This article interrogates the laws that govern safety crimes, harmful but typically unintentional acts of negligence that occur in the production of goods and services. Acts that injure employees at work are commonly depicted in legal discourses as accidents and penalized through administrative laws, although other negligent acts such as driving offences causing injury or death are treated as potentially criminal events. Through a discourse analysis of legal and regulatory texts and documents, the authors argue that the constitution of workplace safety crime is rooted in complex historical factors that shape state responses to corporate wrongdoing. This article documents the roots of this “common sense” view of workplace crime, empirically focusing on Canadian corporate negligence law, and concludes with tentative strategies of resistance and change.

Since the 1960s, public consultation has emerged as an important democratic tool, allowing governments to inform, debate, and learn from the general public. Since the 1980s, international trade agreements have wielded significant influence over domestic law making, as an ever more ‘comprehensive’ set of topics is regulated via treaty. In Canada, these two trends have yet to meet. Neither the public nor Parliament is involved in trade policy making, raising concerns about the democratic legitimacy of expansive trade agreements. Through the lens of the recent Canada and European Union (EU) Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), this article examines whether trade law’s consultation practices can be aligned with those of other federal government departments. We identify five key values that make consultations successful—diversity, education, commitment, accountability, and transparency—and consider the viability of their inclusion in trade consultations.

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.

Drawing primarily from the Canadian case, this paper explores the process of birthright citizenship determination for children born abroad through the use of assisted reproductive technologies. The determination of parentage is central to these cases, raising issues of how parental status is defined in the law—through biology, intentionality, and/or matrimony. Moreover, the complexities of defining who is a child and who is a parent, in order to determine who is a citizen, reveal fundamental contradictions in the consent-based model of liberal citizenship.

The criminal court is supposed to be a place of adversarial justice; however, these formal legal values do not appear to translate into practice. The courtroom workgroup, though made up of formal adversaries with widely divergent roles and objectives, is a community of workers whose shared interests include getting through the day as quickly and efficiently as possible. Using data from 142 days of bail court observation in Ontario the author argues that a “culture of adjournment” has taken over the bail process. Rather than the court being run by an efficient adversarial group of people processing criminal cases through the system, the courtroom has developed a culture that emphasizes the importance of expeditiously disposing of the daily docket over distributing justice.

In this paper, we use postcolonial theories of temporality—specifically the idea of belatedness—to examine how literal forms of lateness inform the so-called Lucky Moose case, wherein Chinese-Canadian grocer David Chen tardily performs a citizen’s arrest in Toronto. Canadian news media outlets, the Chinese-Canadian community, and R v Chen (2010) all contribute to the construction of Chen as an active legal subject, capable of working through the law on his own terms and in his own temporal framework. Consequently, Chen’s belatedness can be understood as part of a larger politics that serves to transform the temporality of citizenship and citizen’s arrest law in Canada.