This paper explores various dimensions of the professorial office as a “legal” space. The office of a professor is, in one dimension, just a generic geometric place without a purpose or occupant that embodies potential in purely formal terms. But it is also a site, in that its very location, size and organization reflect functionality—the values, process and decision-making institutions by which occupancy is determined. In addition, the office embraces a stage and role through which occupants interact with colleagues, students and strangers in ways that confirm or disconfirm relationships of power and subordination. At the same time, the professorial office has a performative dimension, through which the normativity of a community—of professors, staff and students—is imagined and acted upon. Still again, in yet another dimension, it is a ritual space where professors work, relax, reflect, and reflexively contemplate patterns and forms of thoughts. Such an office exists wherever its occupants choose to place it. Finally, the office is a non-place of personal discovery—an intimation of space that has no location apart from the relationships that it creates and by which it is created.

This study investigates the role of an emerging legal doctrine, the precautionary principle, in the development of the plan to manage West Nile Virus in the City of Toronto during the 2003 season. Specifically, it asks whether the precautionary principle, widely expected to transform environmental and public health decision-making, operated as a map or guide to officials trying to navigate through the uncertainty associated with both the virus and the “cure.” Although the study focuses on a very particular local context, it also addresses the broader challenges that are gathering for governments hoping to lean on the precautionary principle for policy guidance in the face of controversy. In the case of West Nile Virus, public health officials seemed to confront an intractable problem: taking precaution with respect to the virus, an uncertain public health hazard, meant facing the uncertain environmental and health risks associated with chemical pesticides. The study draws on qualitative empirical data gathered from participant observation sessions in the Toronto city council chamber and comprehensive semi-structured interviews with almost a dozen key policy actors. The purpose of this detailed empirical analysis is to evaluate the potential of the precautionary principle as a policy instrument in light of a common claim of the principle's critics. Can it point the way out of controversy? Or does the precautionary principle, as is argued by legal academics such as Cass Sunstein, “point in no direction at all”?

In this paper, we investigate the institutional interdependence between courts and police in the governance of picketing. The analysis contributes insight into how economic and security rights are balanced against political and civil rights in the oblique affirmation of a grounding of authority which is arguably more potent because of the indirectness of its everyday construction. We proceed by deriving the concept “judgement by deferral” from current literature on governance. We apply this to an investigation of how courts evaluate injunction claims in cases involving picketing and how police responsibilities are understood in these cases. We then examine police perception of their role in the governance of picketing and demonstrate how both the courts and police engage in deferral practices to avoid hard decisions. Finally, we show how these practices comprise a systemic approach to the governance of picketing, which can nonetheless break down in its application. Our sources for this assessment consist of court cases and our own interview samples drawn from police, union and management officials.

Workers from the Commonwealth Caribbean employed seasonally on Canadian farms through the Canadian Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program are thought to be ignorant of prevailing labour standards. This marks not only an empirical claim about legal ignorance and knowledge, but also a theoretical claim about the role law assumes in capitalist relations, particularly in the ways law shapes consciousness and behaviour. The seasonal agricultural worker context presents an intriguing opportunity for the application of legal consciousness studies. Drawing specifically on the emerging field of new legal consciousness studies, with its emphasis on the legal consciousness of non-legal professionals, the paper contests both the empirical and theoretical aspects of the legal ignorance claim. New legal consciousness studies undergo an important revision to account for law's role in forming the background rules for liberal capitalism. In this respect, the paper points the direction for future study of the relationship between seasonal agricultural worker resistance and law.

The courts' continuing treatment of aboriginal oral histories as cultural artefacts is appallingly ethnocentric despite recommendations to consider the perspectives of aboriginal peoples and adapt the law of evidence. In this paper, I describe how Chief Justice McEachern of the British Columbia Supreme Court responded when a Gitksan witness, Gwaans, presented her adaawk as evidence of Gitksan land ownership and social organization. The Court was not able to hear or accept the adaawk as presented - a legal and political institution rather than a simple cultural artefact or chronological history record. The forms of expression, symbolism, and inter-connections between the worlds of spirits, humans, and animals proved to be beyond the grasp of the trial judge. Will the adaawk be treated any differently in future litigation? This paper addresses a number of concerns such as having the judiciary (1) apply a reductionist approach to the adaawk, and (2) evaluate the adaawk according to the rules of court instead of those inherent in the adaawk.

A determining factor in the evolution of their power relationship with the State was the fact that Native groups became conscious of their identity and collective power and that they defined their collective identity using the concept of “nation”. The federal positions have also changed on the question of Aboriginal collective rights and the State has modified certain principles in its policies. The Native groups have redefined their collective rights according to their needs and political objectives. With that concept, they have developed a form of counter-hegemony, releasing them from the domination of the State and enabling them to attain the political autonomy they are seeking.

A common misconception is that land on Canadian Indian reserves is collectively owned by the band. In reality, individual band members can access four types of private property regimes on Canadian Indian reserves. This paper looks at one of these regimes, Certificates of Possession (CPs), to determine the benefits and consequences of CPs for economic development on Canadian Indian reserves. In particular, the paper focuses on how Six Nations band members have been able to use CPs to get around the seizure for debt restrictions in the Indian Act to acquire mortgages to build and own their own housing. The paper finds that CPs, in conjunction with band and/or government support, may provide a practical solution for tackling the housing problems that face many reserves in Canada.

Should courts seek to apply the concept of equality—as developed in public law litigation—in controversies between private parties? In this review article I argue that the distinction between the concept of “private” and “public” in current society is essentially based on the way equality is treated in each of these fields of social activity. This is because things in our society that are regarded as “public” are those that belong, equally, to everyone, while the things that are “private”—do not. Accordingly, the public field is dominated by the norm of political equality, while the private law field is dominated by the absence of a strict requirement for equal distribution of economic goods. So far, the phenomenon of courts applying the norm of equality in the private law field referred, largely, to cases in which courts enforced some fundamental requirements of political equality, such as the norm against racial discrimination, in private law litigation. Thus, this phenomenon does not raise serious questions of institutional legitimacy in current liberal democracy.