The sense of smell seems to have resisted the kind of objective measurement process that might have facilitated settling competing claims about offensive smells by applying a general rule or standard. As a result, authorities, including courts,cannot avoid making subjective judgements of taste. A nuisance lawsuit out of Ontario regarding a mushroom farm, or rather its smells, is used here as one source of material about the difficulties of adjudication in this subfield of the “law of the senses.” Attention is also paid to a curious quasi-judicial entity, Ontario’s Normal Farm Practices Protection Board, charged with resolving, mainly through mediation, disputes about farm smells between farmers and non-farming neighbours. Overall, the article shows that the ex post facto, situated and complaint-driven logic of nuisance that nineteenth-century law used to govern offensive noises as well as nasty smells, and which left plenty of room for subjective judgements of taste, keeps reappearing in the present day. Nasty smells seem particularly impervious to modernization, that is to being managed through objective measurement and preventive regulation.

Policy debates on commercial sex services provide increasingly complex insights into work on the street and in large commercial sex premises, yet remain largely silent on the contribution of the domestic realm to commercial sex, despite estimates that it accounts for a significant proportion of all commercial sex transactions. Policies that affect home-based sex work are ambiguous and at times contradictory, veering from the promotion of working from home to anxieties about the assumed offensiveness of sex work. These policies have been often developed without direct consideration of home-based sex work and in the absence of evidence. Remedying this silence, this article analyses policy development for, and the experiences of, home-based sex workers in New South Wales (NSW), Australia. The article concludes that working from home provides sex workers with opportunities for autonomy and wellbeing that are not available in other sex service environments, with minimal amenity impacts to the community.