The purpose of this paper is to report on a study of the reputations of provincial human rights commissions in Canada among interested community organizations, women's groups, and minority groups. The focus of the study was on the reputations of commissions for effectiveness, responsiveness, and fairness in handling human rights complaints and implementing programmes against discrimination. The study was designed to test for an hypothesized relation between levels of public funding of commissions and their reputations in the above areas. It was anticipated that the lower the commission's funding the poorer the commission's reputation. Results of the study show that while commissions have generally poor reputations among community organizations, their low ratings are not related to levels of funding. The suggestion made is that poor reputations may be related to other factors such as high community expectations of rights delivery in an increasingly rights-conscious political culture and the structure of human rights procedure.

Given the visibility and obvious importance of judicial power in the age of the Charter, it is important to develop the conceptual vocabulary for desribing and assessing this power. One such concept that has been applied to the study of appeal courts in the United States and Great Britain is “party capability”, a theory which suggests that different types of litigant will enjoy different levels of success as both appellant and respondent. Using a data base derived from the reported decisions of the provincial courts of appeal for the second and seventh year of each decade since the 1920s, this article applies party capability theory to the performance of the highest courts of the ten provinces; comparisons are attempted across regions and across time periods, as well as with the findings of similar studies of American and British courts.

This paper presents an analysis of attitudes among independent business operators (getihu) in Shanghai toward basic tenets of legal reform in the People's Republic of China. Based on a survey questionnaire administered during the summer of 1993 with the assistance of the Law Institute of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, this paper suggests that the getihu are generally receptive to official norms about equality, justice, and private law relations. Despite having doubts about the efficacy of these norms, the getihu seem motivated by factors of disenfranchisement to accept them as useful in their struggle to get ahead. This suggests that the linkage between legal reform and economic development in China is not automatic, but will depend on the particular conditions of legal and economic actors. This has implications generally for the importance of local conditions in causal links between forms of private law and economic development.

In this paper, recent feminist analyses of the feminization of poverty thesis and proposals for a particular kind of child custody determination—the primary caregiver presumption—will be examined. The question of women's subordination in the context of child custody outcomes is of fundamental importance to the issue of financial support for raising children, and women's economic position in general. Yet the complexity and dialectical nature of this relationship is not fully appreciated in most analyses. As a result, recent progress in the area of family law reform may inadvertently entrench traditional assumptions about the role of women and men, perpetuating the myth of the male breadwinner, family-wage model.

Lesbian and gay rights are argued as rights to privacy, rights to protection from violence, rights to equality as individuals, rights to equality as family units, rights of minorities or as part of a larger framework of the recognition of sexual diversity within the society. In the last decades Canadian law has recognized equality claims, first through the reform of antidiscrimination laws and later through the interpretation of the equality provisions in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The major current issue, important because it involves lesbian and gay visibility, is the recognition of same-sex couples for the range of rights, obligations and benefits connected with marriage or heterosexual cohabitation. Recognition is occurring through ad hoc reforms, often in response to litigation or to decisions of human rights tribunals.

The protection against torture is one of the core human rights, from which no reservation or derogation is permitted, even in time of war or crisis. The Committee Against Torture, created pursuant to the Convention Against Torture and Other Forms of Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, has studied several aspects of treatment of the mentally ill. In some of the periodic reports submitted under the Convention, States parties have examined questions such as conditions of detention in psychiatric hospitals, administration of controversial treatments such as electrotherapy and psychosurgery, the abusive use of psychiatric detention for political purposes, and rules applicable to mentally ill persons accused or convicted of criminal offenses. However, in the periodic reports as well as their consideration during meetings of the Committee, relatively little attention is given to these questions, and some States make no mention of them whatsoever. This situation may be explained by the absence of specific guidelines from the Committee concerning the content and scope of the reports, the failure of non-governmental organizations to assist the Committee in this area, and the weakness of the Committee's investigatory powers.

The leading argument of the paper is that the paradigm of legal positivism upon which the prosperity of the jurists was founded since the mid-19th century has now become detrimental to their innovative capacity. Three major trends are considered indicative of a process of paradigm shifting: the ever-increasing specialization of academic and practicing lawyers; the dialectical blurring of the separation between law, politics and morals; the declining intellectual autonomy of the legal science through interaction with the new technosciences. The segmentation of occupational interests and the class conflict opposing the new generations to their predecessors could announce the end of professional corporatism as the official mode of representing and organizing the legal community. Law professors and, first of all, law and society scholars can play a crucial role by providing a better understanding of the current transition to a new paradigm of law.