Following Japan’s 1941 attacks on Hawai’i and Hong Kong, Canada relocated, detained, and exiled citizens and residents of Japanese ancestry. Many interracial families, however, were exempted from this racial project called the internment. The form of the exemption was an administrative permit granted to its holder on the basis of their marital or patrilineal proximity to whiteness. This article analyzes these permits relying on archival research and applying a critical race feminist lens to explore how law was constitutive of race at this moment in Canadian history. I argue that the permits recategorized interracial intimacies towards two racial ends: to differentiate the citizen from the “enemy alien”; and to regulate the interracial family according to patriarchal common law principles. This article nuances received narratives of law as an instrument of racial exclusion by documenting the way in which a new inclusive state measure sustained old exclusions.

Suite à la loi 101, la Politique québécoise du développement culturel a visé à faire en sorte que la culture québécoise soit commune à tous et puisse s’enrichir d’apports en provenance des minorités culturelles. Puis, divers écrits ont contribué à faire évoluer le concept de convergence culturelle, à le critiquer ou à répondre à ceux qui le critiquent. À la lumière de cette politique et de ces écrits, on peut associer ce concept à sept principes : lien consubstantiel entre la langue française et la culture québécoise, impératif de la préservation du statut majoritaire de la culture québécoise et de la langue française, refus de l’assimilation des minorités culturelles, intégration, appropriation identitaire, mixité, et rôle vital des œuvres et productions artistiques. Reprenant ces principes et respectant certains critères de la légistique (clarté, cohérence, concision, véracité), le présent article propose le texte d’une loi-cadre sur la convergence culturelle, et la situe théoriquement.

In May 2012, a former research assistant contacted the Montréal police about an interview he had conducted with Luka Magnotta for the SSHRC-funded research project Sex Work and Intimacy: Escorts and their Clients four years previously. That call ultimately resulted in the Parent and Bruckert v R and Magnotta case. Now, a decade later, we are positioned to reflect on the collective lessons learned (and lost) from the case. In this paper, we provide a lay of the Canadian confidentiality landscape before teasing out ten lessons from Parent c R. To do so, we draw on personal archives, survey results from sixty researchers, twelve key informant interviews with qualitative sociolegal and criminology researchers, and documentary analysis of university research policies. The lessons, which range from the clichéd, to the practical, to the frustrating, have implications for the individual work of Canadian researchers and for the collective work of academic institutions.

A central feature of Canadian history since the mid-twentieth century has been ‘the rights revolution,’ the quest to articulate and give legal protection to human rights and fundamental freedoms. In many ways, as with other Western nations, this struggle has become the country's defining metanarrative, giving identity, normative ideals and purpose to Canadian nationhood and jurisprudence, especially with the entrenchment of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in the Canadian Constitution of 1982. It is the intention of this article to study historically the complex role of religion in an early phase of the human rights narrative in Canada. The focus is on the religious dimension of the passage in 1960 by the Progressive Conservative Government of John Diefenbaker of Canada's first national human rights instrument, the Canadian Bill of Rights. It will be argued that the churches played an important but ambiguous role in relation to the human rights movement which, in some ways, presented perceived challenges to their own religiously-grounded metanarratives of Canadian history, identity, and destiny. A central thesis advanced is that the 1960 Canadian Bill of Rights reflected and legislated a pluralism which was religiously-positive in integrating the nation's principal religious and political values under the formula affirmed in the bill's Preamble: “that the Canadian Nation is founded upon principles that acknowledge the supremacy of God, the dignity and worth of the human person and the position of the family in a society of free men and free institutions (…).”

It is argued that there are no moral or legal rights that may never rightly be overridden no matter what the consequences. There are human rights which are inalienable while still being rightly overrideable in certain circumstances. Even rights-based constructivist accounts of human rights do not provide a grounding for morality that escapes consequentialist critique. But the proper form of consequentialism is a weak form of consequentialism which is distinguished from utilitarian consequentialism.

This essay offers a feminist analysis of the abuse of female lessees and, more specifically, of one solution enacted by the Quebec legislature. Since 2006, article 1974.1 of the C.C.Q. has authorized the unilateral termination of a lease when the safety of a female lessee is threatened. This study questions the effectiveness of this legislative initiative. First, it offers a materialist and radical feminist analysis of the private/public dichotomy that underlies the organization of landlord/tenant law in Civil law. This spatial and legislative division implies a preliminary and implicit characterization of abuse within the home as belonging to the private and individual sphere instead of the social and collective sphere. Within this legal structure, article 1974.1 C.C.Q. takes on a reformist character. Preliminary results of the use of this article before the Régie du logement are then presented. These results highlight four major obstacles to its effectiveness.

As copyright is asked to perform a greater role in governing creative activity, its focus on economic values above all others raises concerns. Interviews conducted by the author with Canadian independent music labels suggest that the law and the norms governing labels’ operations are more diverse and include direct subsidies, or grants, from government and the private sector. These grants perform many of the functions expected from copyright. This study concludes that copyright law is often exotic, peripheral, and even irrelevant to those involved in the spheres of remunerative Canadian sound production considered here. This finding suggests a renewed focus on a Canadian narrative of copyright law that puts it in its place alongside other instruments regulating independent music production.

A determining factor in the evolution of their power relationship with the State was the fact that Native groups became conscious of their identity and collective power and that they defined their collective identity using the concept of “nation”. The federal positions have also changed on the question of Aboriginal collective rights and the State has modified certain principles in its policies. The Native groups have redefined their collective rights according to their needs and political objectives. With that concept, they have developed a form of counter-hegemony, releasing them from the domination of the State and enabling them to attain the political autonomy they are seeking.

In the spring of 1987, Canada's first ministers agreed to a package of proposals for reforming major elements of the country's constitution. The package, which has come to be known as the Meech Lake Accord, contains a number of significant provisions, one of which deals with the federal spending power and national shared-cost programs. This provision stipulates that the federal government must compensate provinces that decline to participate in future national sharedcost programs, but immediately adds that such compensation is conditional upon the non-participating provinces establishing “a program or initiative that is compatible with the national objectives.”

The provision has led to a great deal of debate and discussion. Of special interest, and concern for some, has been the possible effect of the provision on the capacity of the federal government to use its spending power to set up national shared-cost programs. Some contend that Ottawa's capacity would be severely restricted or even eliminated by the provision. Others claim that it would have little or no impact, that the Accord would simply constitutionalize present practices. These conflicting views on the implications of the Meech Lake Accord for shared-cost programs doubtless flow from many sources, but a major one appears to be differing views on the present ability of Ottawa to establish these types of arrangements.

Making sense of the problems which illiterate people face in gaining access to justice puts the foundations of both the ethnography of law and the modern justice system itself into question. The essay explores this thesis with reference to the case of an elderly dairy farmer whose arrest for the mercy killing of his ailing brother attracted intense local and national attention. Documents from the trial which deal with the construction and use of evidence, confession, and testimony, along with schematic representations of the personal, community, and media responses to the case as depicted in the award-winning documentary Brother's Keeper (1992), render visible the textual conventions of a litigious society along with its non-literate and even ritual cultural context. The most troubling issue raised by the case involves a crisis in the bureaucratic organization and expert professionalization of modern litigation when it attempts to address the rights and competencies of relatively illiterate people who appear unable to articulate the values and beliefs of any cultural community at all.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a popular phenomenon that originates at the margins of the legal system. How do CSR practices interact with the law? With the propagation of CSR instruments, the law struggles to prescribe these procedures while favouring an effective application of codes of conduct. Nevertheless, the motivations behind CSR practices stem primarily from a desire to reduce legal risk rather than from a wish to convey a good corporate image. The legal status of the codes is variable, and the jurisdictions participate in the implementation of these regulatory norms of corporate relations. While these acts are intended to protect the fundamental social rights of workers, they sometimes become new legal tools used to make workers subordinate to the corporate ethic. Is it desirable, then, to propose a legal framework for this purely spontaneous and voluntary social phenomenon?

On July 13, 2013, the Commission for Public Complaints released the Report Following a Public Interest Investigation into the Conduct of RCMP Members in Nova Scotia in Respect to Matters Involving Nicole (Ryan) Doucet. After interviewing all parties involved and reviewing 25 incidences involving Ms. Doucet and Mr. Ryan, the Acting Commissioner, Ian McPhail, concluded the RCMP’s policy regarding violence in relationships “was followed at all times.” According to The Report, the RCMP did not fail to protect Ms. Doucet. These conclusions, however, seem to be at odds with the evidence presented in The Report. After discussing coercive control and reviewing R. v. Ryan, the paper analyses the Commission’s findings to argue that the evidence presented to the Commission clearly illustrates that police ignored Ms. Doucet’s repeated pleas for help. The Commissioner missed a real opportunity to review current RCMP policies on domestic violence to bring them in line with current and on-going research on coercive control.

The Depression is usually cited as the reason for the origins of provincial policing in Nova Scotia. This neglects the period preceding the Depression. In particular, the struggle to enforce prohibition between 1921 and 1929 resulted in the centralization of social control in Nova Scotia. Provincial policing became the unintentional public policy success of the prohibition era. A centralized temperance inspectorate formed the foundation of provincial policing. Moreover, between 1930 and 1932, the Nova Scotia Police was established to enforce the Nova Scotia Liquor Control Act which, in turn, generated revenue on behalf of an emerging welfare state. In the final analysis, provincial policing was influenced by middle-class prohibitionists, but it ultimately reflected the interests of state bureaucrats.

The decision of the House of Lords in R. v. Brown has been well documented as one which has serious repercussions for the civil liberties of homosexuals within the United Kingdom, its most notorious ramification being that one cannot consent to the infliction of injury upon oneself in the course of homosexual sadomasochistic activities. The case continues to arouse strong passions in the gay press and amongst civil liberties groups, and the recent announcement that the European Court of Human Rights is to hear the appeal of the men involved has confirmed that this particular “hard case” will continue to exercise the minds of legal practitioners, academics and others for some years to come.

In addition to its implications for sadomasochistic activities, Brown indirectly raises a myriad of other issues. One of these is the question of to what extent the courts should intervene in the case of injuries inflicted during the course of sporting activities. Although the Crown Courts (where the most serious criminal cases of England and Wales are heard) have recently shown an increased willingness to intervene in cases where the injuries inflicted are particularly severe, my preliminary research suggests that the prosecuting authorities are reluctant to bring such cases to court, although they almost certainly would do so if an incident which gave rise to similar injuries had occurred in a nonsporting context.

In my contribution to this discussion or the Arthurs Report twenty years later, I want to talk briefly about the teaching aspect of legal education. I want to be emphatic in my focus on teaching because I fear that teaching is increasingly diminishing as an object of our attention and as a subject of our scholarly work. I fear that, for many of us, teaching is becoming a less and less significant part of our discussions, our hirings, our preoccupations, our energy … To me, this is both short-sighted and sad, particularly for those of us who are committed to a law and society approach to legal education. If we are committed to social change, then education, in the form of teaching and learning, is critically important – that is, what we teach and how we teach, and what we model as teachers and thinkers are important instigators and promoters of change. I make this assertion of a lack of serious interest in law teaching despite the fact that there have been a number of Canadian forums on legal education recently. However, admissions and administrative matters largely overshadowed teaching as issues of primary concern and discussion in the two forums that I attended. I do not think these forums generated the kind of on-the-ground, in-our-work-places re-energization and rethinking of legal education and specifically about teaching that was perhaps hoped for.