Le concept de conscience du droit permet de s’intéresser à la compréhension et à l’utilisation du droit dans la vie quotidienne, afin d’étudier comment des personnes expérimentent leur rapport à celui-ci. En discutant à partir de données obtenues lors d’une enquête ethnographique menée au sein d’hôpitaux, l’objectif du présent article est de contribuer aux études sur la conscience du droit en montrant comment la recherche ethnographique favorise la compréhension de la dimension relationnelle de cette conscience du droit chez des personnes œuvrant professionnellement au sein d’organisations hautement structurées. Cette exploration de l’apport de l’ethnographie à une étude sur la conscience du droit appliquée à une enquête aux urgences québécoises permet de mieux saisir les liens existants entre une démarche de collecte de données (l’ethnographie) et la mobilisation d’un concept (la conscience du droit) dans une étude liée au droit et à la société.

This paper is an analysis of the anthropological evidence used in The Nuchatlaht v British Columbia. I address how this evidence was interpreted, argued over, and ultimately understood by the court in a way that did not support a finding of Aboriginal title. I examine this evidence against the requirement of the test for Aboriginal title in Canadian law. This test focuses on exclusive ownership and sufficient use and occupation before 1846. Canadian courts have said that Aboriginal title is a unique legal concept that blends the common law and Aboriginal perspectives. The Nuchatlaht made a territorial argument. A territorial approach to Aboriginal title is based on the recognition of Indigenous jurisdiction over a territory. I argue that Canadian courts’ continuing emphasis on a site-specific use and occupancy approach shows that the test for Aboriginal title reflects common law concepts of property more than it reflects Indigenous law.

There is a lack of knowledge on deaths related to police use of force across Canada. Tracking (In)Justice is a research project that is trying to make sense of the life and death outcomes of policing through developing a collaborative, interdisciplinary, and open-source database using publicly available sources. With a collaborative data governance approach, which includes communities most impacted and families of those killed by police, we document and analyze 745 cases of police-involved deaths when intentional force is used across Canada from 2000 to 2023. The data indicate a steady rise in deaths, in particular shooting deaths, as well as that Black and Indigenous people are over-represented. We conclude with reflections on the ethical complexities of datafication, knowledge development of what we call death data and the challenges of enumerating deaths, pitfalls of official sources, the data needs of communities, and the living nature of the Tracking (In)Justice project.

This paper examines the consequences of post-release management programs, arguing that these initiatives extend penal power beyond formal sentencing through mechanisms such as surveillance, discretionary policing, and information sharing. While prolific offender programs are framed as risk-management strategies rather than punishment, they operate in ways that mirror carceral control, restricting autonomy and increasing individuals’ susceptibility to criminalization. Drawing on qualitative interviews with crime analysts and police officers, I analyze how the prolific label structures police interactions, justifies heightened scrutiny and reinforces recidivist assumptions that shape sentencing and enforcement decisions. The findings challenge clear-cut distinctions between carceral and non-carceral interventions, highlighting how penal control functions fluidly across legal and administrative domains. By linking empirical findings to broader theoretical discussions of punishment, surveillance, and risk governance, this study contributes to ongoing debates on the expansion of state power in contemporary criminal justice.

Despite international calls to abolish the use of segregation in prisons, the practice has been defended by some Canadian correctional workers as a sometimes-necessary practice to preserve prisoner and staff safety. Informed through a lens of risk and the socio-legal literature on segregation, the current interview study explores perspectives on segregation from 28 correctional officers (COs) employed in provincial correctional services at a prison in Atlantic Canada. COs expressed a need to continue using segregation—albeit less often and under reformed contexts—to ensure safety for prisoners and staff and preserve prisoner accountability. Findings indicate COs recognize the structural, situational, and personal factors and complexities that shape decisions to impose segregation. They call for increased available resources to improve prisoner safety, dignity and wellness, prevent harm and self-injury, and reduce the use of segregation. We conclude with recommendations for provincial and territorial correctional institutions to consider moving forward.

It is well understood that safeguarding confidentiality is paramount to ensuring the success of research and the protection of participations. However, professional responsibilities and ethics of care can, at times, manifest in a requirement, or even a desire, to breach promises of confidentiality. We unpack this tension by drawing on research on the concepts of legal privilege, the right to report and the duty to report, the impacts of disclosures, as well as a study conducted with socio-legal and criminological researchers and criminalized or socially sanctioned communities who have participated in qualitative a research project. Our findings illustrate that while researchers with a clinical designation (e.g., nurses and social workers), enjoy clarity on professional duties, for researchers without such professional policies (e.g., criminologists) there is little guidance on when and how disclosures could and should take place. That said, when faced with the potential of actual and imminent threats of harm to an identifiable person, most researchers align with Supreme Court of Canada guidance, and would consider reporting, but with much deliberation regarding what constitutes harm, to whom one should report, and the consequences of disclosures. In the interests of contributing to this conversation, we conclude this paper with a decision-making framework that puts the Wigmore test into conversation with the Supreme Court of Canada’s 1999 Smith v Jones decision.

Dans cet article, nous mobilisons les théories queers afin de réécrire – réimaginer – la décision Centre de lutte contre l’oppression des genres c. Procureur général du Québec. Bien que cet arrêt ait amené certains changements positifs pour les personnes trans et/ou intersexes au Québec, le Tribunal maintient l’obligation d’inscrire une désignation du sexe/genre sur le constat et la déclaration de naissance. Par la méthode de réécriture queer de jugement, nous montrons, interrogeons et déconstruisons comment cette obligation et son interprétation entre en incohérence avec les théories queers, notamment par sa reproduction des normes cishétéronormatives et des conceptions dominantes et binaires des catégories de sexe, de genre et de sexualité.

Guelph, Ontario, is one of a few cities in Canada that relies solely on groundwater for drinking water. City officials anticipate that the municipality will experience a water deficit in the near future. In response to water security issues residents have actively engaged in the state-sanctioned water source protection committee. This article explores the water management planning process upheld by Ontario’s Clean Water Act, 2006, and examines the question: Is the Clean Water Act’s participatory mode to water governance inclusive of “environmental, health, and other interests of the public”? The analysis of this question engages with the political ecology literature and, in particular, Linton and Budds’s three-part hydrosocial cycle framework. It is argued that the technology of regulatory law (i.e., the Clean Water Act, 2006) constructs the power dynamics and social relations within the state-sanctioned water committee resulting in the weakening of the environmental interests expressed by the public.

Alors que la constitutionnalité de la Loi sur la laïcité de l’État était contestée devant la Cour supérieure du Québec, détournant les regards pour les orienter vers la question du port de symboles religieux dans la fonction publique, se jouait un autre enjeu de laïcité sur un terrain inattendu. Les politiques gouvernementales de gestion de la pandémie de COVID-19 allaient en effet mettre à l’épreuve deux principes aux fondements de la laïcité québécoise – la séparation des Églises et de l’État ; la liberté de conscience et de religion –, sans que ces atteintes ne soient diagnostiquées comme telles. Cet article se penche sur cet impensé des débats récents sur la laïcité québécoise à partir d’un rappel de ses fondements historico-juridiques, puis d’une analyse des effets du dispositif juridique mis en place pour lutter contre la COVID-19 sur l’autonomisation de l’État à l’égard du religieux et la liberté de conscience et de religion.

What does it mean to be a public Catholic institution in Canada? How does this Catholic identity evolve with the secularisation and diversification of society, and with the rising awareness of the complicated legacy of Catholicism and colonisation in Canada? This article explores those questions drawing on document analysis and interviews with staff working in Catholic health care. Taking a legal pluralist approach, it documents how Catholic health-care institutions navigate between transnational canon laws and ethics, and human rights law. Catholic health care is situated in a web of national and transnational legal regimes. We argue that this navigation takes different forms to adapt to societal changes, such as the authorization of Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD). This article speaks directly to how Christianity continues to play a subtle, but still constant presence in Canadian Catholic hospitals, and debunks tropes that construct relationships between state and religion as one of clear separation.

This article examines Bianca Lovado’s human rights complaints as the first trans woman transferred from a men’s to a women’s remand facility in British Columbia, Canada. Despite the initial transfer, upon re-arrest, Ms. Lovado was inconsistently placed in men’s and women’s facilities and was denied gender-affirming care between 2015 and 2019. Drawing on theories of biopolitical and queer/trans necropolitical governance, I conduct a thematic analysis of her five complaints against BC Corrections. The paper investigates how, despite human rights legislation protecting gender identity and expression, cisnormative sex-based correctional logics regulate trans prisoners. Building on Foucault’s institutions of power, I identify how cisnormative techniques of power led Ms. Lovado to face necropolitical violence via incorrect prison placement and denial of gender-affirming care. Analyzing how Ms. Lovado uses the tribunal to combat necropolitical violence, this paper illustrates the consequences of sex as an institution of power governing over gender, despite equal protections in Canadian law.

Defence lawyers working in lower criminal courts are increasingly invited to consider a variety of holistic or alternative strategies like drug treatment courts (DTC). This raises new ethical and practical questions. Scholars have been critical, showing how specialized courts circumvent the principle of the presumption of innocence, impose onerous conditions and surveillance, and lack the resources required to support participants over the long term. What is not known, however, is how defence lawyers representing marginalized clients talk about and engage with DTC programs. Our paper examines this, drawing from interviews with defence counsel working in Toronto and Montreal (n=98). We describe and discuss when and why participants report being either more supportive or more critical of drug treatment courts, and how they borrow from therapeutic justice in their “regular” practice. Our discussion engages with questions about access to health and social support resources, about interdisciplinary interventions and the ways in which people are criminalized rather than helped.

Decades before Canada abolished the death penalty, it removed infanticide from the Criminal Code’s offences punishable by death. In 1948, this form of culpable homicide became punishable by imprisonment up to a maximum of three years. Although this statutory invention has been linked to the post-war rise in the pathologization of women’s violence and tied to legislators’ concerns over jury nullification, its nexus with the death penalty’s abolition has been overlooked. If the prospect of capital punishment did not deter women from killing their newborns, could the death penalty be justified for other forms of culpable homicide? Critics who posed this question about neonaticide wedged open the consideration of other forms of homicide and categories of offenders, undermining long standing certainties over the deterrent potency of capital punishment. Rather than a step in the abolition movement, the amendment merits acknowledgment as a significant move against the death penalty.

This article presents a sociolegal study of decisions by a Canadian immigration tribunal on appeals for “humanitarian and compassionate” relief from criminal deportation. Drawing on the work of Émile Durkheim, we argue that the appeal decisions serve two legitimating functions. On the one hand, they seek to demonstrate the state’s capacity to ensure that the large-scale admission of mostly economic immigrants does not threaten the solidarity of Canadian society. On the other, the decisions address concerns about the justifiability of deportation by making vivid the moral incompetence of unsuccessful appellants, hence their unsuitability for membership.