Comparatists usually describe mixed legal systems as being built upon dual foundations of Romano-Germanic civil law and Anglo-American common law. This widely accepted description examines mixed systems from a formal internally legal perspective. My paper offers a new yardstick for investigating mixed systems by posing an external perspective for examining the complex interplay between law and culture in a mixed jurisdiction. The case study is the codification of private law in the mixed system of Israel. A civil code does not reflect the inner logic or history of the Israeli legal system, as this system has been mostly shaped along Anglo-Saxon lines which generally discourage the enactment of codes. But seen from a cultural perspective, a civil code is not alien to Israeli society because its perception as a symbol of legal independence and modernization is inherent in the European political culture that most Israelis are familiar with. The story of civil codification in Israel demonstrates that beyond the common-law-civil-law “mixedness” in Israeli law, the Israeli legal system is also mixed in a more profound sense: while the country's law is primarily (though not exclusively) influenced by the Anglo-Saxon tradition, its political culture is mainly inspired by ideas embedded in continental Europe which were imported to Israel by Jewish immigrants.

There is concern among socio-legal scholars about the relationship that has formed between scholarly research and public policy. Pat Carlen contends that in the case of criminology, this relationship sees scholars increasingly struggle to maintain their critical capacity. The problem, according to Carlen, is that scholars trying to increase research output through partnership with policy makers often find this partnership hinges on an agreement that any research produced will conform to the parameters of the policy makers' needs. Furthermore, when scholars do not seek partnership with policy makers, they may face political hurdles in gaining access to institutional data. Scholars may be required to demonstrate the direct policy relevance of their research before policy makers will consider the type and extent of access granted. These kinds of barriers to data access have the potential to adversely impact the critical merit of socio-legal scholarship.

This paper employs my own research as a case study to explore some of the foundations for socio-legal scholars' concerns about the appearance and impact of barriers to institutional data. My research aimed to explore how correctional agencies approach the offender rehabilitation principle of responsivity in relation to Indigenous offenders. Contemporary correctional literature states that to be responsive, correctional agencies must identify variances among offenders that may affect the delivery and reception of programs. Significantly, however, it is unclear what, if anything, correctional agencies should do to accommodate variances once identified. Accordingly, I sought access to correctional agencies to interview staff working in the areas of Indigenous offender rehabilitation policy and service who could elaborate on their agencies' approach to Indigenous offender responsivity. Agencies in four jurisdictions were approached. In seeking access to this institutional data, I encountered two main barriers that impacted the scope and direction of the project in unexpected ways.

This paper examines the Chinese Canadian pursuit for head tax compensation through an exploration of the social and political discourses surrounding redress and through the legal case itself, Mack et al. v. The Attorney General of Canada. Although the case never reached the courts, except to determine whether calls for redress had any basis in Canadian law, the juridical reasoning alongside public and state contestations reveal the complex ways in which these claims may be influenced by dominant Canadian national mythologies. My central argument is that the courts, politicians, and the public have read the Chinese Canadian redress campaign through two liberal national-racial myths that circulate within and sustain Canadian discourses of multiculturalism. Throughout, I show how these mythologies – of immigration as “choice” and Chinese Canadians as “model-minorities” – have both influenced and shaped the juridical, political, and social responses to head tax compensation in ways that have diminished Chinese Canadian struggles for justice. In the conclusion, I consider the valuable lessons that we may learn from the Mack case and from the Chinese Canadian redress movement more generally.

The public use of the niqab and other religious face coverings is a source of considerable debate in Western nations. The veiled Muslim woman is often constructed as “other,” reviled as backward, represented as in need of rescue, or associated with Islamic extremism. Despite widespread racist attitudes, officially, Canadians purport to support multiculturalism and the equality of all people under the law as guaranteed under section 15 of the Charter. In a recent Supreme Court of Canada decision, R v NS, the Court had to consider the right of a Muslim woman to wear her niqab while testifying in a sexual assault trial. In “balancing” the conflict between the religious rights of NS and the section 7 rights of the accused to a full and fair defense, the Court ignored the security of the person and equality rights of NS. The Court instead legitimated anti-Muslim stereotypes and reiterated rape myths that had ostensibly been overturned.

This paper explores the possibilities provided by narrative interviewing for critically assessing claims of success regarding reconciliation policies in Brčko District, Bosnia-Herzegovina. More specifically, the paper argues that such claims of success are based on claims to expertise. Certain understandings of the harm, i.e., the inter-ethnic violence committed during the 1992–1995 war, and of the policies designed to address it, i.e., reconciliation policies based on a logic of multi-ethnic living, gain credence based on the supposed expertise of particular actors. However, knowledge of harm and of the impact of policies designed to address it is produced through the subjectivity of different actors’ positionalities, and therefore assumptions about the figure of “the expert” need to be unsettled. This paper explores the possibilities offered by narrative interviewing and analysis for bringing to the fore the complicated ways in which expertise is produced in certain places at certain times.

This analysis of Senegal environmental law is based on the example of a local context of rural communities located in the eastern Senegal area where the Bassari population is settled. The environmental legislation in Senegal does not seem to fit the local and rural realities. Our approach proposes to build a patrimonial legal system involving responsibility of the different actors in decision making. Law should be elaborated consensually by the different stakeholders, so that it will be easier to implement. We have conceived a «local environmental agreement» in order to link the local (legitimate) and national (legal) requirements. The aim of this article is to develop a conceptual and practical basis for legal and institutional patrimonial management of the natural resources.

This essay examines surveillant practices that subject sex trade clients (“clients”) to socio-legal control. In particular, I employ the concepts of the gaze, voyeurism, and exhibitionism to unpack the surveillant dynamics, and consider how power and pleasure are harnessed, produced, and thwarted in the increasing scrutiny of the sex trade’s demand side. I further examine my own research of the regulation of clients within this analytical framework. Following David Lyon’s insights on the scopophilic dimensions of surveillance (2006), I argue that the instrumental goals of surveillance are interconnected with a voyeurism that gratifies the pleasures of looking at, categorizing, defining and making sense of, clients. Yet, bearing in mind the multi-directionality of the gaze, I also analyze the controlled exhibition of sex work signifiers, as information is not just gathered, but also displayed and performed.

This paper is about critical connections that the law obscures in a liberal democratic, colonial context. It is about how law produces and sustains a racial social order by ruling out of order and irrelevant violent histories of Aboriginal dispossession. On November 1st, 1995 the Speaker of Manitoba's Legislative Assembly delivered a ruling that defined the word ‘racist’ as “unparliamentary language.” Thus, by means of parliamentary law a Cree Member of the Opposition was silenced, and ultimately expelled from the House. To explore the underbelly of Canadian ‘universal’ equality, and to underscore the systemic violence inherent in Mr. Oscar Lathlin's legal eviction from the House, I engage in a provincial counter - mapping which firmly reconnects the MLA to some of the racialized spaces he was elected to represent. I illustrate how the law produces racialized zones as well as subjects who are forced to exist outside the protected bounds of ‘equal’ personhood. At the same time, I point to the indispensable role of law in the making of the moral, white subject: a subject who remains unobliged, even in the face of deeply distressing evidence, to know him or herself as both perpetrator and benefactor of contemporary colonial relations of dominance in Canada.

This paper explores attempts made in North America to govern noise and uses the current debates over the impact of wind turbines on human health as a site for examining the politics of noise regulation. I address a number of key questions: First, how has noise been defined and how have these definitions changed over time? Second, how have we tried to control noise and on what grounds have we done this? Lastly, how have our responses to noise been shaped by who is making the noise and who is being disturbed? I argue that our understandings of noise and how we regulate it cannot be disentangled from the broader social, political, cultural, and technological contexts in which these discussions take place. Ultimately, the debates about noise regulation have as much to do with who is making the noise and who is being disturbed as the noise, itself.

Niklas Luhmann's sociology proposes that law is an autonomous social system, which cannot be determined from the outside. In this theoretical framework, law's relations with its environment are mainly grasped with the concepts of autopoiesis and deparadoxification, and through the corresponding paradox of openness through closure. It provides a framework to explore intersystemic relations which refuses a vertical, linear domination of law by other discursive formations. This paper takes (some dimensions of) the 2003 re-validation of the constitutionality of the prohibition of cannabis by the Supreme Court of Canada as a pretext to theoretically clarify and empirically explore this framework. In the case presented here, law notably gives precedence to some biomedical objects over the liberal doctrine. It may well do the exact opposite in future operations. Sociology is condemned to be surprised by the creativity that law displays in autonomously maintaining and transforming itself.

The literature is replete with numerous examples of attempts to either abolish or reform traditional practices that violate the rights of people in different societies around the world. Few success cases have, however, been recorded. The recent anti-trokosi campaign in Ghana against female ritual servitude is one of the few success cases. By August 2000, 59 % of all known trokosis had been liberated. Today, it is estimated that less than a couple of hundred of trokosis are still held in bondage. The campaign, which started as a Christian religious crusade against the Ewe traditional religious practice of trokosi, backfired initially as it met with hostility and little cooperation from the shrine owners and practitioners. However, by 1995, the strategy changed from a religious to an international human rights campaign paving the way for the first mass liberation of trokosis in 1996. The author argues that the peculiar type of human rights approach adopted, which was based on education, dialogue, cultural sensitivity, and mutual respect, accounts largely for the success of this campaign.

“Home” to more than 150,000 children from the 1870s until 1996, the residential school system was aimed at “killing the Indian in the child” and assimilating First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children into white settler society. It was, in short, a genocidal policy, operated jointly by the federal government of Canada and the Catholic, Anglican, United, and Presbyterian Churches. Children as young as four years old were torn from their families and placed in institutions that were chronically underfunded; mismanaged; inadequately staffed; and rife with disease, malnutrition, poor ventilation, poor heating, neglect, and death. Sexual, emotional, and physical abuse was pervasive, and it was consistent policy to deny children their languages, their cultures, their families, and even their given names. While some children may have had positive experiences, many former students have found themselves caught between two worlds: deprived of their languages and traditions, they were left on their own to handle the trauma of their school experience and to try to readapt to the traditional way of life that they had been conditioned to reject. Life after residential school has been marred for many by alcohol and substance abuse, cycles of violence, suicide, anger, hopelessness, isolation, shame, guilt, and an inability to parent.

First Nations leader Phil Fontaine catalysed the struggle for redress in 1990 when he stunned Canada by speaking about his residential-school experience. The second major catalyst was the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) of 1991–1996, which broadly exposed the horrors of residential schools to Canadians and called for a public inquiry.

This paper explores current thinking on the meanings of sex, gender and sexuality and on the relationship between each of these concepts. It suggests that whilst feminist theory has adopted a social constructionist view of gender and, to a lesser extent, sexuality, it has left sex to the conceptual domain of biology. It has also prioritised gender over sexuality conceptually. These issues are explored in the specific area of sexuality and law where it is argued that recent theoretical developments on sex and sexuality within poststructuralist thought have, as yet, failed to influence the dominant understanding of heterosexual relations. Arguably in the field of law and sexuality, feminism has remained wedded to a notion of binary sex and identity politics. The paper then works through two specific instances, namely rape and S/M sexual practice, to identify some of the problems associated with the latter approach. Ultimately it raises questions about whether a poststructuralist politics imbued with feminist ethics might provide us with less essentialist models of masculine/male and feminine/female sexuality without either abandoning feminist political action or falling into a new sexual conservatism.

The careers of male lawyers are radically altered by their experiences in the formation of families. These understudied male experiences fuel income differences, creating a highly hierarchical profession focused around a male mystique of “living large.” This study traces these processes across a 20-year longitudinal study of Toronto lawyers. We argue that time with corporate clients is a very specialized investment that is rewarded with partnership and earnings and that, among men, bears an unexpectedly unique relationship to having children, and that this specialized investment and its relationship to family are more culturally driven than biologically derived.

Why are First Nations overrepresented in Canadian prisons? The habitual answer is that the Canadian justice system is not adapted to Aboriginal cultures. This has given rise to various measures of adjustment, which have not, however, contributed significantly to halt the constant increase of overrepresentation. The author argues that this predicament is rather due to the lack of credibility that the Canadian justice system has in the eyes of Aboriginal peoples, given its involvement in the dismantling of Aboriginal institutions of social control since the middle of the nineteenth century. For this reason, first of all, one must dissociate oneself from certain founding myths of present-day Canada. Moreover, all must be set in motion to allow Aboriginal peoples to reappropriate their political institutions, including their own ways of administering justice. Make no mistake: it is not a question of returning to the past, but rather of moving ahead towards the future.

This article reflects on the question of how culture and religion enter legal cases and public debates about the place of majoritarian religious symbols in diverse societies that have some democratic will to inclusion. In the context of the new diversity, the article considers how the articulation of “our culture and heritage” as a strategy for preserving “formerly” religious symbols and practices in public spaces excludes particular groups from the narrative of who “we” are as a nation. The reader is invited to consider how challenges to such symbols and practices might be articulated as a challenge to privilege and power and that a refusal to acknowledge those power relations puts the reputation of democracy and human rights at risk.

There have been two significant legal challenges to research confidentiality in Canada. The first occurred because of a Coroner’s subpoena, with the researcher invoking the Wigmore criteria and winning a researcher-participant privilege. A second case saw two University of Ottawa researchers served with a search warrant for the tape and transcript of an interview they had conducted years earlier with an individual subsequently accused of murder. The researchers defended research confidentiality in Quebec Superior Court, winning a qualified researcher-participant privilege in the process. This article discusses implications of the court’s decision for researchers, research ethics boards, and universities for the future defence of research confidences. All have a role to play in designing research that anticipates the court’s evidentiary requirements when a claim of privilege is invoked to help ensure future jurisprudence is as favourable to research participants and as respectful of academic freedom as possible.

Significant changes in the refugee determination domain during the 1980s are made intelligible by deploying the concepts of programme, rationality, and technology drawn from the recent governmentality literature. Following a crisis of governability in the mid-1980s, refugee determination continued to move farther from the reach of political authorities. By 1989 it was reassembled in a manner involving a greater reliance on law, on the regular production of medical and psychiatric knowledge in new sites outside the state and a documentation centre, all of which is consistent with the onset of advanced liberal government. Closer examination of the documentation centre shows it permits scrutiny of information destined for use in legal oral hearings; is a form of political subjectification; and serves as a panoptic device that targets non-Western nations and populations consistent with advanced liberalism. In this way the documentation centre also illustrates the overlap of Canadian and international refugee regimes.