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Abstract: In the United States, it is widely accepted that 'policy,' meaning conflicting societal values and interests that can be weighed, plays an important role in private law reasoning. However, in many other polities, including France, England, Quebec and English Canada which this article scrutinizes, the role of policy in private law is either strenuously denied or reduced to an exceptional consideration of social concerns under residual doctrines like good faith, abuse of right or unconscionability. As a result, full-blown and routine invocations of policy are still considered to be an exotic American feature and to be absent from these systems. In this article, I refute this persisting view and show that such policy arguments are as a matter of fact relied on by authoritative actors in France, England, Quebec and English Canada. Taking interruption of contractual performance following breach as a case study, I rely on cases and treatises from these four jurisdictions to produce an integrated repertoire of policy arguments that have been invoked for a series of related contract law questions. I thus provide the basis for the application of American private law insights in legal systems where they have largely been ignored. I suggest that there are important political and aesthetic stakes to this jurisprudential transplantation, in that it allows for innovative forms of contestation of marketbased normative reasoning and of the traditional professional styles adopted by non- American jurists.

In discussions of recent human rights-driven developments in the International Labour Organization (ILO), as well as in other international legal debates, many scholars have suggested that human rights and "neoliberalism" intrinsically tend to converge. Such purported convergence is at once deplored by critics of "globalization" and applauded by its defenders. This article offers an empirical refutation of this convergence thesis by documenting the potential for systematic divergences between human rights, neoliberalism and a third omnipresent discourse, social legal thought (i.e. tropes associated with the welfare state and Keynesianism). I support this claim by taking as a case study three interrelated and historically fateful debates about international labor standards in the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the ILO. The debates are those pertaining to (1) the failed 1990s project of conditioning WTO trade status with respect for labor standards ("trade/labor linkage"), (2) the prioritization of human rights-based labor standards in the ILO's 1998 Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work (1998 Declaration) and (3) the shape of the ILO corpus under the Decent Work Agenda (DWA), a social policy programmatic initiative on labor standards fiercely debated in the 2000s. I argue that human rights, neoliberalism and social legal thought diverge a great deal because they have different degrees of normative malleability. I propose a methodology, structuralist argumentative analysis, to address the question of discursive convergence and divergence, an issue of crucial importance for those interested in the political stakes of debates on international labor standards and the future trajectories of neoliberalism and human rights.

In this article, I analyze a series of Canadian cases on union successor rights defining the circumstances in which labour rights should be transferred to a successor entity in the context of business sales, restructuring and subcontracting. My analysis casts doubt on a globally influential theory of legal interpretation, which I call the "old legality." According to this theory, labour law is made not through conventional legal reasoning but through non-legal, pragmatic, and purposive applications of loose industrial relations standards. I claim that the old legality paradigm is analytically inaccurate and has the perverse effect of normalizing the status quo of the post-war labour law regime in a context where its insufficiency is widely acknowledged. Against the old legality, I propose a new approach to studying and teaching labour law doctrine, which I apply here to union successor rights law. This approach portrays labour law reasoning not as pragmatic and purposive but as riven by continuously recurring and incommensurable legal policy conflicts that render purposive argument inconclusive. I suggest that, by constantly bringing these conflicts to the fore in their research and teaching, labour law academics can contribute to opening up the status quo for normative contestation and help create possibilities for ambitious re-regulation of living conditions in the direction of, say, radical equality, participation, and redistribution.

Au Canada, et dans plusieurs autres pays occidentaux, les crimes d'honneur ont récemment fait l'objet d'une prolifération de discours au cœur desquels se trouve souvent l'idée d'un Occident civilisé opposé à des droits orientaux figés, rétrogrades. Or, la violence au nom de l'honneur n'est pas étrangère aux droits occidentaux et au droit canadien. Dans cet article, nous retraçons les migrations des crimes d'honneur de l'Occident à l'Orient et vice versa pour établir une généalogie de ce phénomène. Ensuite, nous nous attardons à la « défense de provocation », une institution juridique occidentale qui fait parfois resurgir l'honneur comme motif d'homicide à l'occasion de crimes dits passionnels. À partir de cette analyse de l'hybridité juridique, nous en appelons à une fructueuse rencontre des théories postcoloniales et du droit comparé et à une compréhension plus fine de la violence faite aux femmes.