This essay examines surveillant practices that subject sex trade clients (“clients”) to socio-legal control. In particular, I employ the concepts of the gaze, voyeurism, and exhibitionism to unpack the surveillant dynamics, and consider how power and pleasure are harnessed, produced, and thwarted in the increasing scrutiny of the sex trade’s demand side. I further examine my own research of the regulation of clients within this analytical framework. Following David Lyon’s insights on the scopophilic dimensions of surveillance (2006), I argue that the instrumental goals of surveillance are interconnected with a voyeurism that gratifies the pleasures of looking at, categorizing, defining and making sense of, clients. Yet, bearing in mind the multi-directionality of the gaze, I also analyze the controlled exhibition of sex work signifiers, as information is not just gathered, but also displayed and performed.

This paper reflects on the moralization of the sex industry and the implications thereof in a case study of erotic dance in Ontario since the year 2000. It examines how subjects, objects, and practices are discursively formed and moralized in regulatory discussions of stripping and how subjects engage in and resist moralization. This article argues that in spite of the development of a labour discourse, a discourse moralizing stripping as prostitution, which is, in turn, framed as harmful and deviant, continues to inform regulation.

This article uses one case study to explore the use of criminal hate speech provisions against populist politicians. In a high-profile Finnish case, a populist politician was found guilty of hate speech after a four-year criminal process. Though the prosecution was ultimately successful, the various problems with the case helped boost the political popularity of the accused who was turned into a well-known public figure and member of Parliament. The case might thus be seen to warn against tackling populist politicians by means of criminal law. However, further analysis of the political context and a comparison with the Dutch prosecution against anti-immigration politician Geert Wilders complicate this conclusion. This article examines the consequences of hate speech prosecutions of politicians and sheds light on the conditions under which they can achieve (some of) their aims. The case also has lessons for other jurisdictions about when hate speech prosecutions of politicians are likely to be successful in terms of countering prejudice and disempowering those who spread it for electoral purposes.

Canada can boast of having one of the highest rates of naturalization in the world. In the past five years, the government has introduced a series of amendments to citizenship rules, with the majority having a direct impact on the naturalization process. From a sociological viewpoint, we seek to answer the following question: Is naturalization as “liberal” in Canada in the early twenty-first century as it was in the 1990s, or are we seeing a trend toward re-nationalization, as is currently the case in many European countries? Our findings seem to indicate no substantive change in political regime since the arrival of the Conservative Party in power, given the actual scope of the majority of the amendments. However, a discourse increasingly centered on identity and the protection of a specific way of being Canadian reflects a new rhetoric about Canadian citizenship, one that is very close to the “nationalist” concept of naturalization.

Refugee law posits the refugee as a rights-bearing subject prior to legal recognition. The determination procedures from which legal protection may be availed to a person escaping persecution demand that the applicant be recognizable as a subject entitled to law’s power to name her as a refugee. In this article, I draw on speech act theory to investigate the rhetorical structure of refugee recognition. Viewed as a performative speech act, refugee subjectivity emerges as a result of repetition and citation of tropes of “refugee-ness,” which function to legitimate and naturalize certain representations as evidence of the grounds for protection. This places applicants in a paradoxical position: they must attempt to deliver their evidence as a performance of refugee-ness, but in making the narrative recognizable and understandable according to the norms of the legal process, the singularity, and possibly the authenticity, of the account may be lost. The argument is supported by empirical research conducted at the Australian Refugee Review Tribunal.

Drawing primarily from the Canadian case, this paper explores the process of birthright citizenship determination for children born abroad through the use of assisted reproductive technologies. The determination of parentage is central to these cases, raising issues of how parental status is defined in the law—through biology, intentionality, and/or matrimony. Moreover, the complexities of defining who is a child and who is a parent, in order to determine who is a citizen, reveal fundamental contradictions in the consent-based model of liberal citizenship.

The criminal court is supposed to be a place of adversarial justice; however, these formal legal values do not appear to translate into practice. The courtroom workgroup, though made up of formal adversaries with widely divergent roles and objectives, is a community of workers whose shared interests include getting through the day as quickly and efficiently as possible. Using data from 142 days of bail court observation in Ontario the author argues that a “culture of adjournment” has taken over the bail process. Rather than the court being run by an efficient adversarial group of people processing criminal cases through the system, the courtroom has developed a culture that emphasizes the importance of expeditiously disposing of the daily docket over distributing justice.

In this paper, we use postcolonial theories of temporality—specifically the idea of belatedness—to examine how literal forms of lateness inform the so-called Lucky Moose case, wherein Chinese-Canadian grocer David Chen tardily performs a citizen’s arrest in Toronto. Canadian news media outlets, the Chinese-Canadian community, and R v Chen (2010) all contribute to the construction of Chen as an active legal subject, capable of working through the law on his own terms and in his own temporal framework. Consequently, Chen’s belatedness can be understood as part of a larger politics that serves to transform the temporality of citizenship and citizen’s arrest law in Canada.