This article describes current changes in long established policing structures, ideologies and operational practices and links them to changes in the economy and culture of governing and policing late modern societies like Canada. This transition from modern to postmodern policing is marked by the following core changes: (a) the restructuring and relocation of policing authority and responsibility, (b) the re-conceptualization of public policing, and (c) the rationalization and commodification of public and private policing services. These key shifts in policing structure and ideology suggest the declining importance of modern policing assumptions and the emergence of a distinctive postmodern model of public policing in Canada. The social and political implications of this policing transition for citizens, governments and governance are also discussed.

This paper examines the importance of metaphor and media to the ideas of citizenship, nation, and place. In particular, the authors explore the relationship between citizenship and the double metaphor of the “nation-state”. If this double metaphor were to lose its hold on the collective imagination, what metaphor could take its place and be represented through modern media of communication? The authors use the example of deterritorialization, discussing first the emergence of the phenomenon particularly given the role of contemporary media of communication, and noting how it bears upon community, place and citizenship to suggest that such an erosion is taking place. They suggest that the “global market” metaphor is gaining ascendancy, and is represented in simulacrum through contemporary information technologies. The third part of this paper conducts a thought experiment implementing a deterritorialized, global market for citizenship, asking to what degree such a market already characterizes contemporary citizenship and assessing what is attractive and unattractive about it. The paper concludes with a caution against either ignoring or embracing this emerging normative construction.

Metaphorical or figurative expressions often play a significant, though sometimes unacknowledged, role in the law. Their rhetorical power can lead to their being reiterated so that they become “naturalized” or internalized in legal discourse, and they can become a kind of unanalyzed shorthand for complex concepts and processes. One such figurative expression is that of “the Chancellor's foot,” coined by John Selden in the 17th century, and often repeated since then. Examination of its original context reveals that it was at best a superficial and misleading contribution to a serious ongoing debate about the role of equity, and that other, more positive metaphors for equity have been largely lost to the legal imagination. Its continuing prominence may be the result of the “accident” of its having been referred to by so eminent a jurist as Lord Eldon, with the effect that it has become a dismissive aphorism not only for equity, but also for a kind of judicial practice. Contemporary Canadian judges frequently invoke the expression as a pejorative for judicial approaches of which they disapprove, but at the same time they often approve qualities (such as “conscience” and “flexibility”) with which it was originally associated. This paper examines, critically, how a linguistic icon can create and reproduce frameworks of apprehension in the law.

In 1929, the British Privy Council reversed an earlier ruling by Canada's Supreme Court that Canadian women did not, under the British North America Act, qualify as persons. Historians have long heralded this so-called ‘Persons Case’ as a turning point in the recognition of Canadian women's rights. However, little attention has been paid to the case's origins, which date back to the trial of an alleged prostitute in Calgary in 1917. That case successfully tested the right of women to hold high public office in Alberta – in this case, Calgary Police Magistrate Alice Jamieson – and began the subsequent twelve-year battle. However, this victory was achieved only at the expense of the rights of another woman: the alleged prostitute Lizzie Cyr. At best, then, the ‘Persons Case’ should be regarded as a tainted victory.

Life in industrial societies is governed by different kinds of “time”: mathematical or monochronic time predominates in the workplace but sociocultural or polychronic time prevails at home, particularly where young children are present. Many women report high levels of “time crunch” as they move between these two spheres and these effects are heightened for women in the professions. In this study, I test four hypotheses: women lawyers have higher time crunch levels than women in the general population. Time crunch is heightened among women who take primary responsibility for the care of young children and those who work in large law firms. As women grow older and shed some of the demands of child care, their time crunch levels drop. This study incorporates both quantitative and qualitative approaches: a regression analysis of “time crunch stress” is used to test the major hypotheses and excerpts from unstructured interviews deal with time management problems in the lives of these women. Findings from the regression analysis reveal heightened time crunch stress for the women in this study, particularly if they assume major responsibility for child care. Neither firm size nor age has a statistically significant effect on time crunch stress. Women lawyers are caught between two kinds of time and, over the long term, their careers assume shapes that differ from those of their male counterparts. These divergent career patterns suggest that current career theories are in need of reassessment and revision.

This paper chronicles the role of British Columbian provincial authorities and medical practitioners in engineering the deportation of psychiatrically disordered and cognitively disabled immigrants out of the province between Confederation and 1939. Approximately 750 mental patients were removed from BC during the 1920s and 1930s alone, and more than 5000 had been deported from the country as a whole by the outbreak of World War II. With the use of provincial and federal government records and correspondence, institutional documents, print media clippings and patient files, I probe the professional practices and discourses that fuelled this movement to banish asylum inmates. Across these seven decades, medical authorities, in alliance with bureaucrats and various anti-immigration forces, succeeded in assembling a powerful and efficient system for screening out and expelling those new Canadians who ostensibly failed to meet the mental standards for Canadian citizenship. Bolstered by theories of eugenics and race betterment, and drawing on public fears about the unregulated influx of aliens and the associated scourge of madness, officials turned to deportation as an expedient means for ridding hospitals of their least desirable denizens. I argue more generally that the deportation of ‘insane’ and other ‘unfit’ immigrants was nourished by the flood ofnativist, rac(ial)ist, exclusionist, eugenist, and mental hygienist thinking that dominated British Columbian and Canadian political and public culture throughout this ‘golden age’ of deportation.

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.

Many earlier studies of Canadian child custody determinations have been written from ideological and feminist viewpoints. This study attempts to look at this subject from an empirical and sociological stance, within its historical context. Several related issues are considered, including the central issue of sexism, and the effects of legislation and case law on these determinations. Models of how custody cases settled by trial affect those negotiated outside the courtroom are explored. This study analyzes decades of Canadian child custody orders and other evidence to shed light on trends in judicial decision making and their causes.