Canada

The domestic roots of Canada's sociolegal scholarship are found in several scholarly disciplines, including law, political science, sociology, and criminology. The field derives its character from each of these and from a legal education system less narrow and constrained than normally is the case in the United States.

As part of the larger world of academic literature, Canadian scholarship reflects major international law and society currents. This is apparent in work on the social, political, and economic consequences or constraints on courts; impact studies assessing the social consequences of legal change; critical legal scholarship; and research on the legal profession along with more conventional fields.

The distinctive characteristics of contemporary Canadian law and society scholarship emerge from the interaction of three social forces. These are the multicultural, bijural, and bilingual character of Canada; a cultural ethos developed in but not entirely of North America; and lived experiences shaped by successive imperialisms, as French colonization gave way to British, which, in turn, ceded to U.S. hegemony.

Both English and French language law and society scholarship are pervasively comparative. Intellectual frames derived from international literature in both official languages and, regrettably, less commonly, by intellectual engagement across the linguistic divide give shape to scholarly work. While English-Canadian scholarship tends to be most strongly influenced by British, U.S., and other British diaspora writings, most work done by francophone or bilingual and bicultural scholars is also influenced by the intellectual currents of France and la francophonie.

Canada's founding mythology locates the country's origins in the cultures and imperial traditions of Britain and France, identified as two founding nations from the colonial era. This has generated a series of Canadian social understandings that are pervasively marked by an awareness of dual national heritages, dual languages, dual religious affiliations, and dual legal structures. In significant contradistinction to its southern settler-society neighbor, Canada could not aspire to be a “melting pot.”

Canadians have felt the consequences in all aspects of their experience, from constitutional arrangements to military policy, family relations, international relations, criminal justice, and the history of moral regulation. Mid-twentieth-century working out of the consequences of Canada's founding dualism led to the adoption of official bilingualism, which, in turn, spawned a late-in-the-day recognition of the multicultural, not merely bicultural, character of Canada's settler society. At about the same time, Canada's settler-society establishment—heirs of colonists—was forced to confront its own internal imperialism when First Nations (aboriginal) peoples powerfully, persistently, and persuasively asserted their place among the founding nations.

Peculiarly Canadian social and historical consciousnesses have affected sociolegal scholarship at [Page 156]every turn. Both British and French legal traditions emphasize the cultural import of law much more strongly than the more narrowly utilitarian framing of issues that prevails elsewhere. Consequently, the relationship between law and culture was more or less continuously recognized, studied, or argued—even before the so-called cultural turn overtook international humanities scholarship.

An awareness of the cultural dimensions of law is evident, for example, in early twentieth-century thinking about legal professionalism, in scholarship on comparative law and federalism, in work on bijuralism, in Quebec nationalist scholarship, and, most recently, in pervasively legal pluralist framings of sociolegal enquiry. Canadian legal pluralist scholarship reflects and contributes to international streams that emphasize social heteronormativity and the complex workings of relationships between the state's formal law and less formal “legal” normativity. Canadian scholarship working these seams is found in fields ranging from administrative law through debt collection, histories of legal education, studies in multiculturalism, feminist legal scholarship, and studies of law and religion to works touching on First Nations peoples' issues. The pervasiveness of work that takes legal pluralism as its starting point is one of the key distinguishing features of Canadian sociolegal scholarship.

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