The doctrine of judicial notice has been gaining attention in Canadian jurisprudence. This article begins with an examination of how the doctrine has been recently used in areas such as family law to bring a diversity of community interests into the legal decision-making process. The history of the doctrine in American and Canadian jurisprudence is reviewed along with its principal characterizations in the works of Thayer, Morgan, and Davis. The article goes on to uncover several epistemological problems to which the doctrine is prone and proposes a means of getting out of these philosophical dilemmas while keeping the integrity of the doctrine intact. The article concludes by alluding to the communitarian uses to which the doctrine might be put.

This article explores and questions the colonial anxieties that mixed-race progeny of European and Aboriginal ancestry posed to government and religious officials in late 19th and early 20th century British Columbia. Drawing from federal, provincial, and local correspondence, missionary documents, legal statutes, and various court records detailing provincial and federal liquor infractions, I examine the social, legal, and political debates about racially-mixed peoples and'their “proper” place in the province. Pervasive fears about mixed-race peoples, I contend, were not merely symbolic or metaphorical but were deeply imbricated in material concerns about land. Specifically, federal and provincial authorities argued that race-mixing in British Columbia potentially undermined their efforts to appropriate Indigenous lands and to build the province into a “respectable” white settler society. Throughout this period, mixed-blood peoples elicited a penetrating colonial gaze from government administrators and missionaries alike. Although authorities relied on a variety of spatial and legal techniques to govern racially-mixed peoples, I suggest that liquor prohibitions at both the federal and provincial levels were integral to keeping mixed-race peoples in their place: or rather, “out of place.”

The paper begins with an outline of some legal and ethical principles regarding research confidentiality that frame researchers' choices, and then reviews the common law on privilege in Canada and the U.S. to show how researchers can design their research to maximise the legal protection of confidential research information. The paper describes various disciplinary ethics codes and the new federal Tri-Council Policy Statement on ethics to illustrate the principles that should be considered in the unlikely event that a Canadian court orders disclosure of confidential information that could harm a research participant. We conclude by proposing that universities and the three granting councils should campaign for statutory protection of research participants along the lines of the confidentiality certificates that are currently available in the United States for research on sensitive topics such as drug use, criminal activities, sexual behaviour, and genetic information.

This article examines the effect that cultural and technological changes have had on interpersonal communication and aims to provide an interdisciplinary explanation for the recent proliferation of defamation in electronic media. The authors argue that the absence of certain extra-linguistic cues and established cultural convention in the electronic environment often results in miscommunication which — if not itself defamatory — gives rise to emotional exchanges between interlocutors in a manner that provokes defamation. The authors begin their analysis with a discussion of defamation law as a recipient-oriented tort, demonstrating the importance of the context of communication in the determination of whether a particular remark carries a defamatory sense. In order to better understand how an online communication is received and understood by its recipients, the authors then investigate three differences between electronic and other media of communications: i) that the technology-mediated and text-bases character of electronic communication makes the process of communication more difficult and the incidence of miscommunication more likely; ii) that the nature of social interaction in the online setting has a tendency to increase hostile communications that might be considered defamatory; iii) that the cultural context and standards of communication that develop in online communities will reduce the significance of these hostile communications. Applying these considerations to the law of defamation, the authors conclude by rejecting the naive point of view that a libel published through the Internet ought to be dealt with in exactly the same way that a libel published in a newspaper is dealt with. The authors end by calling for further empirical research about the content that is produced as a consequence of contextual challenges in electronic communication.

In 1942, 22,000 people of Japanese origin were expelled from their homes in British Columbia and moved to numerous incarceration sites. The expulsion, incarceration, dispossession, displacements, and deportations of Japanese Canadians were accomplished through Canadian law. In this article, I examine some of the spaces of incarceration and displacement produced through the law and the systems of power mobilized through these carceral spaces. I argue that in mapping out the spaces of the Internment, we begin to see how the nation of Canada was made through racial exclusion and processes of violence. As the spaces of incarceration and displacement become visible, so too do the subjects of these laws and processes. Their accounts of the incarcerations and displacements reveal the long-term effects of the violence of the Internment.

Designations of space and place are significant to the history and formation of Canada as a white-identified country. Particular places discussed in this paper are public education and post-secondary schooling, which, as regulators of public spaces, act as indicators of belonging in the production of students' identities. White students in this study need the university for its credentialing function and for its training in ideological processes of their “becoming a teacher.” Their production as legitimate citizens and teachers is authorized by requirements of the institution in which they learn to “manage” cross-cultural relations. Maintaining the status of elite sites requires surveillance of knowledge production with respect to hierarchies of race, class, and gender. Elite social relations also designate which identifications and knowledges will be considered rational and legitimate. In the research on which this paper reports, white-identified pre-service education participants depend on the racial hierarchies of elite educational spaces to secure their own respectability among the white-dominated profession of teaching. It is a respectability which their whiteness both requires and affords.

In spite of the challenge to the principle of the unity and autonomy of law which made possible integrating the social dynamic, law continues to suffer from a lack of flexibility and openness and from a relative incapacity to grasp social reality. We shall see through Quebec's class action how law distorts and instrumentalizes the collective realities that it was supposed to grasp. Therefore, beyond its function as a rational instrument aimed at responding to social needs, we must conclude that law contributes in fact to transmit its own representation of reality in accordance with its inner logic and a certain vision of society. Moreover, and paradoxically, this position of openness on social reality leads the law to integrate certain aspects of it and contributes to a certain visibility of social conflicts.

In the last three decades, the public-private organization of policing in Canada has undergone significant change. It is now common sociological knowledge that there has been formidable growth in private security alongside evolving forms of private governance. These changing social relations have resulted in the prominence of actuarial practices and agents to enforce them. This paper examines how the Canadian socio-legal context affects and is affected by both private security and new, more aggressive, ‘parapolicing’ organizations. We update the state of knowledge on the powers of private security personnel by examining Criminal Code provisions in a post-Charter legal environment, comparing provincial trespass Acts, and analyzing how one aggressive ‘Law Enforcement Company’ as well as other private security firms, more generally, are both enabled and constrained by these legal provisions.

In 1995, Pamela George was brutally murdered by two young university athletes. The men were convicted of manslaughter and given light sentences. In this article, I examine the murder of Pamela George as gendered racial violence and continuing colonization of Aboriginal peoples. I suggest that as an Aboriginal woman working in the space of prostitution, Pamela George represented a body that could be violated with impunity. Respectable white men who journey temporarily into the zone of degeneracy to engage in an encounter in prostitution are not held accountable for violence that occurs so routinely in the spaces and on the bodies of the Other. Further, this relationship between bodies, space, and justice, in which zones inhabited by racial Others as well as zones of prostitution (often one and the same) are considered to be spaces in which universal justice does not operate, suggests how the violence remains invisible in the law. The constitutive features of this violence, its role in making white men and white settler societies, suggest why it keeps on happening and is so consistently denied in law. The identity making processes I describe are vital to colonization and, in this case, specifically to the colonization of Aboriginal peoples in Canada.

This paper describes the 1912–13 case of R. v. St. Clair, which concerned a Congregationalist minister's attempt to regulate the goings-on in a notorious burlesque theatre in Toronto. A “clean stage” was a goal of the moral reform movement of the time, and the criminal justice system was one of the avenues reformers took to attempt to achieve it. However, obscenity and indecency in theatres posed unique challenges. Two of the most important reasons were that under the influence of artistic and philosophical trends in the modern world, obscenity and indecency were becoming unstable concepts, and the nature, purpose and possibilities of art were being contested. The St. Clair case shows Toronto's legal apparatus grappling with these concerns at a time when the authority to judge and to decide what others might and might not view was slipping away from the Protestant churches and toward secular parties, including the courts. Ultimately the case suggests why the difficulties with censorship of verbal and visual representations may be an intractable dimension of our artistic, philosophical and legal position even now.

This paper is about critical connections that the law obscures in a liberal democratic, colonial context. It is about how law produces and sustains a racial social order by ruling out of order and irrelevant violent histories of Aboriginal dispossession. On November 1st, 1995 the Speaker of Manitoba's Legislative Assembly delivered a ruling that defined the word ‘racist’ as “unparliamentary language.” Thus, by means of parliamentary law a Cree Member of the Opposition was silenced, and ultimately expelled from the House. To explore the underbelly of Canadian ‘universal’ equality, and to underscore the systemic violence inherent in Mr. Oscar Lathlin's legal eviction from the House, I engage in a provincial counter - mapping which firmly reconnects the MLA to some of the racialized spaces he was elected to represent. I illustrate how the law produces racialized zones as well as subjects who are forced to exist outside the protected bounds of ‘equal’ personhood. At the same time, I point to the indispensable role of law in the making of the moral, white subject: a subject who remains unobliged, even in the face of deeply distressing evidence, to know him or herself as both perpetrator and benefactor of contemporary colonial relations of dominance in Canada.

The black community of Africville, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, was forcibly dismantled in the 1960s under a program of ‘urban renewal’. Residents had long fought to have their claims to this space legally recognized, as well as to improve the community with minimal services and safety measures, such as water lines, sewage and police protection. This article examines how the space of Africville was denied these services, constituted as a ‘slum’, and in turn how this status was seen to justify its removal. The land on which Africville stood, now a public park, remains a site of contestation and commemoration. As yet, the city of Halifax has declined demands for compensation and has legally maneuvered to silence resistance. This essay's central aim is to demonstrate not only how the law, through the City of Halifax, functioned as a regulatory measure to ensure a series of evictions, but also the way in which these practices and consequences can be remembered. In particular, it argues for a contextualized legal consideration of Africville's story which recognizes the complex interplay of histories of poverty and racism with narratives of justice.

The issue of the use of genetic engineering in crops and food production is not only a scientifical one. It is a social debate. The multinational companies of agrobiotechnology have interests that are opposed to the environmental concerns of many countries and NGOs. Of course modern biotechnology of DNA recombination can increase agricultural productivity but concerns have arisen about its potential adverse effects on biological diversity and human health. This paper deals with some of the social issues at stake by the use of GMOs in agriculture and food. It relates the recent emergence of the precautionary principle in international trade of GMOs. The adoption of the precautionary principle in the Protocol on Biosafety has created a normative framework in international commerce of GMOs but also in the social debate.

While widely regarded as a victory of grassroots feminist organizing and as part of the ongoing struggle for gender equity and female reproductive autonomy, the movement to legalize midwifery in Ontario has, in fact, derived considerable benefit from hierarchical rather than equal relations among women. This article describes the practice of “midwifery tourism” whereby Ontario midwives traveled to “Third World” maternity clinics in order to obtain clinical experience unavailable to them in the period that preceded the legalization of the profession in the province. Many traveled in order to garner the requisite number of births for participation in provincial programs designed to integrate practicing midwives into the health care system. In addition to this very quantifiable benefit, midwives were also able to enhance their professional prominence through a claim to first-hand knowledge of the birth practices of “Third World” women, a group mythologized within natural childbirth discourse as possessing innate feminine birthing knowledge as yet uncorrupted by Western medical practices. The re-emergence of midwifery in North America provides a cogent example of how, through epistemological claims about women's shared identity, “Third World” space, and those who occupy it, come to constitute a commodity for first world women's consumption and social advancement.