This article considers the problems associated with the international regime addressing the transfrontier movement of hazardous waste. Significant gaps exist within the current regime, it is argued, because historically, policy-making has been predominated by the concerns of developed nations, to the detriment of the developing countries most likely to be the recipients of the waste. To better understand why and how this is the case, the regime is examined through the lens of Critical Race Theory (CRT), a theory advocating, among other things, the need to recognize the context in which the problem is set, outside of the confines of a legal structure defined and changed only incrementally by the enfranchised. The paper begins with an overview of why the problem is of concern, as well as sets out the tenets of CRT to be used as tools of analysis throughout the paper. The paper then highlights the international, regional and bilateral measures that exist, attempting to identify some of the gaps in the regime via application of the tenets of CRT. The final section of the paper offers three suggestions as topics to consider in future negotiations: a call for an ameliorated Prior Informed Consent regime, the establishment of an international fund mechanism and potential options for remedial tribunals.

Memory is primarily valued in Canadian and American legal systems as an evidentiary tool and object. Remembering, however, is seen as a moral and cultural act among anthropologists. This article examines historical and contemporary cases and statutes involving the treatment of dead bodies in search of legal recognition of memory as “moral practice”. The contemporary cases analyzed construct indignities offered to human bodies as affronts to memory. The United States' Native American Graves and Repatriation Act has been interpreted so as to recognize connections between the worlds of the living and the dead. Ontario's Cemeteries Act, however, which sets procedures for managing all unmarked graves, has been interpreted so as to exclude aboriginal views of connections between the living and the dead. Legal recognition of memory of the dead in these cases does open an avenue for justice claims, but it is a narrow one.

This paper analyzes the processing of complaints against lawyers through the Law Society of British Columbia's disciplinary system between 1989 and 2000. It also examines changes to the context within which the disciplinary system operates, between the time period of an earlier study (1978–1988) and this study. Cases processed by the disciplinary system are discussed in light of a model that examines the process from the perspective of how cases are brought into the system (funnel in), and reduced in number by the disciplinary system (funnel out). Finally, the future of self-regulation is assessed in light of some of the renegotiations and readjustments to professional self-regulation that have taken place elsewhere.

The author presents the main results of a research project concerning inquiries conducted by the Commission des droits de la personne et des droits de la jeunesse du Québec concerning rights violations in youth readaptation centres. She goes on to discuss the efficacy of the inquiry mechanism as guarantor of the rights of youth housed in these facilities. Over the ten year period in question the Commission repeatedly affirmed that the use of solitary confinement as a disciplinary measure violated the fundamental rights of these youth. Nevertheless, an examination of the inquiry files demonstrates that this measure is still employed, despite changes in terminology and overall policy. The analysis also reveals that Commission pronouncements are sometimes contradictory and that their recommendations are often not followed-up on with much diligence.

Interpol is the most widely recognised ‘brand name’ in transnational policing, but to whom, or what, is it accountable? In the democratic countries of the West, debates and discussions about accountability frameworks for policing agencies have typically focused on organisations that have a legally defined and narrowly circumscribed jurisdiction, referred to in this paper as the ‘standard paradigm’ for policing accountability. There is a lacuna in this literature which has to do with those few agencies that operate transnationally and which, in important but ill-understood ways, are only partially bound by the jurisdictional purview of sovereign nation-states. This paper examines the accountability framework of Interpol, with particular reference to its historically questionable status as an Intergovernmental Organisation (IGO). It looks at Interpol's modus operandi and explains why its workings can potentially become the subject of hot political contestation. It considers some of the important articles of the organisation's constitution and reflects upon the agency's changing role in policing the globe subsequent to the 9–11 attack. The nature of Interpol's accountability will be analysed by reference to a typology that includes internal, external, formal and informal accountability mechanisms. It is argued that a fundamental challenge for transnational institutions is how to create and maintain the lines of democratic accountability that render them legitimate.

In the spring of 2001, statistics concerning criminality in France, - on the decline over the preceding five years, - showed an increase. The principal measure recommended by a Conference on Interior Security held in January 2001 was the adoption of legislative changes to combat the offences responsible for this increase in criminal activity, which the opposition was using to advantage in anticipation of the coming elections (legislative and presidential elections were slated for the spring of 2002). Thus in March 2001 the French Parliament approved first reading of a new “interior security law.” By the time of second reading in October 2001 the issue had become highly emotionally charged because of the events of September 11 in the United States, which resulted in the bill being “fortified” with a chapter “with a view to strengthening the war against terrorism.” Thus a link was made in the framework of a legislative text between daily security issues and international terrorism, - petty crime irritants to public order and epic conflicts affecting the entire planet. This link persisted, notably in polemics on security issues launched during the election campaigns, and subsequently in the measures instituted by the new government in May 2002. This paper exposes and criticizes this conflation.

Commenting on a collection of essays published in honour of Claude Masse, a career law teacher at the Université du Québec à Montréal and an engaged advocate, the author examines social justice scholarship as a genre of legal writing in Quebec. Itself subtitled ‘in search of justice and equity’, the Mélanges Claude Masse offers an opportunity to reflect upon the role of legal scholarship as an instrument of social change by comparing it to legal scholarship that is merely speculative in its ambitions. The influences on Quebec private law scholarship over the past thirty years – the relative newness of career law teaching, the impact of the Quiet Revolution on the theory of sources of law, and the massive weight of civil code revision in legal culture – may explain why writing on social justice in this period has been so resolutely fixed on law reform. Yet this book and the career of Claude Masse point to a second face of legal writing on justice and equity. It is argued here that legal scholarship is itself an act of resistance in that it involves, by its very nature, speaking out in a spirit of difference. The balance of these two themes – legal scholarship as an instrument of social change and legal scholarship as an act of social justice in itself – is a central feature of Quebec's university culture in law.

The texts discussed illustrate general methodological and pedagogical problems faced by the social sciences. Because of their illustrative nature each of these texts makes a significant contribution to our understanding of how it is that social scientists conceive of and deploy ‘race’ as an analytic category and how this impacts on the production of knowledge about crime control and social justice. In this way, the texts are telling in terms of how analytic categories, more generally, are treated in teaching and research. Through a comparative approach this essay takes three recent texts as a vehicle to argue that the consideration of epistemological issues stemming from the employment of central analytic categories cannot be avoided and that attempts to do so yield a passive rather than active engagement with the object of analysis. Moreover, passive approaches do not serve to represent a critically engaged, social scientific enquiry.