The paper explores the possibilities and perils of an interdisciplinary approach to legal studies emerging as an alternative intellectual paradigm to the doctrinal tradition within legal scholarship. The privileged status accorded to the doctrinal tradition within the legal academy is sustained by its continued importance in providing a link between law as a field of intellectual inquiry and law as a field of professional practice. Despite the promise of a more pluralistic intellectual climate within the legal academy, it seems unlikely that an interdisciplinary approach to legal studies will succeed in challenging the preeminence of legal doctrine as the primary source of professional-knowledge claims about law. At the same time, however, any attempt to claim legal studies as a separate field of intellectual inquiry outside the legal academy confronts many of the same doubts about the nature of law as a unitary object of knowledge as the doctrinal tradition from which it seeks to distance itself. The paradox of the legal studies project is that whenever it tries to free itself from the embrace of the doctrinal tradition, it confronts epistemological doubts about the conditions for its own existence. It appears, therefore, that the legal studies project is destined to continue its labours in the shadow of the law.

Three remarkably similar court cases involving prayers in public schools have been decided in Germany, the United States, and Canada, all of which illustrate the issue of communities in conflict. Comparing these cases is especially pertinent for Canadian jurisprudence inasmuch as community has been trumpeted as important for giving life to the Charter. Developing four options for religiously plural federal societies, this article shows how these three countries each choose different routes, and how these choices relate to history and culture. Further, it points out that an emphasis on community in Charter interpretation is in tension with itself.

Recent proposals to reform the Young Offenders Act have sought to address the difficult question of the proper response to youth who commit especially serious offences. This article evaluates these proposals from the perspective or recent developments in US juvenile justice policy that have also been designed to meet serious and chronic youth criminality. The article suggests that a series of US state legislative reforms, in which individual responsibility and system accountability replace rehabilitation as the dominant objective of juvenile justice policy, offers a comprehensive, if imperfect, model for reform.

The Liberal government of Oliver Mowat, which held office in Ontario from 1872 to 1896, experimented with legislation providing for a formal arbitration structure to resolve labour disputes. Although labour had not requested the initial legislation, in the context of employer resistance to labour organizations, arbitration was viewed by some labour leaders as one way to get the employer to the bargaining table. Since Mowat's legislation did not compel the submission of disputes to arbitration, it was of little use in achieving this goal. Nonetheless, the legislation was used by the Mowat government as evidence of its commitment to equal justice for all classes.

In the mid-nineteenth century, a time when the liberal political order established itself once and for all in Canada, the question of the maintenance of public order took on special importance. The determination of democratic legitimacy required, in effect, a redefinition of the limits within which civil liberties could be expressed. At what point does freedom of speech become a call to revolt? How far can freedom of assembly go without taking the form of riot or rebellion? When does freedom of association transmute into conspiracy against the State? It was to these questions that the first Reform Cabinet adressed itself above all when, in 1843, at Baldwin's instance, it introduced three bills concerning public gatherings, processions, and secret societies. This article analyses the conditions under which these bills were introduced and debated, examines their tenor, and attempts to evaluate their implications for the nascent political order.

This article explores the question of the effectiveness of legal discourse. In view of the limitations of hermeneutic and socio-political approaches to the study of law, it must be asked how the law succeeds in maintaining its claim to say what is just and to persuade people of the necessity for repression when that which it exercises is, in sum, pretty slight. Based on a study of judgments in obscenity cases published in Canada between 1892 and 1970, this article shows that the judiciary sought to frame and change a social practice pertaining to the question of socio-sexual relations to the point of obliterating it, thereby depriving civil society of the capacity to discuss the ethical questions in issue.

On the basis of a review of research on prostitution and prostitution in law enforcement in Canada, Brannigan and Fleischman have argued that prostitution is as mainly adult occupation motivated by financial gain, not “pathological work undertaken by the emotionally damaged and the young.” In this paper, an alternative interpretation suggests, among other things, that: 1) although the majority of Canadian street prostitutes are adult, most of them began their careers as youths; 2) a much larger proportion of street prostitutes report childhood “sexual” and other “abuse” than do non-prostitutes; and 3) the “choice” to prostitute ought to be understood in terms of the social-structures which circumscribe that choice.