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AbstractReligious freedom is protected by section 2(a) of theCanadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.Historically, the right has been understood in individual terms, though the courts have acknowledged a collective dimension to religion as expressed in a community of believers. Yet, the precise meaning of collective religious freedom has not been fully fleshed out. The current case law only encompasses a limited range of forms of collective religious expression and does not articulate a coherent theory as to why some collective 2(a) claims succeed while others fail. This paper draws on concepts from interpretive sociology to help clarify the existing jurisprudence and reveal a tension that is otherwise invisible over the status of volition/voluntariness in the collective religious freedom framework. Addressing this tension can help rationalize the Court's jurisprudence and give resources to critics looking to change how the law encompasses collective religious experience.

This article addresses the implications of a new resistance to hate crime legislation that has yet to be addressed in the mainstream legal debate in Canada or the United States. It comes mainly from groups in the US that represent lgbtq communities who are poor and/or of color. These communities are particularly vulnerable to victimization by hate crime yet the groups have repeatedly opposed the inclusion of sexual orientation and gender identity/expression in hate crime legislation. This article addresses the underlying rationale of the new resistance and its implications for the mainstream debate. It begins by undertaking a comparative analysis of hate crime legislation in Canada and the US. It then considers the mainstream legal debate in both countries as well as some statistical data on hate crime. The third section turns to the new resistance as well as emerging data on the connection between victimization and the criminal legal system itself. It then draws on the legal theory of Walter Benjamin to reveal limits in the way that the mainstream legal debate conceptualizes criminalization. The final section of the article considers the implications of Benjamin's concept of law for both the mainstream debate and the new resistance.

This essay is concerned with criticisms of Giorgio Agamben's biopolitical theory of sovereignty that are developed by Jacques Derrida in his final seminar titled The Beast and the Sovereign (2009). The implicit interlocutor for much of the seminar is theories of biopolitics. However, when these theories are addressed explicitly, it is through the work of Agamben. The article proceeds first with a brief account of the main issues that preoccupy Derrida in the seminar. In general, these relate to conceptualizing sovereignty and its relationship to the division between human and animal. The second section introduces the criticisms of Agamben, which are articulated initially in terms of the latter's tendency to declare the origin of ideas and concepts. The third section outlines some central aspects of Agamben's theory that are pertinent for evaluating Derrida's criticisms. The fourth section turns to the conceptual and textual basis for the criticisms, which involve a way of thinking history and an interpretation of Aristotle. The final section of the paper extrapolates the implications of Derrida's criticisms for thinking sovereignty and its future.

This paper defines a 'crisis of sovereignty' in relation to the status of legal authority without the nationstate as an ultimate referent. Based on an analysis of a debate between two influential strands of legal theory known as legal positivism and natural law, it suggests one current form of response is a renewal in natural law theory, which de-emphasises theological concepts in favour of the idea of the common good of a political community. Through reference to the Aristotelian concepts of politics and nature that are often invoked in these theories, the paper argues that the concept of law in new natural accounts, while manifestly founded on rational principles, still retains a theological core.

This paper explores the ethics of social science research by taking the Canadian context as a case study of the increasing formalization of ethics review procedures in North America. Based on a biomedical model of harm prevention, all university research involving humans in Canada, regardless of discipline, must pass through an ethics board review. I read the official ethics policy document governing review procedures for human research in Canada and use two examples of criticism of such policy as entry points to identify and explore a limit in understandings of social research ethics. This limit is reached when ethics policy is criticized on the basis of the incompatibility of a general rule applied to a particular research situation. Using concepts from the ethical philosophies of Kant and Lacan, I move beyond the question of the application of general rules to particular research situations and push research ethics into different territory, where neither general rules nor the notion of particularity can be relied on to ground ethical action. In this other terrain, radical responsibility and unguaranteed decision are the only signposts.

La pandémie de COVID-19 représente-t-elle véritablement un moment charnière pour la gouvernance contemporaine? Cette question suscite de multiples réponses de même qu'une grande variété de débats et de perspectives. D'un côté se trouvent ceux qui soutiennent ardemment que cette pandémie constitue un événement historique des plus rares, aux répercussions profondes, notamment dans le domaine du droit et de la gouvernance. En revanche, d'autres prétendent que la pandémie, plutôt que de marquer le début d'une ère nouvelle, a principalement amplifié et prolongé les paradigmes préexistants de la gouvernance. Par ailleurs, d'aucuns affirment que la pandémie a revigoré et revitalisé les mouvements sociaux axés sur la remise en question des structures étatiques établies.

Is the COVID-19 pandemic truly a pivotal moment in contemporary governance? This question has sparked multifaceted responses and spurred diverse debates and perspectives. On one side of the spectrum, there are those who ardently argue that this pandemic represents an exceedingly rare and profoundly impactful historical juncture, specifically within the domain of law and governance. In contrast, a counterpoint in this debate contends that the pandemic, rather than introducing an entirely new era, has primarily functioned as an amplifier and extension of pre-existing governing paradigms. Additionally, there is a notable contention that the pandemic has invigorated and revitalized social movements with a central focus on challenging established state structures.