Contrary to what may be suggested by traditional historiography, the modern labour contract did not appear through spontaneous generation with the Industrial Revolution. To the contrary, premodern legal forms going back to the feudal era lasted throughout the nineteen century and even later, entirely subjecting groups of workers to the employers' absolutism. The path leading to a rationalization of the legal technique embodied in the modern labour contract was indeed highly complex. Philip Lotmar's colossal study on Der Arbeitsvertrag [The Labour Contract] (published in two parts, 1902 and 1908) illustrates that complexity in an exemplary fashion, especially as regards the social facts of law. From a Law and Society viewpoint, this work remains without doubts worth reading today, in particular when one also takes into consideration the comprehensive review of this treatise made by Max Weber in 1902 and later comments by Hugo Sinzheimer, the founder of the European science of labour law and himself a distinguished legal sociologist. In the following study, the author insists upon the relevance of Weber's and Sinzheimer's critiques of Lotmar as regards the relationship of law to economics, the importance of legal pluralism for a proper understanding of labour law, as well as the interaction between jurisprudence and the sociology of law.

The Nuremberg Trials provide the foundation for contemporary international criminal law. Yet these trials are rarely explored in their broader ideational and social context. This article examines the context and role of the concept of “civilization” as used in U.S. v Altstoetter, the 1947 trial of Nazi judges and judicial administrators at Nuremberg. I place the reference to civilization in Altstoetter within a tradition of international law that understood law and civilization as co-constitutive. The Altstoetter Court conceptualized Germany as an essentially civilized country that lapsed into barbaric and therefore lawless violence. This account helped the Court to establish the blameworthiness of the defendants' conduct, blame the Nazi violence on lawlessness, and establish its own authority.

The Kingston Immigration Holding Centre (KIHC) is a purpose-built prison for individuals subject to security certificates, located on the grounds of Millhaven Institution in Bath, Ontario. KIHC was created in 2006 in response to controversy over the use of provincial detention facilities for long-term security-certificate detention. While the security-certificate mechanism and its related processes have been the subject of a growing body of critical socio-legal scholarship, the juridico-political space of KIHC has yet to be described or problematized in depth. The present study addresses this gap by providing a detailed account of the history of the facility and an exploration of the interactions within the Canadian insecurity field that shaped its emergence, governing arrangement, and everyday operations. Given the paucity of publicly available official information about KIHC, our study draws extensively on material obtained through requests filed under the federal Access to Information Act. Building on the existing literature, we frame security-certificate detention as a form of normalized exceptionality made possible by counter-law and argue that it conforms to the juridico-political concept of the camp. We then proceed to describe how this particular camp came into being, with an emphasis on the role played by interactions between professionals and institutions within the Canadian security field. The interagency contractual arrangement between the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) and the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) that governs KIHC is outlined. We describe this arrangement as the product of the authority to detain indefinitely meeting the capacity to confine pragmatically, under the banner of national security, and consider its implications for CSC's correctional mandate. The KIHC facility emerges as an “ancillary exception,” the institutional reflection of attempts to reform and normalize the security-certificate mechanism. We conclude by making a case for the abolition of KIHC.

This article draws on Cohn and Kremnitzer's multidimensional analysis of judicial activism and applies the analysis in the Canadian context. The analysis is conducted in the wake of recent Supreme Court decisions giving the police the power to conduct sniffer-dog searches. That case context serves as a substrate to reveal the utility and limitations of a multidimensional approach. While recent scholarship on judicial activism has focused on quantifying activism over time, court composition, and constitutional issues, this article contends that there is potential to introduce even more texture into activism scholarship by paying attention to the interstitial details of judicial reasoning rather than focusing on the disposition alone. This textured approach accepts that what the Court says in these interstices is important because it is part of a discussion about core constitutional principles. Activism scholarship is informed by an investigation into deviations from one's particular allegiance to constitutional norms. The nomenclature of these norms is relatively certain, yet their exact definition remains open to vigorous debate. This race for content lies at the heart of much activist-based critique. Multidimensional analysis can help form the language of this conversation, aid in giving content and order to debates, and help us to discover our normative constitutional content. This content is the starting point for critical evaluation of our constitutional norms.

The legal pluralism debate attempts to locate law beyond the traditional precincts of the nation-state. This essay is about locating law; its aim is to examine the extent to which legal pluralism can serve as a valid theory for grounding self-governance for indigenous/alternative medical systems. The author contends that the pursuit of legitimacy for indigenous health systems must begin from within the state system, understood as a malleable and contestable system of laws, and goes on to argue that the hegemony and centrality of the state can be deployed in fostering an integrated pluralistic health-care system in which orthodox and indigenous health systems have equal recognition.