Historians of the Cold War have tended to focus on the repression of political dissidents during that period, but only recently has attention been shifted to the simultaneous suppression of other types of non-conformity, such as sexual variance and non-traditional gender roles. Parallel to the repression of internal political dissent which accompanied the international Cold War, another, more subtle, campaign was proceeding. This was the attempt to re-establish the social order, based on family life and traditional sex roles, which the war had tended to undermine.

Current interest in the non-medical use of cocaine in Canada can be gauged by the attention this drug is getting in the various media. Not surprisingly, researchers have now entered the arena in the hope of answering some of the questions posed by this phenomenon. A similar trend occurred in regard to marijuana more than a decade ago when popular concern led to a federal commission that eventually recommended the repeal of the offence of cannabis possession. The wave of concern created considerable scholarly interest in Canada's approach to the control of narcotic drugs, including cannabis, which had been defined as narcotic for legal purposes. Much research followed on various fronts, from studies on the effects of cannabis on health to the social consequences of punishment.

Several studies have examined the origins of Canada's legislative response to narcotic drug use. A principal conclusion from these studies is that legislation became possible because of hostility toward minority groups associated with drug use, specifically, the Chinese who were known for their use of opium. In the present paper, however, we see that drug control grew as much out of a “cocaine scare” as out of concern with opium use. Moreover, cocaine attracted attention in part precisely because its use was not confined to despised minorities, but permeated society as a whole, affecting “young people as well as seniors,” “men and women,” those from “poorer classes,” those from “respectable families” and those “who should and do know better.”

… the problem of providing full educational opportunities to handicapped children is a task that has, with few honourable exceptions, been grievously neglected in Canada.

It is essential that we take just a moment to say a few words about the right to an appropriate education. Many Canadians are denied this basic right referred to in the International Covenant and subscribed to by Canada and the Provinces…. There is indeed the need to entrench the right to an appropriate education…. Without the entrenchment of that value… Canadians who live with a handicap condition are at the outset denied the means of access to many of the benefits of Canadian society.

“Special Education and the Charter: The Right to Equal Benefit of the Law” is an excellent article on the provincial statutory regimes and their relationship to s. 15 of the Charter. It surveys the legislatures' attempts at delivering education to students and highlights the shortcomings in these attempts, focussing on the inability or unwillingness of the legislatures to provide an appropriate education to mentally disabled individuals. The article then takes a prospective approach, illustrating how a generous interpretation of s. 15 of the Charter might be used to correct deficiencies in educational statutes. Both the survey of statute law and the commentary on its relationship to the equality provisions of the Charter provide a valuable addition to scholarly writing on the provision of appropriate education to the mentally disabled.

However, there is some danger in assuming that the right to education derives solely from statute. Statutes are creations of legislatures. If the right to education exists only in these statutes, education may be viewed not as the right of every child, but as a privilege bestowed by the legislature, to be determined by administrators, and to be overseen only as a last resort by the courts.

Contemporary Marxist theorizing on law has produced a number of different ways of conceptualizing the class character of law within a capitalist society. The main focus of these approaches has largely been on the role of law in maintaining and reproducing an unequal, exploitative system. As a consequence, the issue, even the possibility of using law as a mechanism for securing substantial social change has been downplayed and, in some cases, precluded.

The purpose of this paper is to argue for a rethinking of law, especially in terms of its potential as an agent for social transformation. The discussion will be divided into two main sections. The first involves theoretical considerations. Problems encountered with existing approaches to law vis-à-vis their implications for change will be examined and the direction in which a theoretical reformulation might proceed will be outlined. The second involves practical considerations. Here the focus will be on the kinds of legal strategies and particular forms and conditions of law that could be extended or developed in order to move in the direction of a socialist society.

A patient comes to a medical facility with a life-threatening disease. The diagnosis is simple and certain. Indicated treatment is the administration of a specific drug. There is very little risk in using the drug, and no alternative therapy has any real probability of success. The patient refuses. Is it permissible to override the refusal?

If the patient is fully rational, has a well-developed, consistent set of values, acts with full knowledge and makes no mistakes, there can be no conflict between her welfare and her choice. If the physician is likewise endowed, and is committed to the welfare of the patient, a problem will not arise. In the real world, though, this ideal is not always met. From the perspective of the participant physician, there may appear to be a breach between the patient's choice and her welfare. The moral (and legal) issue is what should be done in an imperfect world.

In 1976 Nils Christie gave a lecture at the University of Sheffield and suggested that conflicts in society performed certain positive functions. Conflicts are “property,” he argued, and belong to the people involved. The participants in conflict may wish to see them resolved in ways that satisfy them, but sometimes those conflicts are taken away and become the property of courts, judges, lawyers or social workers. Christie contends that conflicts make an important contribution to society, and that highly industrialized societies have too little rather than too much internal conflict. He feels that we must organize social systems so that conflicts are nurtured and made visible. In particular we must see to it that professionals do not monopolize the handling of conflicts. In our criminal justice systems, the victims of crime have in particular lost their rights to participate in conflict resolution.

In this paper we use Christie's concept of “stealing conflicts” as a tool for analysing the consequences of the increased use of lawyers in the juvenile justice system as a result of the Young Offenders Act. The Act purports to enhance juveniles' responsibility and accountability for their actions, but this end is undermined to the extent that lawyers steal the conflicts. Furthermore, we argue that this trend toward legalism, which characterizes North America today, is different from patterns in some European countries such as France.

Section 3 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms sets out the democratic rights of Canadian citizens.

Donald Smiley has written that “some of the rights contained in the Charter are stated so explicitly that there is little doubt about their meaning and effect,” and that section 3 is one of the best examples of such clarity. But Smiley was wrong. The “meaning and effect” of section 3 has been thrown into doubt by the question whether its guarantee of the right to vote extends to imprisoned criminals. Newfoundland obviously thinks that it does, for in The Charter of Rights Amendment Act 1985, it repealed the traditional prohibition of prisoner voting. Other jurisdictions have chosen to retain the legal prohibition and to defend it against constitutional challenges mounted by inmates of Canadian prisons. The issue is probably headed for the Supreme Court, which will have to decide whether prisoners are full “citizens” within the meaning of section 3, and, if they are, whether a limit on their right to vote can be justified under section 1 as a “reasonable limit, demonstrably justifiable in a free and democratic society.”