Profound transformations of Western democracies are apparent today. These transformations express an insufficiency in traditional forms of social organisation. The question of governance, of its efficiency, has thus progressively become the major theme of our social debates. Law and social sciences have provided two contradictory responses to meet the need for a new approach to governance: either in terms of efficiency or in terms of procedural ethics. Even if both of these perspectives contain an element of truth, they are no doubt perceived to be intuitively unsatisfactory. It is this intuition of the insufficiency of these two solutions which our hypothesis (contextual proceduralization) aims to construct and to overcome. Our hypothesis states that the two solutions share, beyond their apparent opposition, the same presupposition which explains their parallel insufficiency. This common presupposition concerns their answer to the question of the ‘norm's mode of action’. How should we understand the operation by which society aims to regulate itself and to act upon itself by norms which it considers legitimate?

Canadian courts are increasingly faced with the challenging task of reconciling a secular, liberal polity with the Charter's guarantee of freedom of religion. Conventional approaches to liberalism and secularism have made this reconciliation particularly difficult by promoting a conceptually unsatisfying vision of an a-religious and hyper-rational public space devoid of moral commitments. At the same time, liberal theorists have failed to fully appreciate the nature and demands of religious conscience. This article considers liberalism, secularism, and religious conscience, and argues for an understanding of the relationship among the three that would consist of a mediated pluralism premised upon a language of civic values. Through a case law analysis, the author demonstrates that this form of reconciliation is already tacitly at play in Canadian jurisprudence. The most theoretically consistent manner of delineating the limits of religious conscience in Canadian society, this approach gives substance to religious freedom while maintaining due regard for the common good and the gifts of secular liberalism.

This article employs recent writings on governmentality to make sense of the ways that labour on the margins of the market and morality are being re-configured in late modernity. By tracing the trajectory of Ottawa strip clubs from 1974 to 2000, the authors demonstrate how the industry and its workers are (re)constituted by shifting discursive contexts, and by economic, legal and social processes. During this time period the restructuring of the labour process from entertainment to service interacted with regulatory strategies including moral contamination arguments, city planning and health management. The authors illustrate how within the normative parameters established by the courts, questions of morality, responsibility and risk get played out. Within this context, and consistent with neo-liberalism, strippers are increasingly constituted as self-regulating moral subjects. On the margins however, her «freedom» is conditioned by a complex web of legal, community, as well as labour discourses and practices.

This article explores the legal and discursive impact of R. v. Vriend (1998), the Canadian Supreme Court's first unequivocal pro-gay rights ruling. While not questioning Vriend as a victory, it engages in a critical interrogation of the Court's reasoning. Deploying the deconstructive insights of queer theory, the article reveals the role of law in producing the rigidly demarcated category “gay/lesbian” and speculates on its enduring discursive legacy. Through a reliance on fixed sexual identity categories, the liberal legal framing of “sexual orientation” in Vriend works to reinforce normative heterosexuality and to privilege those claims that reflect the legal refraction of anti-homophobic struggles as pleas for minority rights. Arguing that the insights of queer theory/politics can and should be brought into a productive relationship with law, the article concludes with some thoughts on the project of “queering law.”

Categorization plays a key role in legal reasoning but it has been under-theorized, particularly within common law legal systems. In this article, the author uses the Canadian law governing cheques to illustrate two different theories of categorization. The law governing ordinary cheques is relatively certain and the results of its application are mostly predictable. However, when that law is applied to variations on the basic form – to post-dated, certified, and double-dated cheques – the results are wildly unpredictable. The reason for this, the author argues, is the theory of categorization embodied in the governing legislation, the Bills of Exchange Act. That act assumes cheques can be defined by a list of necessary and sufficient conditions. However, such a theory cannot account for consumer and corporate practices. A theory of categorization based upon prototypes is necessary to explain the variations. They are systematic and coherent elaborations of a central model. They are not arbitrary because they are constrained by a prototype, but neither are they predictable. The theory of categorization assumed by the law obscures the complexity and fluidity of even such a seemingly simple category as cheques. A prototype theory of categorization, on the other hand, explains both the structure of the category, accounting for the variations, and the source of the law's indeterminacy.

In the early 1990's Canada began a process designed to increase the amount of child support to be paid by non-custodial parents in an effort to reduce child poverty. In 1997, after several years of study and coordination among the federal, provincial and territorial governments, Parliament passed a set of guidelines that linked the level of child support to the income of the non-custodial parent. This paper examines the historical development of the guidelines, and the assumptions that underpin them. The original goals of the guidelines are compared with their apparent and likely results in an attempt to provide a map for future adjustments and policy revision.