This article investigates the manner in which states may rely on their socio-economic obligations, in order to bolster the constitutional legitimacy of laws and policies that aim to promote social citizenship. Focusing mainly on the South African government's use of its constitutional obligations to progressively facilitate access to health care services, the article shows how states may appropriate the obligations flowing from socio-economic rights to legitimize socio-economic laws and policies and partially to insulate them against rights-based attack. Through this legitimizing / insulating effect, it is argued, socio-economic rights enable states to counter the use of civil liberties by powerful private social actors, in attempts to thwart state efforts at socio-economic reform. Even if they are limited to fulfilling this legitimizing / insulating role, justiciable socio-economic rights may therefore advance the cause of social justice.

This paper examines the role of official inquiry in the context of controversial deaths at a mine explosion in Canada. It documents how medical science and law contributed to the social production of official knowledge about lost lives in the Westray disaster and analyzes the significance of this public truth-telling on the registration of other truth accounts. The paper concludes by considering the counter-memories to official accounts and the role that a formal public inquiry into the disaster played in further transforming the fields of enunciation about the truth of death at Westray.

From a comparative perspective between New-Zealand (Aotearoa) and Tahiti, indirect and direct administration during the colonial period (1840–1880) have produced similar effects: the acknowledgment of local custom in an effort to eradicate it. Polynesian answers were very similar: war or passive resistance, with more or less success. As far as the results of colonial policies are concerned, land spoliations were significant in both cases, though perhaps more important in New-Zealand then in Tahiti. The development of these Polynesian societies, as they take into account their cultural histories, will become a subject of increasing importance.

Governmentality scholars document the new, pluralistic, post-Keynesian modes of public governance linking State and non State agencies. This emphasis on “governance from above” needs to be complemented by a focus on “governance from below” by non State actors, especially in urban areas. “Governance from below” may involve actors ranging from commercial organisations and citizens' initiatives, to organised crime and paramilitary networks operating as sites beyond the jurisdiction of sovereign law and public authorities within and between countries. In both rich and poor countries these may be antagonistic to but may also become enrolled in forms of public governance. This paper challenges the view that governance from below fills the vacuum left by the retreat of the central nation State. Rather, these developments signify complex forms of re-articulation of relations of governance from above and below, which may at times strengthen the legal authority of the central State.

This article investigates a downtown revitalization project in a Canadian city and the problem it encountered to shed light on neglected aspects of urban revitalization, security provision, and knowledge transfer. With a gradual shift to “market friendly” downtown land-use, Windsor's core underwent expansion of a night-time, youth-oriented, retail alcohol economy. A security problem with moral dimensions emerged and was deemed to detrimentally affect police patrol resources, residential development and living, and retail business. Using governmentality and Latourian-influenced analytical tools, attention is paid to three interrelated facets: (1) the role of Windsor's downtown business improvement association (BIA); (2) the influential movement of a consultant's report through urban institutions rendered responsible for revitalization; and (3) resulting measures, including an interim control bylaw and then a zoning bylaw targeting and redefining a particular type of licensed liquor establishment called a “kiddie bar.” The implications of this analysis for understanding the role of BIAs, governance “from below,” and knowledge transfer are discussed.

This article relies on reported judicial decisions to examine how individual plaintiffs have fared in tort actions arising from alleged sexual abuse perpetrated in Aboriginal residential schools. It concentrates on three distinct issues: credibility, damage assessment, and vicarious liability. It concludes that tort law has failed the residential school plaintiffs. Their stories are seldom believed in contested litigation. The law fails to take into account the totality of the residential school experience in assessing damages. Indeed, damages are reduced to reflect uncompensated harm from residential schooling. The government is not held vicariously liable for all abuse perpetrated within the residential schools. These problems are similar to those experienced by other plaintiffs seeking redress for sexual abuse. However, residential school survivors have faced additional challenges in tort litigation for sexual abuse, over and beyond the formidable challenges faced by others. We could have and should have done better.

The scholarly analysis of public space, despite ideological differences, has tended to focus on the political and ethical dimensions of public space, construed as a site for encounters between people. This has been at the expense of what the author terms the “traffic logic,” a pervasive administrative view of public space that emphasizes pedestrian flow and motion, and tends not to discriminate between things and bodies. The paper illustrates the prevalence and effects of traffic logic with reference to By-Laws in the city of Vancouver. The author notes its important consequences through brief discussions of cases involving public protests and begging. While important, traffic logic's pervasiveness and bureaucratic commonsensicality render its reach and effects harder to discern. As a powerful yet mundane form of urban governance, it demands closer scrutiny.

The video and computer game industry now generates profits greater than Hollywood films and pornography, and ranks second in earnings only to the music industry. The most popular games are using more explicit representations of crime, drugs, sex, and extreme violence. Furthermore, with advancements in technology, the violent and sexual content of video games are becoming increasingly realistic and interactive. As a result, independent national debates have been taking place globally as to whether modern video games constitute a new social problem. In this study, we perform an interactive content analysis of the most popular video games and demonstrate that “socially questionable content” is just as prevalent as violent content in the most played video games. In addition, we examine “how” video games are rated by the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) and issues of voluntary compliance regulation.

This paper examines the fiduciary or trust relationship that is created between the members of a First Nation band council and the band members. In particular, the discussion is concerned with the fact that as the local form of government, a First Nation band council is somewhat analogous in its composition and operation to that of a municipal council. The respective nature and scope of the fiduciary relationship that is created, both in reference to a First Nation band council and a municipal council, is then reviewed in detail. In terms of aboriginal self-government, the concept of this fiduciary relationship is significant, as the municipal model of self-government would appear to be the direction taken by First Nations' people in their quest for self-government. Given this fact, the discussion then identifies the inherent statutory inadequacies of such a form of self-government in failing to recognize and adequately address this fiduciary relationship. Due to this statutory failure, realization of a functional form of self-government by First Nations' people based upon a municipal format may be adversely compromised. Furthermore, despite the chosen model of aboriginal self-government, in order to ensure its continued viability, it is imperative that the governmental model adequately accommodate the issues posed by this fiduciary relationship.

Recent governmentality literature distinguishes between government from above and government “from below” in an attempt to avoid “top-down” analyzes of state-centered government and to acknowledge the multiple and diverse ways in which the governance is achieved. By analyzing key shifts and changes in the regulation of prostitution in the UK in the last three decades, it is possible to complicate the distinction between the two modes of government. Whilst some writers highlight the ways in which government from above and below become increasingly blurred, this article argues that although the agendas and modes of government from above and below are difficult to disentangle, the effects on sex workers are not. Regulation remains rooted within coercive and punitive state-centered criminal justice responses, even though organizations “from below” may well be the very organizations tasked by the state with carried out those responses.

Based on a nodal governance perspective, this article attempts to make the case for connecting disciplinary perspectives in the study of urban governance. We argue for more robust analytical enterprises that incorporate mixes of quantitative and qualitative techniques that capture both “bottom-up” and “top-down” empirical developments. Whilst stressing the need to measure the nature and strength of ties between governing nodes, we suggest there must be equal emphasis on depicting the various rationalities, and the forms of knowledge and capacities that inform them, at various nodal sites. We also highlight a number of cross-disciplinary contributions that could be made to this project by research fields such as psychology, economics, health and social work, geography and urban planning. The authors draw from the work they are undertaking respectively in Montreal, Canada and in Melbourne, Australia.

Niklas Luhmann's sociology proposes that law is an autonomous social system, which cannot be determined from the outside. In this theoretical framework, law's relations with its environment are mainly grasped with the concepts of autopoiesis and deparadoxification, and through the corresponding paradox of openness through closure. It provides a framework to explore intersystemic relations which refuses a vertical, linear domination of law by other discursive formations. This paper takes (some dimensions of) the 2003 re-validation of the constitutionality of the prohibition of cannabis by the Supreme Court of Canada as a pretext to theoretically clarify and empirically explore this framework. In the case presented here, law notably gives precedence to some biomedical objects over the liberal doctrine. It may well do the exact opposite in future operations. Sociology is condemned to be surprised by the creativity that law displays in autonomously maintaining and transforming itself.

The decision of the Government of Canada in the fall of 2006 to terminate funding of the Law Commission of Canada was of a piece with the earlier decision of the government of Canada in 1993 to close the former Law Reform Commission of Canada. Unsurprisingly, the creation of the Law Commission of Canada was justified by the same general arguments as those that were invoked when the Law Reform Commission was established. The closure in 1993 occurred after the LRCC had more or less abandoned its original mandate and had taken on a role more in keeping with that typically performed by provincial law reform agencies. That of 2006, by contrast, was undertaken precisely because the LCC did not abandon its statutory mandate. This note explores the conceptions of law, of reform, and of commissions (institutional structure) through which public engagement with, and public participation in reimagining law have been pursued at the federal level. Rather than a lamentation for either the LRCC or the LCC it offers an optimistic assessment of the policy choices that a wise Parliament might well take up in its next iteration of the law reform idea.

In Memoriam I explained how the Law Commission of Canada developed a law reform model that sought to respond more effectively to the gap between law and reality and to democratize the process of law reform itself. The Law Commission situated its work directly at the interstice between law and action and experimented with different ideas about democratizing its research agenda, its networks of partners and its output. The LCC decided to firmly engage with interdisciplinary and community-based scholarship in the definition of its plan of action (from legal categories to dynamic social facts), in its research process (from legal expertise to social sciences and humanities and to action-based research) and its product (from legislative responses to mechanisms of empowerment). In Memoriam II is organized around four themes: first, that a democratized law reform project requires a process of “translation” between different audiences, second, that it necessarily implies a painful exercise of destabilization of the intellectual status quo, third, that it must support the empowerment and capacity building of the different social actors to embrace and demand change and fourth, that it must do so with care. The paper includes testimonies and case studies derived from the work of the LCC.