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Some assume that Canada earned a place among postcolonial states in 1982 when it took charge of its Constitution. Yet despite the formal recognition accorded to Aboriginal and treaty rights at that time, Indigenous peoples continue to argue that they are still being colonized. Grace Woo assesses this allegation using a binary model that distinguishes colonial from postcolonial legality. She argues that two legal paradigms governed the expansion of the British Empire, one based on popular consent, the other on conquest and the power to command. Ghost Dancing with Colonialism casts explanatory light on ongoing tensions between Canada and Indigenous peoples.
This important book recovers the long tradition of indigenous transnationalism - contact with external people, institutions, ideas - throughout Australia's history from before white settlement to the present.
Diverse insights into the life and legal case of a Canadian child soldier.
Canadian legislatures regularly assign what are truly court functions to non-court, government tribunals. These executive branch “judicial” tribunals are surrogate courts and together comprise a little-known system of administrative justice that annually makes hundreds of thousands of contentious, life-altering judicial decisions concerning the everyday rights of both individuals and businesses. This book demonstrates that, except perhaps in Quebec, the administrative justice system is a justice system in name only. Failing to conform to rule-of-law principles or constitutional norms, its tribunals are neither independent nor impartial and are only providentially competent. Unjust by Design describes a justice system in transcendent need of major restructuring and provides a blueprint for change.
Self-Determination as Voice addresses the relationship between Indigenous peoples' participation in international governance and the law of self-determination. Many states and international organizations have put in place institutional mechanisms for the express purpose of including Indigenous representatives in international policy-making and decision-making processes, as well as in the negotiation and drafting of international legal instruments. Indigenous peoples' rights have a higher profile in the UN system than ever before. This book argues that the establishment and use of mechanisms and policies to enable a certain level of Indigenous peoples' participation in international governance has become a widespread practice, and perhaps even one that is accepted as law. In theory, the law of self-determination supports this move, and it is arguably emerging as a rule of customary international law. However, ultimately the achievement of the ideal of full and effective participation, in a manner that would fulfil Indigenous peoples' right to self-determination, remains deferred.
For more than 500 years, Indigenous laws have been disregarded. Many appeals for their recognition under international law have been made, but have thus far failed – mainly because international law was itself shaped by colonialism. How, this volume asks, might international law be reconstructed, so that it is liberated from its colonial origins? With contributions from critical legal theory, international law, politics, philosophy and Indigenous history, this volume pursues a cross-disciplinary analysis of the international legal exclusion of Indigenous Peoples, and of its relationship to global injustice. Beyond the issue of Indigenous Peoples’ rights, however, this analysis is set within the broader context of sustainability; arguing that Indigenous laws, philosophy and knowledge are not only legally valid, but offer an essential approach to questions of ecological justice and the co-existence of all life on earth.
Scholars often accept without question that the Indian Act (1876) criminalized First Nations. Drawing on court files, police and penitentiary records, and newspaper accounts from the Saskatchewan region of the North-West Territories between 1870 and 1905, Shelley Gavigan argues that the notion of criminalization captures neither the complexities of Aboriginal participation in the criminal courts nor the significance of the Indian Act as a form of law. This illuminating book paints a vivid portrait of Aboriginal defendants, witnesses, and informants whose encounters with the criminal law and the Indian Act included both the mediation and the enforcement of relations of inequality.
In The Right Relationship, John Borrows and Michael Coyle bring together a group of renowned scholars, both indigenous and non-indigenous, to cast light on the magnitude of the challenges Canadians face in seeking a consensus on the nature of treaty partnership in the twenty-first century.
This book presents and evaluates theoretical approaches to 'pluralist jurisprudence' and assesses the viability of theorising law extending beyond the state.
Using the judiciary of Manitoba as a model, Paths to the Bench examines the political nature of Canada's judicial appointment process and suggests that ability alone seldom determined who went to the bench. In fact, many of Manitoba's early judges spent little time actually practising law, since professional merit was not a criterion for judicial appointments. Rather, it was relationships with influential mentors and communities that ensured appointments and ultimately propelled careers. Brawn offers an in-depth analysis of how the paths to the bench of competent and connected and less competent and connected lawyers differed. This book is one of the few studies to examine why many of the best and brightest members of the bar either did not want to go to the bench, or if they did, why they did not get there.