Supporters of the Meech Lake Accord of 1987 describe it as a compromise that will allow Québec to accept the Canadian Constitution Act of 1982 (and the new Charter of Rights) and to once again participate actively in on-going constitutional discussions. Before “accepting” the constitution, Québec demanded, among other things, the right to participate in the nomination of judges to the Supreme Court of Canada in order to counter what has long been perceived by Quebecers as the centralist potential of a federally appointed Supreme Court. The experience of foreign federations indicates, however, that provincial participation in the appointment of high court judges serves essentially to reinforce the political legitimacy of the court and to facilitate judicial centralization of powers in the federation. The author suggests that this part of the Accord is better thought of not as a victory for Québec, as is often claimed in Québec, but rather as a major political concession made by a Québec government apparently unaware of the stake of this reform, namely the consolidation of the decision-making authority of a central institution of the Canadian State.

The paper explores the limitations of class instrumentalist analyses of law in accounting for the failure of the criminal justice system to control corporate crime. The first part of the paper examines current theoretical perspectives in Canadian corporate crime research, with particular emphasis on the class instrumentalist analyses of law which predominate in the literature. The remainder of the paper seeks to develop a critical analysis of corporate crime which avoids the reductionism of such class instrumentalist analyses. In particular, it is argued that attempts to theorize the failure of the criminal justice system to respond to corporate crime require investigation not only of external factors influencing the enactment and enforcement of legislation, but also of the manner in which ideological discourses are articulated through the form and content of criminal law in such a way as to reproduce the popular consent for the differential treatment of suite and street crime. Failure to problematize the ideological role of criminal law in legitimating the differential treatment of corporate and street crime is likely to undermine attempts to make corporate offenders more accountable for their illegal behaviour by further criminalizing certain types of corporate behaviour.

Juvenile prostitution has been characterized alternatively as an expression of delinquency based on opportunity, and, as a form of pathological work chosen by adolescent victims of sexual abuse. Analysis of the trends in arrests for solicting in Canada suggest that the majority of persons arrested for soliciting are not juveniles. In addition, estimates of abuse in the background of prostitutes are extremely inconsistent. Questions are raised both about the relevance of the pathological model and the utility of treating soliciting as a crime.

This essay explores the possibilities within Canadian legal education for the development of critical skills, attitudes and practices. It examines the structure and organizational culture of law school, and analyses the assumptions underlying the dominant model of legal knowledge. The conclusion drawn is that at every level, legal education teaches political values, and rewards personal characteristics that are conducive to the preservation of the status quo and which serve to marginalize critical knowledge and practice. The final section considers and commends several modest efforts to make some room for the critical analysis which is so lacking in legal education.

Le ministère de la Justice du Canada initiait en 1985 un programme de recherche sur la vulgarisation de l'éducation et de l'information juridiques. Il nous demandait, dans une démarche exploratrice, de mesurer la difficulté linguistique des textes de loi dans leur forme vulgaire et officielle et dans les langues anglaises et françaises. Pour cette recherche exploratoire, nous partions de brochures d'information juridique produites par les gouvernements du Canada et de l'Ontario, brochures qui étaient mises à la disposition de la population. Nous recherchions ensuite, pour chacune des lois vulgarisées, le texte officiel correspondant.

In the inaugural volume of this journal Peter Russell of the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto noted that the political science community, after nearly fifty years of blindness to judicial power, had begun to regain an appreciation of the courts' political significance. Despite this reawakening, certain legal subjects very germane to political science still tend to be the preserve of legal academics. One such subject is judicial review, more specifically the impact of judicial review upon policy outcomes. To date, arguably the most detailed and valuable commentary on this topic is offered by a legal scholar, Patrick Monahan. In Politics and the Constitution, Monahan suggests that judicial review is not as universally consequential as we might expect. For him, the instrumental impact of judicial review varies according to whether it is based on the law of federalism or on the Charter of Rights. He believes that, for reasons to be outlined shortly, Charter review is likely to have a greater substantive impact than federalism review. In this article, I use a discussion of Alberta's reaction to the 1988 decision in Morgentaler, Smoling, and Scott v. The Queen to question this conclusion. This decision on abortion provides an excellent example of how federalism may temper the substantive impact of Charter review. The reaction of Alberta to the Court's judgement demonstrates how the intergovernmental interdependence typical of Canadian federalism may dilute or at the very least delay the consequences of Charter review for policy outcomes.