Many Canadian Muslim couples are hesitant to resort to civil legal processes and attempt to resolve their disputes within the religious community. Islamic law’s exclusion of non-Muslim judges from holding judicial authority in certain family law matters limits the feasibility of aligning religious commands with family court orders. By extrapolating contemporary legal opinions (fatāwā, sing. fatwā) issued by institutions and narrating experiences of Canadian imams, this article documents the views of both researchers and practitioners, finding that neither holds secular court-ordered divorces contested by the husband to suffice as a form of Islamic marriage dissolution. This article concludes that both Canadian imams and fatwā-issuing bodies call for the development of extra-judicial entities that apply Islamic law’s Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) procedures in a manner recognized by secular authorities.

Conventional wisdom about civil litigation, both among scholars and political actors, holds that abuse of the legal process is common, that there is too much litigation, that it is “all about the money”, and that “a bad settlement is better than a good trial”. This constellation of attitudes that emphasize the economic function of law suggests that courts are an expensive conflict resolution mechanism of last resort and that their use would be minimized in a healthy market-based democracy. In this paper we apply a new sociological framework to understand the meaning and function of civil litigation in a democratic society. We focus in particular on the democratic function of the informational characteristics of litigation that require substantial disclosure and engagement between plaintiff, defendant and third parties. Instead we examine the role courts play in the maintenance and attainment of a social information order – norms and legal rules governing the sharing and withholding of information that depend on and constitute particular status relationships between actors (Ryan 2006). Using interviews and surveys of family members of victims of 9/11 we develop a theory of the lived experience of entitlement to information in Anglo-American legal settings with suggestions of how these ideas might translate to civil law systems.