Buried within the everyday deployment of business vehicles by Indigenous governments as a seemingly neutral way to pursue economic development are also legal notions of corporate personhood and representation. While it is occasionally suggested that corporate law is itself part of the problem of colonialism, the idiomatic notions of “representation,” “legal personhood,” and “business as neutral” form an opaque curtain that hides colonizing tendencies within the legal structures used by Indigenous peoples. This article explores these colonial tendencies at play in Canadian corporate law, showing how corporate law’s deployment of the “legal person” sits at odds with Indigenous juridical orders.

In the 1960s and 1970s, psychologists at the University of California, Los Angeles, operated two behaviour modification programs: one aiming to eliminate “feminine” behaviours in male-bodied children (“conversion therapy”), and one targeting autistic children’s so-called problem behaviours (applied behavioural analysis or ABA). The head of the autism program referred to his work as “building a person.” Decades later in Ontario, a radically incommensurate legal context sees conversion therapy banned while ABA receives millions of funding dollars. Drawing on legislation, case law, media, and clinical literature, I argue that the process of trans communities wresting themselves out from under conversion therapy involved discursively shifting from having a condition to being human—a process of “building a person”—still incomplete for autistic communities. While legal reforms protect some trans youth from harmful therapies, this does not extend to autistic trans youth, leading us to question at whose expense a rights-bearing trans person was built.

For Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, writing is predominantly about articulating their cultural belonging and identity. Published creative writing, which is a relatively new art form among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander prisoners, has not been used as an outlet to the same extent as other forms of art. This is, however, changing as more Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander rappers and story-writers emerge, and as creative writing is used as a way to express Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander empowerment and resistance against discriminatory and oppressive government policies. This article explores the use of poetry and stories written by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander male prisoners in a correctional facility located in southern New South Wales, Australia, to understand how justice is perceived by people who are (and have been) surrounded by hardships, discrimination, racism, and grief over the loss of their culture, families, and freedom.

This article offers a transnational perspective on Canada’s legislative response to globally expanded national security intelligence activities in the War on Terror since 2001. I situate Canada’s new legislation against the backdrop of US and Japanese legislative responses and analyze the transition, including Bill C-13 (2014), Bill C-44 (2015), Bill C-51 (2015), and Bill C-59 (2019). I argue that the thrust of this legislative trend has been the active legalization of previously illegal surveillance activities by security intelligence agencies, rather than passive ineffectiveness in restricting state mass surveillance enabled by information and communication technologies. The transition is in synch with a global legislative trend that lowers the legal standards of privacy and personal data protection and weakens checks and balances in democratic governance. As a result, mass surveillance has increasingly undermined and regulated the rule of law, not vice versa.

Human rights instruments are but one of many legal advocacy tools used by trans people. Recent legal scholarship emphasizes that human rights laws are not sufficient to address legal challenges facing trans people, particularly intersectional and systemic barriers. This article looks to Canadian trans case law outside of human rights law to reveal the many instances in which trans people’s fight for legal recognition and redress occur outside of the human rights arena. It focuses on trans case law in three areas: family law, the use of name and gender in court, and access to social benefits. Canadian trans jurisprudence illustrates that not only are trans legal strategies outside of human rights plentiful and effective, they are also imperative. An agile and pragmatic approach to trans rights is necessary, particularly when minority rights are under threat, and for trans people on the margins of trans law reforms.

Community trust in law enforcement and confidence in the administration of justice is put to the ultimate test when police officers act outside the limits prescribed by the criminal law. External and civilian oversight of the police can be essential to investigate and respond to allegations of police criminality and impropriety. However, little is known about the investigations completed by civilian oversight agencies and the prosecution of police officers. In this paper, we analyze 159 investigations by the Ontario Special Investigations Unit over a fifteen-year period. We examine each case from the laying of charges to prosecution through to sentencing. We provide an empirical analysis of how the justice system responds to police officers charged with a criminal offence. We situate these findings within the context of the broader justice system and police oversight. At the same time, we observe certain differences between the Canadian and American approaches to dealing with police offenders accused and convicted of criminal offences.

Cet article s’intéresse aux inégalités numériques qui touchent l’accès aux services publics, et plus précisément à la justice. Au Québec, les plumitifs sont des registres publics qui retracent l’historique judiciaire des justiciables, et ils sont disponibles en ligne. Dans une perspective d’accès à la justice, cet article aborde la tension existante entre les objectifs de la numérisation des services publics et les inégalités d’accès au numérique, en s’intéressant au cas des plumitifs au Québec. Nous retraçons l’évolution des approches en termes d’inégalités numériques en insistant sur la nécessité de dépasser la question de l’accès matériel aux services numériques pour nous intéresser aussi aux inégalités socio-économiques préexistantes. Nous analysons les difficultés d’accès aux plumitifs et l’usage qui en sont fait à la lumière des différentes dimensions de l’accès numérique selon Jan van Dijk (2006) afin d’envisager des pistes de solutions concrètes et efficaces pour améliorer l’accès aux plumitifs et plus largement à la justice.

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.

This paper argues that analytical jurisprudence has been insufficiently attentive to three significant puzzles highlighted by the legal pluralist tradition: the existence of commonalities between different types of law, the possibility of a distinction between law and non-law, and the explanatory centrality of the state. I further argue that the resolution of these questions sets the stage for a renewed agenda of analytical jurisprudence and has to be considered in attempts for reconciliation between the academic traditions of analytical jurisprudence and legal pluralism, often called “pluralist jurisprudence.” I also argue that the resolution of these problems affects the empirical, doctrinal, and politico-moral inquiries about legal pluralism.

This article examines the phenomenon of interface governance. It uses two interface technologies—Universal Credit’s digital account (United Kingdom) and ArriveCAN (Canada)—to explore how interfaces and their predictable glitches govern relations between state officials and members of the public. Drawing on tools of government literature, it argues that interfaces do not achieve their stated goals evenly (improved efficiency, digital literacy). Instead, they generate several unintended effects, including heightened bureaucratic intensity, diffused responsibility, and even eroded public trust in state agencies. It urges socio-legal and administrative justice scholars to take interfaces seriously and calls on scholars to adopt socio-legal-technical methods to better conceptualize the effects of infrastructure governance and to imagine other possibilities for public administration.