This article examines the effect of two recent constitutional decisions that have altered the course of assisted-reproduction policy in Canada: Reference re Assisted Human Reproduction Act (2010) and Pratten v British Columbia (2011). Together, the cases link a socially liberal conception of morality in federalism cases with an interventionist view of the state in Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms cases. This could result in a trend toward judicially mandated provincial, as opposed to federal, government action. These cases also provide further evidence of the judicialization of politics in Canada, whereby controversial moral and public-policy issues are increasingly determined in the courtroom.

In Western societies, penal regulation is largely considered the best way to deal with conflicts or, more widely, with trouble. Indeed, penal regulation is seen as one of the most efficient tools for maintaining the cohesion of collective life. However, some research has questioned this efficiency, noting that only a few problematic situations were addressed by the penal system. We can hypothesize, then, that other forms of defining and regulating trouble exist and function outside of any institutional field. The present study develops this hypothesis by analyzing how people experience conflicts in everyday life. In this way, we attempt to discover whether these social modes of identifying trouble still remain and under which conditions this survival is possible.

In this article, I argue that precarious migration status can be used as an organizing concept for an analysis of (im)migration law in Canada. After situating the regulation of precarious migrants in the historical context of the liberal/neo-liberal shift of the 1970s, I argue that the increase in migrant precariousness over the past few years is likely to increase as a result of recent legislative changes in both refugee and migrant-worker law. Finally, I offer a critique of the traditional liberal argument for migrant rights, inviting an alternative approach to establish migrant rights on the basis of economic participation.

This article advocates for the inclusion of intercultural dispute-resolution principles in Canadian courts to resolve conflicts between Indigenous communities and the Canadian state. These principles include judges' opening themselves up to discomfort, emotion, and unsettling in listening to Indigenous testimonies; facilitating ongoing processes for negotiation; and engaging the moral imagination to make court procedures more culturally appropriate for Indigenous testimonies. The author argues that by implementing these principles, courts can contribute to the creation of more respectful relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people.

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.