LAWS Topics Courses

Professor Dawn Moore

This course explores the idea of abolishing prisons from an interdisciplinary perspective.  We will explore the rise of the prison abolition movement across the world, taking into account both historical and contemporary movements.  We will then work collaboratively to explore different approaches to prison abolition including resource reallocation, law reform and the addressing of social ills like poverty and racism.  Students will benefit from guest speakers from around the world as well as working with local prison abolitionists.

Prerequisite(s): LAWS 2908 and fourth-year Honours standing

Instructor Erica Chen

Advanced Special Topics in Legal Studies: Psychology of the Jury

This course will explore the intersection of psychology and law within the jury system in Canada and other countries. Topics such as jury selection, emotion, race, and technology will be discussed, in addition to a number of legal and extra-legal influences on jury decision-making. We will discuss various juror biases that can hinder a defendant’s right to a fair trial as well as potential remedial measures (e.g., lawyer opening statements, expert testimony, jury education programs). By the end of the course, students will be able to describe and critically analyze the strength and limitations of jury systems, assess strengths and limitations and psycholegal research, and integrate and apply the information to a real jury trial.

Prerequisite(s): LAWS 2908 and fourth-year Honours standing

Professor Steve Tasson

Topic: Exploring the Sociolegal Imagination & Cultural Approaches to Law

What does it mean to talk about the socio-legal imagination? When we think of what law “is” and how it operates in our society, what images come to mind? What institutions (e.g. the courtroom, the prison, etc.) and what language (e.g. justice, order, fairness, etc.) do we think of when we think of law? How does our experience of law compare to these images?

This course aims to introduce and explore these questions. We do this by looking at some of the most influential and persistent constructions of law and legal action, and the enduring debates that these idealizations provoked. These come to us not just from caselaw and “legal texts”, but through the social sciences, and crucially through the cultural representations of law and justice that surround us (e.g. books, film, etc.).

As students interested in law and legal studies, this course will challenge you to examine your own views of where and how we “locate” law in our societies. Does our socio-legal imagination extend beyond “the books”, the courtroom, the police, violence? Students who take this course should be prepared to explore these questions through open and structured discussion, short written work, and structured essays.

Professor Alberto Salazar

Selected Topics in Business Law: Corporate Law and Artificial Intelligence

This seminar seeks to unlock the future of business law, driven by the profound impact of artificial intelligence. Delve into the exciting realm of Canadian and comparative corporate law, exploring the transformative influence of the new technology.  Discover how algorithms, blockchain technology, artificial intelligence, automation, smart contracts, and platform corporations are reshaping the business landscape and traditional business law.

Our course covers a wide range of topics, including the legal implications of financial technology (e.g. cryptocurrency, financial algorithms, and investment platforms), the changing landscape of fiduciary duties of corporate directors (e.g. AI directors, liability for privacy breaches, workplace algorithms and algorithmic management, and the impact of e-commerce on consumers), the transformation of work (e.g. app-based workers and platform corporations), and antitrust (e.g. regulation of powerful big tech giants and competition offences). Don’t miss out on this opportunity to explore the future of business law in the digital age!

Prerequisite(s): LAWS 2908, LAWS 2201, LAWS 2202 and fourth-year Honours standing

Instructor Kelly Lauzon

Selected Topics in Criminal Law Issues: Wrongful Convictions

In this class, we will rely on Canadian and American research to examine and analyze the factors that have been linked to wrongful conviction cases. We will use this knowledge to study known cases of wrongful conviction within the Canadian justice system to help us consider the implications that a wrongful conviction has for the accused person who is subsequently exonerated. In doing so, we will attempt to answer a variety of questions such as what impact do wrongful conviction cases have on the credibility of the criminal justice system? How do the state and the justice system respond when people complain that they have been wrongfully convicted? What role do police, crown attorneys, judiciary and other justice officials play in wrongful conviction cases? What impact do wrongful convictions have on the lives of the wrongfully convicted and their families? Finally, can anything be done to reduce the frequency with which people are wrongfully convicted by the criminal justice system in the future?

Prerequisite(s): LAWS 2908, CRCJ 3001, or CRCJ 3002 and LAWS 2301, LAWS 2302 and fourth-year Honours standing.

Professor Jane Dickson

Special Topics in Criminal Justice and Social Policy: The Gladue Requirements in Theory and Practice

This is a course about how law works (or doesn’t work) in real time.

Since 1999 Canadian courts sentencing an Indigenous person have been required to consider their ‘unique background and circumstances’ and any ‘alternatives to incarceration that are reasonable in the circumstances’ of the offence and the offender. Since that time, these ‘Gladue requirements’ have been expanded to apply across the criminal process, from bail through to parole applications.

Despite working with the requirements for 25 years, Gladue’s goal of reducing Indigenous incarceration rates remains beyond our reach and Indigenous people remain disproportionately represented at virtually every level of the system from police contacts to incarceration. So what’s the problem? Is it Gladue? Is it courts, lawyers, cops, corrections? Is it that we failed to understand the complexity of the factors that bring people into conflict with the law? Or was Gladue based on flawed assumptions about the system and the society that supports it, and thus the failure is no real surprise? Is this yet another example of how bad policy can thwart law’s best intentions?

This course will immerse you in the research and evaluations around Indigenous criminal justice system involvement, Gladue and critical discussions of the nature of culpability, accountability and ‘what works’. You will then have the opportunity to engage with those on the front lines of the criminal justice system – police, judges, defense and Crown counsel, Gladue writers and workers – to discuss their understanding of, and role in, decarceration.

You will have the opportunity to ask some hard questions and get honest answers from the people doing the actual work and to query connections between theory and practice and between research and the real world.

Because the real-world matters and ready or not, it’s on your doorstep.

Prerequisite(s): LAWS 2908 and fourth-year Honours standing

Professor Violet Ford

Advanced Special Topics in Legal Studies: Indigenous Legal Orders within Legal Pluralism

This course will explore the interactions between state law and Indigenous legal traditions in response to colonization and concepts of law. The course focus is on Indigenous legal traditions within the context of self-determination and self- government. It looks at a case study on how Indigenous legal traditions in one region in Canada became legitimized with a Constitutional law context within an Indigenous relationality framework.

The course begins with the drawing out of Indigenous legal principles and is further delivered through readings, and group discussions.

Prerequisite(s): LAWS 2908 and fourth-year Honours standing

Professor Stacy Douglas

Topic: Settler Sovereignty & Aboriginal and Treaty Rights: Whose rights do we talk about then we invoke the Charter? How do we understand law in a settler society? In this class we will discuss the history and use of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, with a special emphasis on section 25 which covers Aboriginal and treaty rights. We will explore how this section has been used both as a tool by indigenous peoples and how it has been used as a tool to in the maintenance of settler sovereignty.

Prerequisite(s): (0.5 Credit from LAWS 2105, LAWS 2201, LAWS 2302, LAWS 2502) and 0.5 credit in LAWS at the 2000 level.

Professor Alberto Salazar

Topic: Corporate Law and the New Industrial Revolution: Unlock the future of Business Law: Join our seminar on Corporate Law and Artificial Intelligence! Delve into the exciting realm of Canadian and comparative corporate law, exploring the transformative impact of the new technology.  Discover how algorithms, blockchain technology, artificial intelligence, automation, smart contracts, and platform corporations are reshaping the business landscape and traditional business law. Our course covers a wide range of topics, including the legal implications of financial technology (e.g. investment platforms, cryptocurrency), the changing landscape of fiduciary duties of corporate directors (e.g. AI directors, liability for privacy breaches, algorithmic management, consumer’s rights), the transformation of work (e.g. gig workers and corporate social responsibility), and antitrust (e.g. regulation of powerful big tech giants and platform corporations). Don’t miss out on this opportunity to explore the future of business law in the digital age!

Prerequisite(s): LAWS 2908, 0.5 credit from LAWS 2201 or LAWS 2202, and fourth-year Honours standing.

Instructor Garett Lecoq

Topic: Governance or Resistance? An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms

The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is an iconic document impacting the legal, social, political, and cultural fabrics of Canada. Deemed as the supreme law of the land, the Charter has a variety of influences on our daily lives beyond the written language of the law. This course explores contemporary topics and controversies from interdisciplinary perspectives emphasizing nuanced legal, social, and political implications brought about by the Charter. Unpacking both the history and processes surrounding the Charter, this course explores how the Charter may be perceived as both a provider of rights and freedoms and a tool of regulation and control over Canadian’s lives. Examining the Charter as an interdisciplinary document, this course investigates how the Charter can be understood to benefit some to the detriment of others. This course follows a lecture format with a heavy emphasis on class discussion and student participation to engage with the sophisticated theoretical and substantive components covered each week.

Professor Alberto Salazar

Topic: Corporate Law and the New Industrial Revolution 

This seminar discusses issues on Canadian and comparative corporate law and governance arising from the impact of the fourth industrial revolution. Specifically, it studies the transformative impact of both the massive deployment of blockchain technology, artificial intelligence, algorithms, smart contracts, automation, cryptocurrency and the expansion of e-commerce and big tech and platform corporations on the economy, companies and corporate law. These revolutionary changes require an examination of the ways in which business law should be adjusted to respond to the new economy and societal demands. The course will examine issues such as the new technology-driven changes to corporate law and governance; the impact of the new financial technology on business law; fiduciary duties of directors and officers and artificial intelligence; the transformation of employees’ rights, platform corporations and the gig economy; executive pay and stakeholder capitalism; corporate social responsibility in the digital economy; government intervention in recessionary economies and health emergencies; smart contracts and blockchain technology; the regulation of e-commerce; antitrust concerns associated with global big tech companies and platform corporations; consumer protection law, smart contracts and the health risk of the new technology. Evaluation is based on student reading presentations and a research paper.

Instructor Ekpedeme Edem

Topic: Race and the Criminal Justice System? 

Linking history to present-day LAWS 4306C, Criminal Law Issues looks at race and the criminal justice system. Adopting an interwoven approach to viewing race, crime, criminality, and the criminal justice system, this Special Topics course lays the foundation for de (constructing) race. It introduces students to the criminal justice system. A critical lens is adopted to policing, crime statistics, and media representations of crime. The relationship between the criminal justice system and indigenous people and other visible minorities is considered, including the impact of #movements as an advocacy tool for change and equality. At the end of the course, students should appreciate topical issues on race and the criminal justice system.

Professor Hollis Moore

Topic: Global Incarceration

This interdisciplinary seminar addresses the expanding global prison population, foregrounding the experiences and insights of people who have been targeted by the criminal law. The seminar will magnify and center scholarship that has been cast to the margins and features work meant to challenge our carceral common sense. Through vivid descriptions and first-hand accounts of prison climates in the Global South and Global North, we will examine the dynamics and far-reaching effects of incarceration, including anti-prison activism. In particular, we will investigate how practices of incarceration reflect, reinforce, and produce ongoing colonialism as well as intersecting inequalities of class, race, and gender.

Professor Danika Littlechild 

Topic: Indigenous Relations, Ethics and Law

More information to come.

Instructor Zoey Jones

Topic: Feminist Controversies in Sexuality and the Law

The course will focus primarily on the feminist and legal contexts of BDSM, sex work, and pornography. Students will be invited to discussion times during scheduled class time.  Alternate asynchronous participation options may be available. Some content will be delivered online, including (but not limited to) quizzes, podcast-style audio clips explaining concepts, and readings.

Professor Pierre Cloutier de Repentigny

Topic: Ocean and Coastal Law 

This course explores the legal regimes applicable to the governance of oceans and seas, including the regulation of coastal and land-based activities impacting or involving oceans and seas. Oceans play a crucial role in humanity’s past, present and future. In addition to being the source of life on Earth, oceans provide a crucial means of transportation (especially for global trade), are an important source of food and other resources, contribute to culture and spirituality, and are an essential component of the biosphere. The course covers a breadth of issues related to the governance of oceans, from the marine environment and our impact on it to navigation and piracy. These issues will be explored through various lens, such as legal geography, legal history, political economy, and Indigenous worldviews. While the course will include Canadian examples when relevant, the course takes a global approach to the topic.

Professor Steve Tasson

Topic: Exploring the Sociolegal Imagination and Cultural Approaches to Law

What does it mean to talk about the socio-legal imagination? When we think of what law “is” and how it operates in our society what images come to mind? What institutions (e.g. the courtroom, the prison, etc.) and what language (e.g. justice, order, etc.) do we think of when we think of law? Who do we think about? How do our experience of law compare to these images?

This course aims to introduce and explore these questions. We do this by looking at some of the most influential and persistent constructions of law and legal action, and the enduring debates that these idealizations provoked. These come to us not just from caselaw and “legal texts”, but through the social sciences, and crucially through the cultural representations of law and justice that surround us (e.g. books, film, etc.).

As students interested in law and legal studies, this course will challenge you to examine your own views of where and how we “locate” law in our societies. Does our socio-legal imagination extend beyond “the books”, the courtroom, the police, violence? Students who take this course should be prepared to explore these questions through open and structured discussion, short written work, and structured essays.

Professor Atiya Husain 

Topic: Foundations of Race and Law

This course focuses on the relationship between race and law. This focus includes attention to how race shapes the law through the construction of the modern state, as well as how law forms racial categories. We will ask: How does law form peoples? How do categories construct as well as obliterate? What racial epistemologies inform contemporary western law.

Instructor Jean Ketterling

Topic: Reproductive Rights and Justice

In this course, we will examine how reproduction is regulated, contested, and controlled in Canada. Moving beyond the binary framing of pro-choice versus anti-choice, this course draws on reproductive justice frameworks to examine a wide range of issues that impact the choice to have or not have children, and the ability to parent children in safe and sustainable communities. We will consider how law and social structures affect goals such as greater bodily autonomy and choice, and safety for parents and children.
The goal of the course is to put the legal governance and regulation of reproductive health into conversation with community-driven debates about reproductive justice. Topics include abortion, surrogacy, sterilization, parenting, and the impact of racism, disability, colonialism, carceral politics, heteronormativity, and climate change on reproductive rights and justice.

Professor Alberto Salazar

Topic: Corporate Law and the New Industrial Revolution

This seminar discusses issues on Canadian and comparative corporate law and governance arising from the impact of the fourth industrial revolution. Specifically, it studies the transformative impact of both the massive deployment of blockchain technology, artificial intelligence, algorithms, smart contracts, automation, cryptocurrency and the expansion of e-commerce and big tech and platform corporations on the economy, companies and corporate law. These revolutionary changes require an examination of the ways in which business law should be adjusted to respond to the new economy and societal demands. The course will examine issues such as the new technology-driven changes to corporate law and governance; the impact of the new financial technology on business law; fiduciary duties of directors and officers and artificial intelligence; the transformation of employees’ rights, platform corporations and the gig economy; executive pay and stakeholder capitalism; corporate social responsibility in the digital economy; government intervention in recessionary economies and health emergencies; smart contracts and blockchain technology; the regulation of e-commerce; antitrust concerns associated with global big tech companies and platform corporations; consumer protection law, smart contracts and the health risk of the new technology. Evaluation is based on student reading presentations and a research paper.

Professor Jean-Michel Marcoux

Topic: Business and Human Rights

The activities of corporations can have a profound impact on a wide range of internationally recognized human rights. In addition to a more traditional focus on labour conditions in global supply chains, there is a need to take into consideration how business entities can affect the right to health, the right to water and freedom of expression, among others. Seeking to hold corporations accountable for human rights violations also requires an understanding of the distinct obligations and responsibilities of States and business enterprises, as well as how human rights issues are addressed in various areas of law. This seminar is divided in three sections. First, it provides an overview of actors, international initiatives and concepts that relate to business and human rights. Second, it examines developments that have emerged at the domestic level in various jurisdictions, including corporate due diligence laws and forced labour legislation. Third, it explores different avenues to address business and human rights in international law, including efforts to negotiate a formal treaty and the elaboration of rules on business and human rights arbitration. Evaluation is based on a research paper, a short response paper, a reading presentation and participation throughout the semester.

Instructor Kelly Lauzon

Topic: Wrongful Convictions

In this class, we will rely on Canadian and American research to examine and analyze the factors that have been linked to wrongful conviction cases. We will use this knowledge to study known cases of wrongful conviction within the Canadian justice system to help us consider the implications that a wrongful conviction has for the accused person who is subsequently exonerated. In doing so, we will attempt to answer a variety of questions such as what impact do wrongful conviction cases have on the credibility of the criminal justice system? How do the state and the justice system respond when people complain that they have been wrongfully convicted? What role do police, crown attorneys, judiciary and other justice officials play in wrongful conviction cases? What impact do wrongful convictions have on the lives of the wrongfully convicted and their families? Finally, can anything be done to reduce the frequency with which people are wrongfully convicted by the criminal justice system in the future?

Instructor Adriana Poloz

Topic: Legal and Psychological dimensions of investigative fact-finding and prosecution evidence in Canada

This course will explore the delicate balance between the investigation of crime and the protection of individual rights, with a particular focus on some of the more controversial aspects of fact finding and criminal evidence. Topics will include the use of investigative tools used to elicit confessions, current legal and procedural protections against the admission of unreliable evidence and the prospect of wrongful convictions.

Professor Sean Richmond

Topic: International Law in International Politics

This interdisciplinary seminar examines key theories of the nature, role and limits of international law in international politics and armed conflict; relevant legal principles and rules shaping this relationship; and how these theories and rules apply to important historical and contemporary case studies.  It assesses how law and politics interact in areas such as the use of military force by states and the conduct of war; international human rights; international criminal law; world trade; the law of the sea and outer space; the environment; and Canada’s Arctic policy in a time of global warming and geopolitical change. The seminar is aimed at fourth-year undergraduate students who have pre-existing knowledge of public international law. It will be run synchronously online, using Zoom. Live discussions will be held during the scheduled course time. They will not be recorded. Students are expected to prepare in advance and actively participate.

More information to come.

Professor Melanie Adrian

Topic: Is Religion a Human Right?

This course will consider the legal, theoretical, and theological interconnections between religion and human rights. The course will familiarize students with key concepts including religious freedom, secularism, public sphere, accommodation and neutrality. These fundamental concepts will be brought into dialogue through a series of case studies that critically examine religion and culture, boundaries of religion and state, and religious compulsion. Attention will be paid to the interdependence of legal and religious perspectives.
Please note: This course will be delivered using a combination of online videos, podcasts, readings and “live” sessions using the Zoom conferencing platform. These live sessions will be held during our regularly scheduled class time.

Professor Danika Littlechild

Topic: Indigenous Relations, Ethics and Law

More information to come.

Professor Melanie Adrian

Topic: Is Religion a Human Right?

This course will consider the legal, theoretical, and theological interconnections between religion and human rights. The course will familiarize students with key concepts including religious freedom, secularism, public sphere, accommodation and neutrality. These fundamental concepts will be brought into dialogue through a series of case studies that critically examine religion and culture, boundaries of religion and state, and religious compulsion. Attention will be paid to the interdependence of legal and religious perspectives.
Please note: This course will be delivered using a combination of online videos, podcasts, readings and “live” sessions using the Zoom conferencing platform. These live sessions will be held during our regularly scheduled class time.

Professor Zoran Oklopcic

Topic: Popular Sovereignty in Contemporary Western Democracies

More information to come.

Activist in Residence Rehana Hasmi

Topic: Patriarchy, Human Rights and Informal Justice 

This course will put women at the centre of an important conversation about the relationship between customary justice and state laws, formal courts and global legal frameworks. In the Global South, up to 80% of disputes are resolved through informal justice systems. Marriage and divorce, theft, property rights, religious disputes, crimes against women, etc., are regularly mediated through tribal, religious and community-based mechanisms. These mechanisms have their roots in traditional patriarchal attitudes and practices that often disadvantage and harm women. Women’s access to informal justice may be limited or denied. Women may be convicted, punished and criminalized without having committed any crime. Female persons may be used as compensation to settle family and tribal feuds. Though many countries in the Global South have their own formal justice systems and many have signed and ratified the U.N. Human Rights Conventions, traditional practices are deeply entrenched and often prevail despite being in conflict with international human rights standards and the rule of law. We will examine practices and mechanisms of informal justice at specific locations and with specific cases to discern whether the process and outcome has weakened or strengthened universally accepted human rights for women—bearing in mind that justice for women in the Global North has also proved elusive, with legal practices and mechanisms regularly failing them. The course will feature conversations with prominent women human rights defenders.

Professor Steve Tasson

Topic: Exploring the Sociolegal Imagination & Cultural Approaches to Law

New students to Carleton who have First-Year Standing are eligible to register into one 1.0 credit or two 0.5 credit First-Year Seminar (FYSM) courses.

Instructor Garett Lecoq

This course explores contemporary topics and controversies under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms utilizing a socio-legal perspective. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is an iconic document impacting the legal, social, political, and cultural fabrics of Canada. Deemed as the supreme law of the land, the Charter has a variety of influences on our daily lives beyond the written language of the law. Unpacking both the history and processes surrounding the Charter, this course explores how the Charter may be perceived as both a provider of rights and freedoms and a tool of regulation and control over Canadian’s lives. Examining this precarious relationship of the Charter, this course investigates how the Charter can be understood to benefit some and be detrimental to others.

Professor George Rigakos

Topic: Special Topics in Policing

Professor Alberto Salazar 

Topic: Corporate Law and the New Industrial Revolution

Professor Hollis Moore

Topic: Global Incarceration

In recent decades, prison populations throughout the world have dramatically expanded. As of September 2018, more than 10.74 million people were incarcerated around the globe (Walmsley 2018). What role has the criminal law played in the growth of mass incarceration? How do jail(able) subjects (Schept 2015) — those people most directly affected by criminalization and incarceration — experience and contest uneven carceral expansion? How are we complicit in mass incarceration and how might a global perspective that centers marginalized perspectives enable us to think against the grain of carceral common sense? Throughout the course, we will grapple with these questions.
This course addresses global incarceration ethnographically. Students will read fine-grained accounts of imprisonment in North America, South America, and Africa. These studies foreground the complex experiences of targeted groups. We will begin with Indigenous and race-radical Black feminist auto-ethnographic approaches to the theorization of criminal justice systems (or the carceral state). This abolitionist lens will orient the remainder of our inquiry. Key topics will include: The political economy of punishment and resistance; challenges, limitations, and benefits of conducting ethnographic research with people who are incarcerated; the applicability of concepts/theories derived from research conducted in Western Europe and North America for grasping dynamics and experiences of incarceration in the Global South; prison-society relations; and gendered practices of incarceration.

Instructor Kelly Lauzon

Topic: Wrongful Convictions

In this class, we will examine and analyze the factors that have been linked to wrongful conviction cases within the Canadian justice system.

Instructor Marcus Sibley

Topic: Governing Sexual and Gender-Based Violence

Professor Sean Richmond

Topic: International Law in International Politics

This interdisciplinary seminar examines core theories of the role and limits of international law in international politics and armed conflict; key legal principles and rules shaping this relationship; and how these theories and rules apply to important historical and contemporary case studies.  Cases that may be studied include the Nuremberg war crimes trials; the Korean War; the Afghanistan Conflict post 9/11 and the controversy over detainees; the new corporate “race” for outer space; Canada’s Arctic policy in a time of climate change and Indigenous sovereignty; the politics of international criminal law; and the regional inequality in the work of the International Criminal Court.

Instructor Tara Ashtakala

Topic: Outer Space Law

Space is the newest “space” for the application and creation of law. The development of the law of outer space not only expands the boundaries of legal scholarship or practice, but it also affords the opportunity for humankind to reflect on how its sense of “the other” has evolved.

It was not that long ago in the history of the universe that our human ancestors first ventured from the familiar environment of their home continent. From that first foray into the unknown, human groups saw the need to both take some form of collective rules with them and create new ones, in the places which they settled or simply claimed as property, like the Western Plains of North America, the Polar regions or the sea floor. Now, we are exploring space for the same reasons we explored those previous territories: to understand this new place, to use what it contains to our benefit and, eventually, to inhabit it.

In this course, we will explore the application of existing international and domestic law and jurisprudence to current activities in outer space, as well as contemplate the new legal structures that may develop in the future, while appreciating the normative principles that persist no matter which “space” the law operates in.

Instructor Rehana Hashmi (Visiting Activist)

Topic: Patriarchy, Human Rights and Informal Justice

Professor Ummni Khan

Topics: Sexuality Debates in Law and Feminism

Feminist theorists, activists and legal reformers often identify sexuality as a key site of oppression, if not the quintessential linchpin to patriarchy. At the same time, feminists are in dispute with one another about the meaning of sexuality, which sexual practices are oppressive, and which strategies will best bring about equality and liberation. At stake in these debates is determining the feminist agenda for social change, along with identifying which “side” is entitled to claim the feminist position on the issues.
With an emphasis on the contemporary socio-legal context, this class surveys a number of “hot topics,” including BDSM, pornography, sex work, sexual violence, and safe spaces. The goal is for us to engage with the substantive issues, consider the contrasting methodologies and theories employed to illuminate the issues, evaluate the various feminist approaches to social transformation, and explore the epistemic and ontological premises of different feminist positions. In the course of our work, we will grapple with various concepts including: agency, autonomy, consent, coercion, context, call out culture, rape culture, carceral politics, sex equality, socialization, material and structural constraints, desire, pleasure and empowerment.

Professor Zoran Oklopcic

Topic: Popular Sovereignty in Contemporary Western Democracies 

From the United States and Brazil, to Poland and Hungary, the spectres of populism, nationalism, and ‘illiberalism’ are haunting Western liberal democracies. The concept which unites these ‘-isms’, is the one which already figures prominently in the imaginary of liberal democracies: popular sovereignty. Focused on this foundational concept, the course offers a panoramic, yet in-depth overview of the manifestations, functions, and the (il)liberal potential of popular sovereignty, by looking at the most influential conceptualizations of the people as an imaginary owner of a nation-state that happens to be liberal-democratic; the people as an imaginary author of a liberal-democratic constitutional order; the people as the origin of constitutional authority; the people the subject of collective self-government; the people as the bearer of constituent power; the people as the holder of a right to self-determination—which, on closer inspection can never be separated from he potential of popular sovereignty as a regulative ideal (which oftentimes refers to more specific normative principles such as democratic inclusion, widespread political participation, and non-discrimination); a political doctrine (first invoked by the opponents of the divine rights of kings in their struggles against royal absolutism, unaccountable power, and imperial domination), and, finally, popular sovereignty as a desirable, or actual state of affairs (in which an actually existing people enjoys actual sovereignty).

Professor Steve Tasson

Topic: Exploring the Sociolegal Imagination & Cultural Approaches to Law

New students to Carleton who have First-Year Standing are eligible to register into one 1.0 credit or two 0.5 credit First-Year Seminar (FYSM) courses.

Instructor Bridgette Desjardins

Topic: Sports, Law and Society

This course explores how sport is informed by, and in turn informs, law, policy, and other forms of governance. Topics include sport and the law, violence, social regulation, and social change, as related to professional and amateur sport as well as sport fandom.

Professor Alberto Salazar

Topic: Corporate Law and the New Industrial Revolution

This seminar discusses issues on Canadian and comparative corporate law and governance arising from the impact of the fourth industrial revolution. The rapid expansion of blockchain technology, artificial intelligence, automation and e-commerce and the rise of big tech and platform corporations in Canada and around the world are increasingly modifying traditional business law concepts, norms and policies. These revolutionary changes require an examination of the ways in which business law should be adjusted to respond to the new economy and societal demands. The course will examine issues such as the new technology-driven changes to corporate law and governance; the impact of the new financial technology on business law; fiduciary duties of directors and officers in the gig economy and the transformation of employees’ rights; executive pay and stakeholder capitalism; corporate social responsibility in the digital economy; government intervention in recessionary economies and health emergencies; smart contracts and blockchain technology; the regulation of e-commerce; antitrust concerns associated with global big tech companies and platform corporations; consumer protection law, smart contracts and the health risk of the new technology.

Instructor Marcus Sibley

Topic: Governing Sexual and Gender-Based Violence

Professor Melanie Adrian

Topic: Governing Sexual and Gender-Based Violence

Have you ever wondered why questions around headscarves and face veils continue to headline the news? Why we debate the role of prayer in public schools? The removal of crosses from public buildings? In short, why does the question of religious freedom persist? This course will examine these issues by considering the legal, theoretical, and theological interconnections between religion and human rights.

Professor Melanie Adrian

Topic: Governing Sexual and Gender-Based Violence

Have you ever wondered why questions around headscarves and face veils continue to headline the news? Why we debate the role of prayer in public schools? The removal of crosses from public buildings? In short, why does the question of religious freedom persist? This course will examine these issues by considering the legal, theoretical, and theological interconnections between religion and human rights.

Professor Gulay Kilicaslan

Topic: Migration, Border and Social Justice: This course is designed to provide students with a comprehensive introduction to the critical border and migration studies in relation to social justice perspectives. Some of the topics that this course will cover include border violence, governance and nation-states; the production of borders, immigrant figures and migrant “illegality”; migrant rights advocacy, state and subnational regulations, and the rise of anti-immigrant discourse; migrant and refugee deservingness; bordering and migration management; criminalization of migrants and securitization of borders; migrant agency and activism and cross-border migrant solidarities.

Professor Hollis Moore

Topic: Ethnography of Law: A Methods Workshop: In this experiential course, graduate students will deepen their understanding of legal phenomena (e.g., racism in courtroom culture and sex discrimination in the Indian Act) while learning how to study law empirically. Through site visits (e.g., to the Ottawa Courthouse), lab-based learning, and a series of small research projects, students will develop the knowledge and skills necessary to conduct independent qualitative research. Both ‘in the field’ and inside the classroom, students will complete regular labs in which they gain first-hand experience performing core research activities such as systematic observation, recording fieldnotes, ethnographic interviewing, and coding. Instead of submitting a traditional final research essay, students will have the opportunity to design and execute three small research projects throughout the term. First, students will carry out an observational study of a legal setting of their choice. Second, they will use autoethnography to investigate their own legal experiences. Finally, they will conduct interviews with legal actors, code/analyze their data, and report on their findings. In each case, there will be ample opportunity to practice skills, engage in structured self-reflection, and “workshop” ideas and techniques.

This workshop-style course is particularly suitable for PhD students and MA students considering the MA Thesis or Research Essay path because they will be able to explore topics that interest them, experiment with methods, and get a taste of independent research. This course is also appropriate for students who want to deepen their understanding of law through a different style of hands-on, applied learning. In this course, we will read/discuss both compelling exemplars of ethnographic legal research and practical methods guides.

Professor Ania Zbyszewska

Topic: Regulating Labour in the 21st Century: Bodies, Space, Flows, Utopias: Labour is an act, a process, a concept that is ubiquitous yet escapes easy categorizations. A site of, at once, freedom and exploitation, power and dis-empowerment, solidarity and fragmentation, resistance and acquiescence, love and domination, creation and destruction, labour – with all its contradictions – is integral to the re/production of political economies (capitalist, colonial and otherwise), different forms of sociality and community life, and socio-ecologies. Adopting a range of critical (feminist, heterodox political economy, decolonial, ecological, etc.) perspectives, in this course we will consider historical and contemporary developments in how labour is conceptualized, organized, and regulated, and reflect on the human and more-than-human consequences of these moves. We will pay particular attention to law’s constitutive role and the way in which it institutionalizes and reproduces labour processes and (unequal) labour relations. We will also critically scrutinize the effectiveness of policy and regulatory initiatives devised to address various contemporary problems, including exclusions, ‘gaps’, and ‘misfits’ stemming from global political-economic, technological, ecological and social transformations. We end by considering provocations, imaginaries, and heterotopias that de-center paid and ‘productive’ work and instead foreground care, community, sustainability and socially useful labour. Can – and should – law play a role in bringing these sorts of post-work, more-than capitalist worlds about? To explore these various questions, the course is organized around a series of themes: work and labour, bodies, temporalities, spaces, flows, socio-ecologies, solidarities, resistance, post-work, utopias.

Professor Philip Kaisary

Topic: Worlding Law & Literature: When it emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, the interdisciplinary field of Law and Literature cast itself as a “movement.” This seminar takes up the stakes of that claim. First, we will pay close attention to the field’s formation, goals, situation, theoretical investments, and ideological thrust. Second, we will draw on recent debates within world literary studies and the critical tradition of cultural materialism to explore whether these offer Law and Literature a way to live up to not only the claim, but also the responsibility, of being a movement. We will consider a diverse corpus of primary materials (spanning literature, film, visual arts, case law, and constitutional law) drawn from both “peripheral” and “core” global locations (likely locations include Brazil, Canada, Congo-Brazzaville, Cuba, Great Britain, Haiti, and the United States).

Professor Hollis Moore 

Topic: Everyday Experiences of the Law – An Ethnographic Lens  

Adopting an ethnographic lens, this course will offer students tools to both investigate and think critically about everyday experiences of law. Through methods training and applied learning, students will study key concepts (legal pluralism, semi-autonomous social field, vernacularization, fetishism of the law, etc.) and deepen their understanding of how law is lived. This course is suitable for any student pursuing the MA in Legal Studies; it cultivates an ethnographic sensibility that enriches all types of legal inquiry.

Professor Diana Young 

Topic: Socio-Legal Engagements in Film and Television

The purpose of this course is to consider examples of popular films and television shows in light of some perspectives in sociolegal theory that students might be familiar with. Thinking about popular art forms, their relationship to these perspectives, and the cultural reference points through which meaning is conveyed, provides insights into the assumptions that underlie legal discourse and critical approaches to law.

Professor Brettel Dawson

Topic: Judges and Judging

This course focuses on judges and decision-making by judges. In the common law system, judicial decisions have ‘the force of law”. As such, they are consequential for the litigants and also for the content of law, and the organization of society. Some settle or unsettle the law. Some spark ‘dialogue’ between the academy and the legislature. Some spark outrage and galvanize social movements while others inspire and secure social change. Most are unremarkable. All are made through an intensely human process requiring the exercise of judgment, in the absence of meta theory by which they can be measured for correctness. The course will consider factors that guide and constrain judges, the extent to which judges make choices when reaching decisions, and the interplay between legal rules, values, and social context in judicial decision-making. It will also consider whether there is a distinctly judicial state of mind that enhances capacity for good judgment (or, in its absence, poor judgment). The course aims to lay a foundation through which students can interrogate their understandings of judges and judging, critically assess the nature of the judicial role, and engage robustly with judicial decisions.

Professor William Hebert

Topic: Medicine, Criminal Law, and Governance

 Relationship between medicine, criminal law, and governance. Explores how care and punishment diverge, converge, and merge in state institutions. Examines the interactions and tensions between medical and legal knowledge, experts, and practices. Historical and contemporary case studies investigate who is imagined to constitute ‘the public’ across public health and public safety initiatives.

Professor Ania Zbyszewska

Topic: Regulating Labour in the 21st Century – Bodies, Spaces, Flows, Utopias

Adopting a range of critical (feminist, heterodox political economy, post-colonial, critical disability, ecological, etc.) perspectives, in this course we will consider historical and contemporary developments in how labour is conceptualized, organized and regulated, and reflect on the human and more-than-human consequences of these moves. We will pay particular attention to law’s constitutive role and the way in which it institutionalizes and reproduces labour processes and (unequal) labour relations. We will also critically scrutinize the effectiveness of policy and regulatory initiatives devised to address various contemporary problems, including exclusions, ‘gaps’, and ‘misfits’ stemming from global political-economic, technological, ecological and social transformations. We end by considering provocations, imaginaries and heterotopias that de-center paid and ‘productive’ work and instead foreground care, community, sustainability and socially-useful labour.  Can – and should – law play a role in bringing these sorts of post-work, more-than capitalist worlds about?

Professor Sebastien Malette

Topic: Law, Power, Indigeneity

This seminar will investigate Law through the work of Michel Foucault, especially in relation to the politics of rights in the contemporary era. The work of Foucault will be used to further investigate various rationales we find embedded in juridical narratives on what constitutes indigeneity (i.e. “regimes of truth“), as well as the power/knowledge strategies and tactics involving various indigenous actors aiming at defining–and often limiting–the scope of such concept in the International and Canadian context. The seminar will encourage an open discussion on issues of the politics of Law-Identity, and students will be encouraged to investigate subject matter on this topic. Other possible domains, which could be analyzed using this framework, include topics such as gender, sexual identities, ethnicities as well as immigration, giving students an opportunity to pursue research in their own fields of interest in line with the Foucaldian theoretical framework explored.

Professor Ania Zbyszewska

Topic: Regulating Labour in the 21st Century – Bodies, Spaces, Flows

Adopting a range of critical (feminist, heterodox political economy, post-colonial, critical disability, ecological, etc.) perspectives, in this course we will consider historical and contemporary developments in how labour is conceptualized, organized and regulated, and reflect on the human and more-than-human consequences of these moves.

Professor Diana Young

Topic: Socio-legal Engagements in Film and Television

In this course we will consider popular film and television shows in light of various theoretical perspectives students might be exposed to during their graduate studies. Students will be encouraged to unpack the ways in which meaning is conveyed, and to consider how concepts such as subjectivity, identity, and power emerge both in systems of law and in popular culture.

Professor Philip Kaisary

Topic: Modernity and Its Discontents

*Cross-listed: Law & Legal Studies / English / ICSLAC*

This course considers theorizations and aesthetic reconfigurations of repression and emancipation under modernity. Vectors of repression to be considered may include law, institutions, race, gender, technology, and industrial and post-industrial capitalism. Drawing on a diverse corpus of materials, including literature, film, television, and critical theory (Frankfurt School), our methodological approach will be comparative, contextual, and interdisciplinary.