While governments assert that Canada is a world leader in sustainability, Unnatural Law provides extensive evidence to refute this claim. A comprehensive assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of Canadian environmental law, the book provides a balanced, critical examination of Canada's record, focusing on laws and policies intended to protect water, air, land, and biodiversity.

Three decades of environmental laws have produced progress in a number of important areas, such as ozone depletion, protected areas, and some kinds of air and water pollution. However, Canada's...

Recent years have seen the retrenchment of Canadian social programs and the restructuring of the welfare state along neo-liberal lines. Social programs at both the federal and the provincial levels have been cut back, eliminated, or recast in exclusionary and punitive forms. Poverty: Rights, Social Citizenship, and Legal Activism responds to these changes by examining the ideas and practices of human rights, citizenship, legislation, and institution-building that are crucial to addressing poverty in this country.

The essays in this volume investigate current trends in social,...

This book provides a comprehensive exploration of ideological patterns of judicial behaviour in the Supreme Court of Canada. Relying on an expansive database of Canadian Supreme Court rulings between 1984 and 2003, the authors present the most systematic discussion of the attitudinal model of decision making ever conducted outside the setting of the US Supreme Court. They test the assumption, accepted by many political scientists, that conflict in the courts is due in large part to ideological divisions among the members. The groundbreaking discussion of the viability of the attitudinal...

The meaning of criminal responsibility emerged in early- to mid-twentieth-century Canadian capital murder cases through a complex synthesis of socio-cultural, medical, and legal processes. Kimberley White places the negotiable concept of responsibility at the centre of her interdisciplinary inquiry, rather than the more fixed legal concepts of insanity or guilt. In doing so she brings subtlety to more general arguments about the historical relationship between law and psychiatry, the insanity defence, and the role of psychiatric expertise in criminal law cases.

Through capital murder...

In the past several years religion has increasingly become an integral component of discussions about diversity and multiculturalism in Canada. Of particular concern has been the formulation of limits on religious freedom. Defining Harm explores the ways in which religion and religious freedom are conceptualized and regulated in a cultural context of fear of the "other" and religious "extremism."

Drawing from literature on risk society, governance, feminist legal theory, and religious rights, Lori Beaman looks at the case of Jehovah's Witness Bethany Hughes who was denied her...

An adversarial "client warrior" image dominates historical notions of the lawyer, and a commitment to "zealous advocacy" remains one of the core norms of the legal model. Yet structural changes within both the justice system and the legal profession have rendered the "warrior" notion outdated and inadequate, with a shift toward conflict resolution rather than protracted litigation.

The new lawyer's skills go beyond court battles to encompass negotiation, mediation, and restorative justice initiatives. Julie Macfarlane sets out the parameters of practitioners' evolving roles,...

Indigenous peoples around the world are seeking greater control over their cultural heritage. In Canada, issues of protection, appropriation, and repatriation have sometimes been addressed through negotiation. However, the legal environment for negotiation is sometimes dated, often uncertain, and always complex.

First Nations Cultural Heritage and Law is an interdisciplinary volume exploring selected First Nations perspectives on cultural heritage and issues of reform within and beyond Western law. Written in plain language and in collaboration with First Nations partners, it...

The relationship between law and religion in democracies committed to equal citizenship and religious pluralism has become the subject of significant interest in recent years. Law and Religious Pluralism in Canada seeks to elucidate this complex and often uneasy relationship. The chapters are written by leading socio-legal scholars who consider the role of religious values in public decision making, government support for religious practices, and the restriction and accommodation by government of minority religious practices. They examine such current issues as the legal recognition...

In a 1994 decision known as Howard, the Supreme Court of Canada held that the Aboriginal signatories to the 1923 Williams Treaties had knowingly given up not only their title to off-reserve lands but also their treaty rights to hunt and fish for food. No other First Nations in Canada have ever been found to have willingly surrendered similar rights.

Peggy J. Blair gives the Howard decision considerable context. She examines federal and provincial bickering over "special rights" for Aboriginal peoples and notes how Crown policies toward Indian rights changed as settlement pressures...