This article explores how the legal arguments in favour of same-sex marriage recognition in the United States and Canada have been taken up in two recent documentaries on the subject: Tying the Knot: The Union That's Dividing America (USA, 2004) and The End of Second Class (Canada, 2006). My interest in these films lies in how they represent the legal challenges to their audiences. Like the litigation itself, each of these documentaries is built upon representational strategies that are intended to have the maximum impact on their audiences. Tying the Knot and The End of Second Class replicate the legal arguments and litigation strategies used by advocates of same-sex marriage. In particular, I analyse how each film represents the case for same-sex marriage through an appeal to three markers of equality rights discourses: rights evolve over time; rights are comparative; rights are indicators of national belonging. I contend that in their reliance on these markers, Tying the Knot and The End of Second Class unwittingly re-inscribe dominant notions of what it means to have full and equal national belonging and, thus, delimit what it means to be a “good” sexual citizen.

This article examines Canada's federal Live-in Caregiver Program (LCP) from the perspective of international human-rights and labour norms pertaining to the protection of migrant workers. Showing that the current legal framework of the LCP restricts migrant caregivers from effectively exercising a range of human and labour rights, the author argues for the removal of the labour (im)migration program's unnecessary structural obstacles and proposes a reformulation of the LCP under the principles and guidelines of the International Labour Organization's Multilateral Framework on Labour Migration, in order to transform this controversial labour policy into a decent work opportunity.

This article examines shifts in the regulation and governance of business crime in competition and deceptive trade practices law. It traces policies and enforcement in Canada's Combines Investigation Act/Competition Act from 1975–2005, a period of seismic shift in regulatory law during which formerly dominant Keynesian welfare-state discourses, practices, and policies were replaced by those characterizing the neo-liberal regulatory state. The Competition Bureau was a key player in this transition, by which competition policy became the primary regulatory mechanism of the modern state. The article's purpose is to analyse enforcement records, annual reports, and other documents from the Competition Bureau to show how priorities and practices have changed and to link these changes to shifts in governance associated with the transition from Keynesian economic philosophies to those of the neo-liberal state.

This article compares the two most significant paradigm shifts in the administration of Aboriginal affairs in Australia's Northern Territory. The Welfare Ordinance 1953 (NT) constituted a then-unique attempt to reclassify the diminished legal status of most indigenous Territorians as justified not by their racial heritage but by their level of social need, while the 2007 legislation behind the “Northern Territory intervention” has jettisoned formal racial neutrality through a campaign to curb the breakdown of “community standards and parenting behaviours” in many remote indigenous communities. The authors argue that while both initiatives had similar fundamental aims—encouraging remote Aboriginal people to adopt social habits generally evident in non-indigenous society—the decision to jettison racial neutrality has ushered in a new era of race relations in Australia, in which race has openly and formally been reestablished as a marker of legal inferiority.

Women who are released from prison continue to face challenges stemming from their imprisonment. This article discusses the ways in which the prison and, by extension, the state follow women out of prison into their communities. While the state attempts to ensure “successful reintegration” for ex-prisoners, its policies, which reflect a neoliberal agenda of individual responsibilization, may in fact hinder women's chances of integrating into their communities. The article explores women's experiences of (re)integration through the voices of female ex-prisoners who served long prison terms, their families, and their advocates. The control experienced in prison echoes in women's lives on the outside: they experience dislocation, marginalization, and a need to (re)negotiate their lives. While women may physically leave the prison, the experience remains imprinted on their minds and bodies as the state continues to govern them from a distance, both through the after-effects of imprisonment and through continued surveillance.

This article examines what happens when non-normative genders and sexualities collide with the complicated world of criminal procedure. Grounded in a close reading of Forrester v. Peel (Regional Municipality) Police Services Board, a recent decision in which a trans detainee alleged discrimination in services on the basis of “sex,” the article connects strip searches to a larger system of corporeal power. Trans bodies are targeted not merely because they are perceived as different but also because of what that difference symbolizes: a failure of the regimes that regulate bodies into a sharp, essentialist gender binary. As such, trans bodies become a key site for simultaneous observation, normalization, and examination not only by the police but also by society at large.