Canadian corporations could potentially be liable under domestic law for breaches of customary international law perpetrated abroad. The decision has been criticized for straying too far from a classically positivist conception of international law. This article argues that such criticisms are well founded insofar as the majority’s judgment implicitly relies on progressive human-centric theories of international law without adequately addressing how these are reconcilable with international law as it is currently applied. It then explores the ideas that drive the majority’s opinion in order to propose two alternative approaches to holding corporations accountable that are more readily reconcilable with traditional state-centric conceptions of international law. Adopting these revised approaches could less contentiously lead to corporate accountability before future domestic courts. Finally, this article considers the potential international developments and repercussions to which this and other forward-looking decisions could lead.

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.

Against the historical backdrop of the sinking of the Canadian rum-running schooner the I’m Alone by the US Coast Guard in 1929, this paper examines the re-crafting of maritime jurisdictional practices in the 2000s through the Canada-US Cross-Border Maritime Law Enforcement Program known as Shiprider. Thinking jurisdictionally and taking seriously the materiality of the water, we explore the significance of Shiprider’s patrols in the local context of Kaniatarowano’on:we (St. Lawrence River) which flows through Akwesasne Mohawk Territory, an indigenous border nation cleaved by the Canada-US international border where local communities contend with and continue to refuse imposed colonial settler boundaries.

To engage in the question of what it means to decolonize law, we must ask by what authority a law has the authority to be invoked and to govern. In this paper, I describe the conditions necessary for the exercise of Canadian law as being the work of jurisdiction, and I call into question Canada’s legality and legitimacy in making jurisdictional claims. Decolonizing law means deconstructing the state’s grounds to inaugurate law on lands acquired through colonial settlement. By critically examining law’s geography and scope I call into question the modern definition of territory itself. Further, I draw attention to jurisdiction as a conceptual framework for understanding the specificities of settler colonialism; illustrate jurisdiction as a historical concept, distinct from territory and sovereignty; and show some of the ways in which jurisdiction is enacted to govern across multiple scales and issues.

Questions about the ways in which colonial subjects were acquired and maintained, and how it was that multiple and often contradictory sovereignties came to overlap in history, may not be purely academic. We raise them today because they spring from issues that remain unresolved, concerning rights to land, resources, and self-determination. Following recent scholarship on the English East India Company, the author redefines the Hudson's Bay Company, during the period before widespread settler colonialism, as a state (or “company-state”), and in this way argues that the HBC-state possessed its own kind of sovereignty. The article make three main arguments: that it was up to the HBC, not the Crown, to found Rupert's Land, defend its establishments, make alliances with locals, and challenge intruders; that HBC rule extended to cover not only the company's employees but, eventually, an indigenous “home guard” population; and that the HBC welfare regime transformed the relationship between ruler and ruled.