Originally published thirty years ago, Critique of the Legal Order remains highly relevant for the twenty-first century. Here Richard Quinney provides a critical look at the legal order in capitalist society. Using a traditional Marxist perspective, he argues that the legal order is not intended to reduce crime and suffering, but to maintain class differences and a social order that mainly benefits the ruling class.

Quinney challenges modern criminologists to examine their own positions. As -ancillary agents of power, - criminologists provide information that governing...

Comparative law and legal anthropology have traditionally restricted themselves to their own fields of inquiry. Mapping Marriage Law in Spanish Gitano Communities turns this tendency on its head and investigates what happens when the voices of each discipline are invited to speak to each other. Susan Drummond forges this hybrid form of comparative work through small- and large-scale studies of Gitano marriage law as it emerges in a Western European state, in a modern urban centre, and in particular communities and families.

Drummond's mapping of Gitano marriage law is grounded...

The sacred sites of indigenous peoples are under increasing threat worldwide. The threat's origin is traceable to state appropriation of control over their ancestral territories; its increase is fueled by insatiable demands on lands, waters, and natural resources. Because their sacred sites spiritually anchor their relationship with their lands, and because their relationship with their lands is at the core of their identities, threats to their sacred sites are effectively threats to indigenous peoples themselves.

In recent decades, First Nations peoples of Canada, like other...

The BC treaty process was established in 1992 with the aim of resolving the outstanding land claims of First Nations in British Columbia. Two discourses have since become prominent within the treaty negotiations between First Nations and the governments of Canada and British Columbia. The first, a discourse of justice, asks how we can remedy the past injustices imposed on BC First Nations through the removal of their lands and forced assimilation. The second, a discourse of certainty, asks whether historical repair can occur in a manner that provides a better future for all British...

Laws and Societies in the Canadian Prairie West, 1670-1940 examines the legal history of the north-west frontier, from the earliest years of European-Native contact in the seventeenth century to the mid-1900s. Challenging myths about a peaceful west and prairie exceptionalism, the book explores the substance of prairie legal history and the degree to which the region's mentality is rooted in the historical experience of distinctive prairie peoples.

The chapters, written by a cross-section of established and emerging scholars working in the allied fields of law, legal history,...

People with disabilities in Canada experience and inhabit a system of deep structural, economic, social, political, legal, and cultural inequality ? a regime of dis-citizenship. Despite the widespread belief that Canada is a country of liberty, equality, and inclusion, many persons with disabilities experience social exclusion and marginalization. They are socially constructed as second-class citizens.

Critical Disability Theory inquires into the possibilities and parameters of a critical theory of disability. Its essays argue that accommodating equality for the disabled is...

Since the introduction of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982, the question of judicial power and its relationship to parliamentary democracy has been an important one in Canadian politics. Some critics, suspicious of what they perceive as the "activism" of "unelected and unaccountable" judges, view the increased power of the Supreme Court as a direct challenge to parliament. But has parliamentary democracy been weakened by judicial responses to the Charter?

In Governing with the Charter, James Kelly clearly demonstrates that our current democratic deficit is...

Facing immediate deportation, a lone Guatemalan migrant entered sanctuary in a Montreal church in December 1983. Thus began the practice of sanctuary in Canada. By 2003, thirty-six incidents involving 261 migrants had occurred nationwide.

Sanctuary, Sovereignty, Sacrifice closely examines sanctuary practice in Canada. Randy Lippert suggests that, far from being a coherent social movement, sanctuary practice is a localized and isolated phenomenon, and often not primarily religious in orientation. It is also remarkably successful -- in every documented incident, state...

Bar Codes documents twelve years in the lives of a group of Ontario women lawyers. Shakespeare's Portia provides an overarching metaphor, reminding readers of women's attempts to enter into an unfamiliar culture. Sometimes the simple act of robing can enhance a woman lawyer's identity and grant her legitimacy. Like Portia, she is transformed from ?unlessoned girl? to wise counsel. However, women also face a countervailing image, that of the powerful professional gentleman symbolizing excellence.

Women encounter the norms of the legal culture when they enter law school and...

Domestic Reforms tells a complicated story of family and welfare law reform within the context of British Columbia's transformation from a British colonial enclave to a white settler Canadian province. It inherited a British legal system that granted married men control over most family property and imposed few obligations on them toward their wives and children. Yet from the 1860s onward, lawmakers throughout the Anglo-American world, including legislators on the Pacific Coast, began to grant women and children new rights. Feminist scholars have long debated the reasons for these...