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.

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 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.

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.

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.