En droit de l'environnement et de l'aménagement du territoire, comme dans l'ensemble du droit public, le droit apparaît comme un système de communication, mais un système univoque: un système de communication formulé en termes de normes, pour assurer la réalisation d'un mode de production et d'échanges économiques et sociaux, un système de communication qui obéit tantôt davantage à certains aux nécessités de l'échange et de la circulation, tantôt davantage à certains impératifs de la reproduction des rapports sociaux, mais qui ne change jamais desens.

Présupposé de l'échange et de la circulation, appareil de reproduction des conditions de la production, appareil idéologique et répressif d'Etat, enjeu et forme du pouvoir, le droit représente un agencement et une représentation du réel. D'une part, il justifie les rapports sociaux et, d'autre part, il tente de les rendre “naturels.” Ainsi le droit devient principe de vie en exprimant la réalité sociale à travers le prisme de l'Etat. Et, en même temps qu'il en concrétise les règles, il en travestit la forme dans un langage et un code abstrait. Une telle représentation a notamment pour objet de légitimer et de valoriser l'ordre social et spatial existant.

India's Constitution of 1950 was, on the whole, a creation of the Western spirit, superimposed on a society and a culture with a complex traditional legal system. But constitutions are more than simply legal texts which can be adopted at will; they are also means of cultural self-portrayal and mirrors of cultural heritage. This is illustrated here by an analysis of the tortuous history of the Basic Structure Doctrine in India's constitutional discussions. Although this doctrine, developed by Carl Schmitt during the time of the Weimar Republic in Germany, was introduced to India by the Supreme Court in order to reduce the flood of constitutional amendments, it soon underwent major reinterpretations and later referred to overarching principles of the Constitution. In this way the Constitution became permeable to some of the surviving traditional legal concepts of India. An appendix provides a comparison with the unwritten principles of the Canadian Constitution. In contrast to the Indian situation, the Canadian unwritten principles have no superlegal status and the written constitutional rules take precedence over them. Any constitutional amendment realized according to the prescribed procedure is legal, and no higher principle would provide legal continuity.

In Canada, Treaty 1 First Nations brought a claim against the Crown for land debt owed to them since 1871. In 2004, Crown land in Winnipeg became available that, according to the terms of the settlement, should have been offered for purchase to Treaty 1 Nations. Similarly, in New Zealand, the Waikato-Tainui claim arose from historical Crown breaches of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi. In 1995, a settlement was reached to address the unjust Crown confiscation of Tainui lands. Despite being intended to facilitate the return of traditional territory, compensate for Crown breaches of historic treaties, and indirectly provide opportunity for economic development, in both cases, settlement was met with legal and political challenges. Using a comparative legal analysis, this paper examines how the state continues to use its law-making power to undermine socio-economic development of Indigenous communities in Canada and New Zealand, thereby thwarting opportunity for Indigenous self-determination.

We have rediscovered the social diversity of law. From now on, legal pluralism becomes a paradigm to win over our preconceptions and ideologies of law, a fact to be constructed on the basis of a multidisciplinary theorization.

One of the recommendations made in Law and Learning is that “[t]he teaching of law in the liberal arts and other faculties should be encouraged.” Earlier in its report, the authors acknowledged the existence of legal studies programs outside law faculties in Canada and emphasized that in these programs legal doctrine exerts much less influence on the direction of study than in law schools. Law teaching in these programs, the Consultative Group explains, “has many attractions. It relieves the subject of its professional training connotations, facilitates integration of legal study and research with parallel activities in other disciplines, and recognizes that law ought to be understood by and subject to the critical scrutiny of as many citizens as possible.”

Although the praise in Law and Learning for legal studies programs outside law faculties and especially in faculties of arts and social sciences in Canadian universities is considerable, it is significant I believe that the report does not explain why the teaching of legal doctrine – legal rules – is not central to these legal studies programs, and in particular law and society undergraduate programs. Indeed, the demand from incoming undergraduate students and ordinary citizens is overwhelmingly for these programs to offer courses on legal doctrine. And some programs in Canadian universities comply. Why not teach legal doctrine in these programs? Why should the study of law in these programs be so different from that found in Canadian law schools?

The relationship between scientific knowledge and legal discourse is raised once again by a recent decision of the Supreme Court of Canada, a case involving a young Aboriginal woman who was pregnant and ordered by the court to remain in a drug treatment program at a health center until the baby was born. Her glue-sniffing habit was deemed dangerous to the normal development of the fetus. The Court held that her solvent-dependency did not justify the original court action, but both the Court and the various interveners disregarded the current state of our knowledge on the fetal syndromes. There is thus a continuing disconnect between the scientific understanding of fetal risk and the development of Constitutional law around women's reproductive rights. This paper reviews the case and follows it through the appellate process; we examine the research literature on fetal syndromes tracking the changes over time. Finally we comment on the interventions by the Winnipeg Child and Family Services, the Women's Health Rights Coalition, by The Canadian Civil Liberties Association, and both The Canadian Abortion Rights Action League and the Women's Legal Education and Action Fund.

The paper explores the limitations of class instrumentalist analyses of law in accounting for the failure of the criminal justice system to control corporate crime. The first part of the paper examines current theoretical perspectives in Canadian corporate crime research, with particular emphasis on the class instrumentalist analyses of law which predominate in the literature. The remainder of the paper seeks to develop a critical analysis of corporate crime which avoids the reductionism of such class instrumentalist analyses. In particular, it is argued that attempts to theorize the failure of the criminal justice system to respond to corporate crime require investigation not only of external factors influencing the enactment and enforcement of legislation, but also of the manner in which ideological discourses are articulated through the form and content of criminal law in such a way as to reproduce the popular consent for the differential treatment of suite and street crime. Failure to problematize the ideological role of criminal law in legitimating the differential treatment of corporate and street crime is likely to undermine attempts to make corporate offenders more accountable for their illegal behaviour by further criminalizing certain types of corporate behaviour.

The system of temporary protection set out in accordance with the conclusions of the Executive Committee of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (Excom) offers the necessary guarantees for the protection of the refugee under such a system. However, regimes of temporary protection recently established in a number of states (for example Germany and the United States) do not respect the conclusions of Excom nor the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees of 1951 and are based on the objective of controlling migratory flows.

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.

Cultural studies provides an interesting conceptual perspective on legal pluralism for a number of reasons. Rather than asking ontological questions about parallel legal systems, cultural studies frameworks encourage questions about the meanings which might be generated for “law” at the plural sites of intersection of regulatory phenomena: legal meanings must defer to questions about how a subject is positioned, subjected. Narratives of culture, broadly conceived, also allow us to notice the diverse, fluid and often contradictory patterns of regulation and discipline created when there are politically powerful beliefs in the singularity of order and certainty. The efforts in Anglophone cultures to create an “English” heritage safe from various threatening others is echoed in jurisprudential specifications of the criteria of legality.

This article offers a narrative analysis of the two CBC Fifth Estate investigative documentaries about Ashley Smith (“Behind the Wall,” 2010; “Out of Control,” 2010) and juxtaposes the documentary narratives against claims made by feminist criminologists with respect to women’s corrections. Examining the coherent ‘through narrative’ that is constructed in each documentary, we claim that The Fifth Estate uses dominant medicalized conceptualizations of mental illness and mental health treatment to frame the Smith case, leaving questions about the gendered nature of her criminalization, imprisonment and mistreatment unasked. Considering the socio-political context of neoliberal and post-feminist individualism, we argue that The Fifth Estate presents the case in a way that maintains the status quo and may resonate with their national audience, but which also reinforces the pathologization of women prisoners and upholds gendered stereotypes.

Invitée à «commenter les commentaires» de Constance Backhouse et de Roderick A. Macdonald sur le Rapport Arthurs, j'avais bien sûr prévu de leur part une évaluation critique de son influence sur l'enseignement et la recherche en droit, mais je ne m'attendais pas vraiment à des commentaires convergents aussi nettement négatifs … J'essayerai de voir si le tableau est aussi noir partout au Canada, pour tenter ensuite à mon tour une analyse des causes et des remèdes de ce mal-être que vivent les descendants d'Harry Arthurs.

Des diagnostiques négatifs convergents: Sur l'enseignement, surtout au niveau du baccalauréat, Constance Backhouse estime que rien n'a vraiment changé dans les curricula ou, si peu, dans certaines Facultés où l'offre de cours s'est diversifiée pour accueillir les perspectives sociales recommandées par le Rapport, mais où les étudiants boudent ces cours en faveur de ceux qui se rapprochent davantage de la formation professionnelle. Roderick A. Macdonald va dans le même sens en insistant sur le maintien du même découpage traditionnel des sous-disciplines juridiques inspirées de la pratique du droit, des mêmes formules pédagogiques, même au niveau des études supérieures, où il estime que peu de Facultés offrent en fait des cours spécifiques à l'enseignement supérieur, notamment au niveau doctoral. Il ajoute que le peu de théorie qui s'y enseigne est souvent superficiel, et que cette carence se reflète dans l'absence presque totale de stagiaires post-doctoraux dans les Facultés de droit. Sur le plan de l'accessibilité aux études, la communauté juridique a également régressé depuis le Rapport, compte tenu de l'augmentation phénoménale des frais de scolarité dans certaines Facultés, notamment à l'Université de Toronto.

This article examines the legal characterization of the full-face veil worn by female users of Canadian government services. Considering how various Western states perceive full-face veils, we suggest that legally defining this piece of clothing as a “religious object” is key to guaranteeing freedom of conscience and religion by the courts. By drawing on constitutional law and legal theory, we examine the legal treatment of this religious object within the analytical framework of the Supreme Court of Canada in the NS case.

This paper uses the example of the control of medicinal liquor during prohibition in Alberta to explore how the methods of control altered during the eight years of prohibition. This paper argues that the system used to control medicinal liquor changed from a prosecutorial system to a regulatory system. This shift from prosecution to regulation was essential in ensuring that medicinal liquor was actually controlled and allowed medicinal liquor to become an alternative as well as an exception to prohibition. This paper focuses on explaining the success of administrative control rather than the courts' attempts to control administrative action and thus examines administrative law and practice from the ground up. Consequently, this paper uses a broad definition of administrative law which includes the regulations, policies and practices created and used by the provincial state in its attempt to control medicinal liquor.