This article interrogates the controversial field of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), focussing in particular on the implication of the British press in its regulation. It grounds its analysis in a 'decentred' understanding of regulation; a socio-legal approach which moves beyond formal regulation and regulators, and instead foregrounds diverse social actors and their attempts to alter behaviour across a given domain. Focussing on newspaper as a case-study, it identifies five regulatory techniques through which the newspaper drew (and redrew) lines separating the safe from the risky, the efficacious from the sham, and the normal from the deviant. By analytically decentring CAM's formal regulation, this article provides a conceptual contribution. It highlights an everyday form of healthcare regulation directed at prospective users which may be just as significant in potentially guiding users towards or away from particular healthcare practices/practitioners as the more traditional, formal kinds of regulation identified in regulatory literatures.

This paper is concerned with exploring legal atmospheres during colonial expansionism and the early period of confederation of British Columbia. By describing the theatrical and performative aspects of legal colonialism, the archival documents from this time represent interesting, yet oft-overlooked, significances that attention to sensory and affective experiences captures. Examining "affective atmospheres" disclosed in such colonial settings reveals ways that the colonial regime promulgated its influence in non-rational, non-legal manners. As well, drawing out the material conditions of topography shows how the environment acts more than just a backdrop for the staging of legal expansionism, as it acts also as a constitutive force in the development of colonial legal arrangements. At the same time, the colonial regime was forgetful of these same contextual, topographical, and atmospheric origins of law insofar as it promulgated myths of the universality, objectivity, and superiority of English law.

The diversity of features attributed to populism - and, as a result, the variety of critiques leveled at it - are remarkable. It sometimes seems as though people are using the same terms to address very different phenomena. Is there any distinctive meaning to populism? Is populism inherently anti-democratic or, on the contrary, is it the epitome of democratic practice? What should an engagement with populist movements mean for the theory and practice of democracy? This paper seeks to map the discursive ecosystem that populism determines. It canvasses the phenomena often associated with populism, proposes an interrelated set of concerns that is distinctive to populism, suggests how populism intersects with propensities and affinities with which it is often associated, emphasises the role of growing economic inequality, and suggests responses to populist movements that are grounded in a truly democratic constitutionalism.

This article analyses how right-wing populist actors claim to represent the "voice of the people" and express "popular sovereignty" as a mode of challenging the traditional constitutional foundation of liberal democracy. This hypothesis is illustrated by an investigation into the political discourse of the considering how this populist actor has developed a political strategy claiming to speak for the "people" in an authentic and immediate fashion. The analysis of this actor's political mobilization shows how the championed direct democratic representation is couched in a sovereigntist discourse that relies on divisive identity markers rather than genuine democratic participation. Drawing on Carl Schmitt's concept of the political, the article interprets right-wing populism as invoking a permanent "state of exception" that employs an emotionally charged - distinction whose logic of representing the people has the potential of triggering radical political change as well as undermining the integrity of rule-based democracy.

In the wake of increasing attention to reparations for settler colonialism in recent years, the politics of refusal and contestation of reparations has remained an underexplored area in socio-legal research. This article addresses this gap by foregrounding the perspectives of the colonised as a focal point to examine the strategies they mobilise to stage resistance to state-sponsored redress and to expose the harmful logics and legacies of ongoing settler colonialism. Strategies of resistance are discussed in the context of the Independent Assessment Process - a financial compensation process designed to provide redress to survivors of the physical and sexual violence they had suffered while attending Canada's Indian Residential Schools. This article explores how survivors disrupted the compensation process to advance an anti-colonial agenda, to politicise the violence, and to compel the settler state to recognise their lived experiences and realities of structural violence in the settler colonial present.

In midcentury Canada, legislative drafters, government lawyers, food and drug officials, and ministers grappled with cosmetics. Faced with constitutional concerns about cosmetic licensing, these actors drafted legislative amendments that would instead require cosmetics to be registered. In contrast to people or land, the registration of products, substances, or things has received little attention in sociolegal scholarship. Building on work investigating law's temporalities and materiality, this account traces how in-formed by the constitutional doctrine that apprehended substances through the legal form of prohibition, cosmetics were rendered in draft legislation as constituted of ingredients that may cause injury. Injury, in this account, is a material-temporal regime. Yet cosmetic injury was neither static nor singular, as it was catalysed differently by distinctive regulatory devices. This is shown by last-minute changes to the bill which retooled cosmetic registration, from an information extraction device for anticipating future harms, into a recording device for capturing latent harms.

In this paper, we chart the context in which contemporary legal debates around traditional healing in Senegal unfold, pointing in particular to the type of power-knowledge relations that are at stake in both the current legal status-quo, and legal changes proposed in 2017. We interrogate the struggles over legitimacy and recognition that are at play in these processes, and the ways in which different actors relate to both formal legal rules, and more fluid forms of legalities, in which imaginaries of the law, and negotiations with the law, translate into everyday practices. We underline how legal and scientific discourses are mobilised to draw the opportunities and boundaries offered to different healing agents, and to organise their respective authority. Traditional healers overlap with modern health practices, while retaining their own ontologies and claims to legitimacy while representatives of the biomedical professions insist that they should have some oversight over the regulation of all healers. As negotiations continue over the possibility for the state to regulate traditional healing, everyday legal choreographies define the relative roles, possibilities and precarity of different healing agents.

Prison food is central to the prison experience and is a physically invasive manifestation of carceral power. This article draws on 61 interviews with individuals with lived experience of provincial prisons in Ontario, Canada. Participants reported that the food was unhealthy, small-portioned, bland, and steamed to the point that they could not discern what they were eating. Others reported living in fear of the food, whether because it was molding, spoiled, or had been tampered with. For many participants, their experience of incarceration was that of hunger and unwanted bodily changes. Poor quality prison food bolstered an underground food economy in which trading, gambling, or intimidation were used by prisoners to access more and/or better foods. Overall, prison food was a means through which social, political, and institutional contempt for prisoners was communicated to and embodied by prisoners.

COVID-19 placed unprecedented strains on criminal court systems, necessitating moves to digital platforms with little preparation. To study the influence of virtual courtrooms on defendant rights (e.g. effective assistance of counsel, speedy and public trials, among others), we qualitatively analyzed the journals of 44 student court watchers, documenting their observations of online court proceedings in a single state in the Northeastern United States. We find that virtual courtrooms are highly disorganized and fraught with technical malfunctions, compromising defendants' appearances online, and impeding their ability to confer with counsel and address the court. Defendants with less access to digital platforms and incarcerated individuals are disproportionately impacted. Further, court actors tend to treat virtual court in a casual manner and are often unprepared to litigate cases, resulting in undue delays, and extended periods of pre-trial detention. Policy recommendations to improve technologies and administrative procedures are discussed.

This article explores the temporality of migration control through an analysis of refugee claim processing in Canada. I draw on organizational reports, commissioned studies, media reports, interviews and archival data to argue that time is a key technology of state-controlled migration regulation. I show that temporal technologies have long been used to both control the access of migrants and the labour of civil servants. Furthermore, I show that procedural temporalities have been consistently manipulated to reflect and facilitate growing restrictionism in Canadian migration regulation. In short, I suggest that migration regulation regimes devise and use temporal technologies to block, deter or delay access to rights to unwanted and unauthorized migrants, and to reduce the cost of doing so where possible.

Ambivalence about rights is well known: rights may both challenge existing injustices while simultaneously re-enforcing sovereign regulatory control over citizens. In this article, we focus on the paradox that potentially radical and transformative claims to rights are made at a site - civil society - that under liberal governmentality has increasingly become a site of government. By exploring the unionization of undocumented migrant domestic workers (MDWs) in the Netherlands, we aim to show how rights claims are shaped and controlled by civil society. Using the analytical category of (in)visibility, the case study discloses the dualistic role of the union. On the one hand, the union operated as a site of resistance supporting undocumented MDWs to make their rights claims. On the other hand, it operated as a site of government of the same undocumented MDWs by selectively promoting work-related rights claims and excluding more radical claims for the right to come and go.

The article evaluates labour law's strategies of coping with the pressure put on its project of realizing justice by a hegemony of economic perspectives on labour markets. Its consequences for a methodology of labour law are set out by critically engaging with recent proposals made by Simon Deakin and Ruth Dukes. It is argued that a socio-historical perspective on the role of legal models in actually shaping labour relations can enrich the concept of a 'labour constitution'.

Identity is a central theme in contemporary politics, but legal academia lacks a rigorous analysis of this concept. The aim of this article is twofold: (i) firstly, it aims to reveal presumptions on identity in human rights law by mapping how the European Court of Human Rights approaches identity and (ii) secondly, it seeks to analyse these presumptions using theoretical insights on identity. By merging legal and theoretical analysis, this article contributes a reading of the Court's case law which suggests that the tension between the political and apolitical is visible as a common thread in the Court's use of identity. In case law concerning paternity, the Court appears to hold a specific view of what is presented as an unquestionable part of identity. This ostensibly pre-political notion of identity becomes untenable in cases where the nature of an identity feature, such as the headscarf, is contended or a minority has adopted a national identity that conflicts with the majoritarian national identity. The Court's approach to identity in such cases reflects a paradox that is inherent to identity; identity is personal while simultaneously constituted and shaped by overarching power mechanisms.

This article examines recent developments in family law which are concerned with the child's right to know her genetic history. It specifically investigates three areas. First, the Child Support (Pensions and Social Security) Act 2000 (CPSSA). Second, an unusual case concerning IVF at a licensed clinic where a decision failed to be made about parental responsibility (Re D [2001]; Re R [2001]). Finally, the recent Department of Health (2002) consultation exercise on donor anonymity. Drawing upon Parker's (1992) theoretical discussion about the significance of rights and utility to family law, the article will show that although there is evidence of a child's right to know in private familial disputes, this right is not approached consistently across family law. In respect of the government's recent consultation paper on donor anonymity, it will be argued that the child's right to know is subordinated to a utility approach. The article will recommend that the government should take the radical step of reforming law on donor anonymity to allow donor children the right to know their genetic progenitor.

This article draws on Pashukanis's concept of legal form and on O'Brien's concept of synthetic value to argue that legal form plays a role in reproductive relations by constructing legal subjects as the bearers of reproductive responsibilities. Pashukanis conceived of legal form as playing a particular role in capitalist exchange relations by interpellating subjects as the bearers of property rights. O'Brien argued that reproduction's specific value is synthetic value, which represents the value of integrating nature and reason in species continuity. Synthetic value is distinct from exchange value or emotional value which may also attach to reproductive process. By working through Pashukanis's method of extracting legal form from specific social relations and by adapting it to reproductive relations, an example is provided of how legal form analysis can be extended beyond the particular context of capitalist exchange relations. Just as legal form constitutes owners and non-owners as legal subjects, so it constitutes reproducers and non-reproducers. By tracing the way in which law attributes reproductive responsibility, legal form analysis shows us how law draws a line between wanting to attribute responsibility and not to attribute it, and this contradiction is a hook which social forces such as sexuality, gender, race, class and disability can latch on to in pushing legal form to shape reproductive responsibilities in a particular way. Each legal form is also externally contradicted by other legal forms. When law negotiates a balance between the reproductive norms of responsibilities and rights, it demonstrates how particular legal forms manage the interaction of different sets of social relations, such as reproduction and exchange.

The judgment in the English Court of Appeal case of Re A (Conjoined Twins: Surgical Separation) highlights forcefully the highly individualistic and abstract assumptions that commonly shape the deployment of rights discourse in liberal legal adjudication. Forced by the all-or-nothing nature of this discourse into a dilemma between perceiving of the twins as separate right-bearers or perceiving of the stronger twin, Jodie, as the singular right-bearer and of Mary, her weaker sibling, as a non-legal entity, the court chose the former option. Perceiving of the twins as distinct and equal legal persons forced the court to employ a balancing of incommensurate interests, implicitly accepting a utilitarian analysis within the strongly deontological confines of law and medicine. The implications of this turn towards utilitarianism are significant. Within the confines of this article, it will be argued, however, that these implications are avoidable if the law concedes a more flexible approach to the dominant notion of the distinct and autonomous right-bearer.

After her intense battle for the decriminalization of assisted suicide in the Supreme Court of Canada, Sue Rodriguez committed suicide with medical assistance in 1994. Following her suicide, government and law representatives remained silent and no criminal charges were ever brought against the person(s) who presumably assisted Ms Rodriguez in her death. This apparent non-intervention of criminal law is examined in view of the useful role that the Rodriguez event may have played in a possible shift in the dominant morality. It is argued that the Rodriguez assisted suicide may have been a useful 'crime' (in the Durkheimian sense) in that it brought to the fore the possibility that social conditions--which made the 'crime' possible--may no longer be in harmony with conventional morality. Similarly to Socrates' crime, the Rodriguez case can be seen as an anticipation of a new morality. It can be analyzed as a prelude to alterations, as directly preparing the way for changes in the dominant morality. The role of criminal law as a preferred mode of moral regulation is also examined in relation to the moral demands and expectations that arose during as well as after the judicial saga.

The principle of patient self-determination has assumed central importance in British medical law in recent years. This article considers whether this increasingly strong commitment to patient autonomy has any resonance for abortion law. In particular, this article explores the possibility that the priority currently accorded to autonomous decision making may be in tension with the Abortion Act's requirement that a woman's reasons for seeking to terminate her pregnancy be judged acceptable by two medical practitioners. Moreover, interest in the moral legitimacy of a woman's reasons for wanting to terminate her pregnancy seems to be intensifying. Concerns arising from the increasing availability of precise prenatal tests have led to suggestions that access to abortion should be further restricted in order to prevent the cavalier use of abortion for reasons that might seem trivial or misguided. Using abortion following prenatal diagnosis as an example, this article considers whether it is anomalous for the common law's vigorous protection of an individual's freedom to make irrational or morally objectionable choices about his or her medical treatment to coexist with demands for further restriction of the acceptable grounds for abortion.

This article summarises the outcome of a research project which analyses the legislative debate about the German Embryonenschutzgesetz (Embryo Protection Act) in 1990. From 1988 to 1990 the German Parliament discussed legislation for the practice of assisted contraception and embryo research. The term 'risk' is central to the discourse. For Ulrich Beck (1986) this emphasis on risk is a sign of the reflexivity which contemporary western societies have reached. This article reads back into the risk discourse the values hidden in risk terminology: they are identified as fears about modernisation processes. The focus on risk in this article allows observation of late modernity's unease about its own potential and a growing ambiguity about modern ideas of progress and control (Bauman, 1991). This ambiguity also becomes apparent in the strategies of policing which the German legislature offers as solutions to the perceived risks: different legislative strategies are developed to tackle the contradictory risk scenarios. These different strategies of policing are understood as the construction of 'places of safety' in the face of identified dangers: the 'traditional family', the 'good doctor', 'professional' judgement. Defining those boundaries allows the German legislature to juggle contradictory agendas. This explains the inconsistent and fragmented nature of the Embryo Protection Act 1990.

The wrongful conception action holds both a troubled past and future. As a response to rapid technological advancement in the area of reproduction, this action has introduced complex legal and ethical issues in the courts' efforts to respond to the question: 'Can parenthood ever constitute an injury?' At the heart of this dilemma lies the manner by which both law and society conceptualize 'harm'--is this 'part of the normal vicissitudes of life' or a harmful event? But this question is not decided within a legal vacuum and public policy factors have deeply influenced the nature and existence of case law in this field. In the context of the controversial cases of McFarlane v Tayside Health Board [2000] and Rees v Darlington Memorial Hospital [2002], this article critically examines how 'harm' is judicially characterized and explores the various tensions emerging from conflicting harm constructs. In arguing that the courts must seek to find a balanced approach between public policy concerns and reproductive autonomy, this article will present a fresh theoretical perspective to the conceptualization of harm based on autonomy as the central organizing principle.