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The rights of people to use their mother tongues are both central to the Canadian constitution and yet seemingly impossible. Their centrality is obvious. The rights of linguistic and religious minorities were the only ones entrenched in the British North America Act that left the usual civil liberties to the protection of common law and party politics. And even with the entrenchment of civil liberties in the Charter, language rights still receive pride of place as even the crudest content-analysis of the document reveals: they occupy sections 16-22 (official language rights), section 23 (minority language educational rights), and more peripherally section 14 (right to an interpreter in trials), and section 27 (preservation of multicultural heritage). This is all the more striking considering that the typical liberal-democratic freedoms of conscience, religion, opinion, expression, assembly and association are jostled together in the brief, telegraphic language of section 2. Language rights enjoy the highest level of constitutional entrenchment. They are exempt from the power of Parliament and the provincial legislatures in section 33 to legislate notwithstanding the Charter. Their amendment requires either unanimous approval of Parliament and the provinces (section 41(c)) or, if the section applies to some but not all provinces, approval of Parliament and all affected provinces (section 43(b)). While some multilingual states, such as Switzerland, appear to flourish with only a minimal degree of constitutional entrenchment, Canada has joined the ranks of Belgium and India with what may seem to be the over-constitutionalizing of language. Thus the historical and political centrality of language rights.

To be radical about pornography used to mean that one favored less censorship; now it often means that one favors more. That political change reflects a shift in the dominant paradigm of pornography and its putative evils. Until quite recently, most people who believed pornography wrong thought that it offended against decency and propriety and was therefore obscene. That was certainly the view of the law. English judges first created the crime of obscene libel in 1727 on the basis that such expression tended to corrupt the morals of the King's subjects, a thought that inspired most subsequent legislation in the common‐law world. Sometimes the underlying concern really was paternalistic: pornography degrades and corrupts its producers and consumers; the law forces them to become better people. More often, however, it was just moralism of the familiar sorts: the view that a majority of a community is entitled to enforce its moral views on the rest, either because that is democratic or because that is just what it means to be a community. The obscenity paradigm thus had two features. First, it was illiberal: it ranked personal autonomy below realizing the good, enforcing the majority will, or embodying communitarian values. Second, it was gender neutral: to understand the nature of pornography did not require theorizing relations between men and women. On the obscenity paradigm, pornography was a matter of virtue versus vice, majorities versus minorities.

SummaryThe importance of the role of discipline in the military and the way in which it has been viewed from historical times to the present day are surveyed by the author. The practices of different armies in various conflicts are considered and attempts to codify rules through international conventions and decisions of tribunals are discussed.

SummaryThe author considers the application of relevant human rights provisions to the Balkans both historically and in terms of contemporary issues. In particular, he discusses the legality of the measures taken under the auspices of NATO in respect of Kosovo and queries whether such measures are able to remedy such a breakdown of civil administration and respect for human rights. In the author's view, in such circumstances, administration of a country by the United Nations itself provides the only viable alternative.