Contemporary shifts in legal pluralism theory (from weak, intra-state pluralism to strong, extra-state pluralism and from socio-scientific to critical legal pluralism) have raised important new questions about law as a normative phenomenon. This article argues for the significance of implicit and inferential legal norms. It begins by considering a movement of thought—evangelicalism—that subordinates the implicit and informal to the explicit and authorized. The essay then outlines the principal features of a non-chirographic legal pluralism and explores how regimes of written rules are consistently made over by those whose conduct they are presumptively meant to govern.

This article presents the results of an empirical study of the contractual practices of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) operating in the area of Dakar, Senegal, from the perspective of legal pluralism. The notion of internormativity developed by Jean-Guy Belley in his study of the relationships between Alcan and its suppliers serves to question the importance of state law in business relationships and economic development and the approach taken by the World Bank with respect to the relationship between formal and informal norms in developing countries.

In 1998, the three major government funding councils put in place the Tri-Council Policy Statement (TCPS) to regulate all research involving humans in Canada conducted at institutions funded by the councils. This article examines the process of developing the TCPS, a historic and very important document in Canada's research ethics landscape, and the application of the democratic values of legitimacy, transparency, representation, accountability, and community engagement in that process. The authors argue that efforts were made to ensure basic democratic values in the process but that these attempts should have been taken farther. This examination is a timely exercise in light of the new draft now being prepared to replace the current version of the TCPS. The authors also consider this ongoing process of establishing a new edition and reflect on lessons to be learned.

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 article reflects on the lesser-known theoretical effects of the dominance of legal monism by contrasting them with the advantages of an approach open to different forms of legal pluralism, including those prominent in the thought of Jean-Guy Belley. In the context of the growing phenomenon of “cause lawyering,” the authors illustrate how the theme of political engagement in law, present in the practice of advocacy and quietly influential for Belley, benefits from a theoretical outlook emancipated from the monist conventions that in many ways still have an impact on contemporary legal thought and the dominant reflexes of its epistemic community.

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?

Parliament recognized the fundamental importance of protecting access to government information when it enacted the federal Access to Information Act. When the Act came into force on Canada Day 1983, Canada was just one of a handful of countries to have legislative protection of access to government information. Now, 27 years later, over 80 countries across the globe have enacted some form of access to information legislation.

Although the world has followed Canada's lead in recognizing the importance of protecting access to government information, Canada has “fallen behind” (to borrow the descriptor used by journalist and author Stanley Tromp) and may even be “backsliding” (in the words of Laura Neuman of the Carter Center). What has gone wrong with the federal access regime? Why should legal studies scholars care? I address these questions in this article. I start by outlining the symbiotic role between academics and access to government information. I then identify three key factors that have contributed to the decline of the federal access regime: administrative resistance, legislative degeneration, and political indifference. Finally, I close by briefly discussing three ways in which scholars can continue to work to protect and promote access to information in Canada.

Academics and Access

Academics took the lead in advocating for access to government information in the 1960s and 1970s in Canada. One of the earliest advocates was Donald C. Rowat, a professor of Political Science at Carleton University. In a 1965 article entitled “How Much Administrative Secrecy?”, he summarized the key arguments in favour of protecting access to government information, writing

Most of the draft documents, memoranda, communications, and other textual materials amassed by government agencies do not become public record unless efforts are taken to obtain their release. One mechanism for doing so is “access to information” (ATI) or “freedom of information” (FOI) law. Individuals and organizations in Canada have a quasi-constitutional right to request information from federal, provincial, and municipal levels of government. A layer of bureaucracy has been created to handle these requests and manage the disclosure of information, with many organizations having special divisions, coordinators, and associated personnel for this purpose. The vast majority of public organizations are subject to the federal Access to Information Act (ATIA) or the provincial and municipal equivalents.

We have been using ATI requests to get at spectrum of internal government texts. At one end of the spectrum, we are seeking what Gary Marx calls “dirty data” produced by policing, national security, and intelligence agencies. Dirty data represent “information which [are] kept secret and whose revelation would be discrediting or costly in terms of various types of sanctioning.” This material can take the form of the quintessential “smoking gun” document, or, more often, a seemingly innocuous trail of records that, upon analysis, can be illuminating. Dirty data are often kept from the public record. At the other end of the disclosure spectrum are those front-stage texts that represent “official discourse,” which are carefully crafted and released to the public according to government messaging campaigns.

Belley proposes a “new legal pluralism” as a new way of thinking and a new perception of law. This conception of law is far from the dissident approach taken in the original understanding of legal pluralism. Instead, it introduces a subversive element by positing the “new legal pluralism” as a substitute for the monist conception of law. This perspective contributes to an understanding of Islamic law and opens up opportunities to explore the sources of Islamic law elaborated in the seventh century CE and redefine the interaction of religion and law at their political interface. The author's hypothesis is that the paradigm of legal pluralism is foundational to Islamic law. Belley's approach constitutes a way of understanding the limitations of the construction of law characterized as “religious.”

Among prison scholars it is well known that access to penal institutions for the purposes of conducting research is not a given. For instance, in the Canadian context, some social researchers have been effectively barred from conducting studies inside prisons or have had to modify their research designs in order to enter the carceral. The ability to obtain unpublished records on imprisonment policies and practices in Canada has also been cited as a cumbersome process that often results in non-disclosure of the documents sought.

Beyond data collection, social researchers have also raised concerns about the challenges of communicating their findings to publics outside the academy. In criminology, in particular, scholars have been concerned with the perceived lack of influence academic work has had on public policy and public opinion. These interventions, while not novel, have resulted in calls for a public criminology, renewing a discussion on how to disseminate research to non-academic audiences.

Although much of the access to information literature is focused on the techniques used to obtain data as well as the barriers encountered during the process, and the public criminology literature is centred principally around the question of how to reach and influence those outside the halls of the university, few have examined how data collection and dissemination activities shape subsequent information flows. Here, I am not referring to the moments when and sites where the “policing of criminological knowledge” occur that mediate access to data sources and diffusion opportunities based on the epistemological orientations and political agendas of gatekeepers.

This article concerns the second round of consultations on the drafting of the 2002 Immigration and Refugee Protection Regulations. In this context, it explores the nature of the “communication space” within which regulatory authorities and interest groups interact with each other. The authors analyse the extent to which the consultations met their main goal of remedying the lack of democratic legitimacy in the process of drafting the regulations. Both discourse analysis and analysis of the concrete results of the consultations reveal that the “communication space“ is shaped by certain pre-established rules. The authors codify and compare the arguments put forward by interest groups in their proposals for modifications as well as the justifications offered by Citizenship and Immigration Canada. They conclude that issues capable of calling into question the soundness of regulatory interventions, having already been dealt with during the first round of consultations, are seldom raised during the second round. The authors also assert that the relationship between state and non-state actors is complementary and interdependent rather than antagonistic, noting that interventions by interest groups have a real impact on the regulations. Consultation is at the root of plurality of modes of production of law within the legal order of the state. The article highlights the complementary nature of the norms produced by state and other sources of normativity and draws attention to the importance of the cooperation between state and civil society actors.

In perhaps no other area of scholarship is access to information (ATI) legislation as contentious and the stakes so high as in policing and security research. Although ATI has become an important mechanism by which researchers have been able to analyse security and police practices, there remain significant legislative barriers preventing access. A decade after 9/11, the need for increased scrutiny of government agencies tasked with security and policing remains high, as is evident from the proliferation of public and private policing, the advance of a general societal risk aversion, and the now ubiquitous nature of state security and surveillance. In this article we offer first-hand accounts that highlight the institutional imbalances between police organizations and researchers, and consider the potential long-term effects of ATI in this area of scholarship. ATI legislation in Canada is increasingly becoming both a tool for researchers to penetrate policing organizations and also a weapon with which security institutions can stymie critical inquiry.

The significant amount of Canadian ATI research that has stemmed from national security scholars shows the difficulties faced in this field when attempting to exercise the “right to know.” The strident lack of transparency within security and policing institutions tips the balance of access versus secrecy towards the latter, under the ever-present assumption that secrecy equals security. However, this area of research plays an important role in political discourse by fostering public dialogue and raising awareness of questionable and illegal security practices. As Larsen points out, we have seen ATI used recently to shed light on politicized security issues such as the Arar Inquiry, the campaign to repatriate Abousfian Abdelrazik, and, most recently, the Afghan detainee transfer scandal.

This article focuses on Jean-Guy Belley's interest in the relationship between law and the economy—an interest illustrated by his major work on the contractual practices of the multinational company Alcan. They lament contemporary economic sociology's lack of interest—until recently—in legal phenomena, which contrasts with the close attention paid by two historic figures in “economic sociology,” Max Weber and John R. Commons, to the relationships between law and economics. The authors argue that to fully grasp the importance of the legal dimension in socio-economic analysis, we must return to the foundational insights of Weber and Commons. However, they particularly stress differences between Weber and Commons as to the unity or heterogeneity of law and the economy, the role of ethics, the search for an all-encompassing approach in the construction of ideal-types, the various forms of constraint that characterize law (whether psychological, economic, or physical), and the distinction between state law and non-state law. The latter element is why the authors, like Belley himself, argue that due consideration for legal plurality should be a central thread in any sociological analysis of the interplay between law and the economy.

Race and racism have long played an important role in Canadian law and continue to do so. However, conducting research on race and criminal justice in Canada is difficult given the lack of readily available data that include information about race. We show that data on the race of victims and accused persons are being suppressed by police organizations in Canada and argue that suppression of race prevents quantitative anti-racism research while not preventing the use of these data by the police for racial profiling. We also argue that when powerful institutions, such as the police, have knowledge that they keep secret or refuse to discover, it serves the interests of those institutions at the expense of the public. Fears that reporting of racial data will result in racial profiling or the stigmatization of racialized communities are not assuaged by the repression of this information. Stigmatization may still occur, and racial profiling can continue to happen, but without public knowledge. Quantitative anti-racist research requires consistent, institutionalized reporting of race data through all aspects of Canadian justice. We outline what data are available, what data are needed, and where consistency is lacking. It is argued that institutional preferences for white-washed data, with race and ethnicity removed, should be subrogated to transparency.