Green College Law and Society Seminar Series Schedule
Spring 2003
(in reverse chronological order)
***2004 schedule is now available.***

JURIES - April 30th
Carolyn Strange - April 16th
Doug Hay - April 15th
Greg Levine - March 27th
Michael McCann - March 13th
George Pavlich - February 27th
PIVOT - February 25th

to see a chronological list of seminars from fall 2002 click here

7:00 - 8:30 p.m., Wednesday, April 30, 2003

UBC Robson Square, Room C680

http://www.robsonsquare.ubc.ca/directions.htm

`Juries: medieval institution; twenty- first century justice?

Is the jury a font of freedom or an unneccessary hindrance to effective justice? The future viability of this ancient, cherished, institution has been called into doubt in a number of recent high-profile cases including the O.J. Simpson trials and the Gillian Guess prosecution. IF the jury system cannot bear the weight of long, complicated trials - whether commercial suits or high-profile criminal prosecutions such as the upcoming Air India prosecutions - profoundly important questions concerning the future of Canada's justice system are raised.

Speakers:

• Ian Mulgrew (Vancouver Sun - pictured above)
• Robert Prior (Department of Justice, Canada - General Counsel and Head of Criminal Law, BC
• A.N. Other (Canadian Bar Association, BC)

Chair: Agnes Huang

top

 ==================================================

Coffee will be available following the event

LAW AND SOCIETY LIST. (Listowner: pue@law.ubc.ca) A Law and Society list provides information about events. It is not a discussion list and no more than one mailing per week during the academic year should be expected.

To subscribe: law-and-society-request@interchange.ubc.ca message body (not subject field): subscribe end

Interdisciplinary Nineteenth Century Studies

(jointly with Law & Society seminar series)

Coach House, Green College,

April 16, 2003 @ 7:30 p.m.

Punishment, the body, & Historiographical Lacunae

Speaker: Dr. Carolyn Strange, Centre of Criminology & Department of History, University of Toronto.

Chair: Dr. Renisa Mawani, Sociology/Anthropology, UBC

19th Century Studies announcement list: to subscribe send "subscribe 19c-ubc" to majordomo@interchange.ubc.ca
Dinner is served at Green College at 6:30 p.m. To book dinner phone 822-0912 before 10:00 a.m. on the preceding business day. Specify vegetarian or non-vegetarian option when you phone. Dinner can be paid by purchase of tickets in advance from the Green College Office ($10.50 for students, $13.50 for others) or in cash on the evening ($12.00 for students; $15.00 for others).

top

Law & Society Seminar

with Nineteenth Century Studies & Faculty of Law

Coach House, Green College, April 15, 2003 @ 4:00-5:30 p.m.

(reception to follow)

Gothic mystery, judicial power:
King’s Bench (And Other High Courts) In 18th And 19th-Century England And Canada

Speaker: Dr. Doug Hay, Department of History and Osgoode Hall Law School, York University.   Chair: Doug Harris, Law, UBC

Abstract: When English law came to ‘Canada’, a 500-year series of parchment rolls already documented the proceedings of the royal courts of Westminster Hall. King’s Bench, Common Pleas, and later Chancery (with Exchequer down the corridor) had occupied the Hall for almost half a millenium. Its judges were crucial to government: not only the Lord Chancellor, but the chiefs of King’s Bench and Common Pleas in particular were statesmen as well as justices. King’s Bench, the highest court of criminal law, favoured executive and sovereign power. Its process, some of it inherited from Star Chamber, included criminal informations, interrogatories on contempts, and other instruments of rule that were politically contentious in the 18th century. First copied in Ireland, then throughout the empire, including British North America, the royal courts gave colonial courts and their judges some of the means and much of the temptation to emulate their English counterparts, in politics and in the use of controversial process. In England and in Canada those powers were often contested, by whigs or democrats, and also by generals, even as many subjects, including some enemies of the Crown and the constitution, looked to the judges for ultimate justice.

19th Century Studies announcement list: to subscribe send "subscribe 19c-ubc" to majordomo@interchange.ubc.ca ; law and society announcement list. To subscribe send "subscribe law-and-society" to majordomo@interchange.ubc.ca

Dinner is served at Green College at 6:30 p.m. To book dinner phone 822-0912 before 10:00 a.m. on the preceding business day. Specify vegetarian or non-vegetarian option when you phone. Dinner can be paid by purchase of tickets in advance from the Green College Office ($10.50 for students, $13.50 for others) or in cash on the evening ($12.00 for students; $15.00 for others).

top

Law and Society Seminar Series

Coach House, Green College,

Thursday, March 27, 2003 5-6:30 p.m.

"Geographic Perspectives on Law and Society: Thoughts on a Course of Study"

Property law, environmental regulation and mobility rights are topics which intuitively lend themselves to the geographic eye and, in the last thirty years, geographers, generally, and urban geographers, in particular, have subjected such law to spatial scrutiny and place based study. Geographic perspectives on and studies of law and society have grown and changed. A course of studies on this wide ranging topic presents its own challenges and opportunities. This talk will focus on the purposes of such a course as Greg Levine has constructed and taught it, his method, and his sense of how it has been received by those who have participated in it.

Dr. Greg Levine (General Counsel, B.C. Ombudsman's Office & Adjunct Professor, Geography, UBC)

Dr. Greg Levine is the General Counsel in the Office of the Ombudsman, Province of British Columbia. He is a member of the Law Societies of British Columbia and Upper Canada and has an LL.B. from the University of Toronto. He also has a Ph.D. in cultural geography from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario and is currently an adjunct professor in the Geography Department at the University of British Columbia

LAW AND SOCIETY LIST. (Listowner: pue@law.ubc.ca) - notices only - normally no more than one mailing per week during the academic year - To subscribe: law-and-society-request@interchange.ubc.ca message body (not subject field): subscribe end

Dinner is served at Green College at 6:30 p.m. To book dinner phone 822-0912 before 10:00 a.m. on the preceding business day. Specify vegetarian or non-vegetarian option when you phone. Dinner can be paid by purchase of tickets in advance from the Green College Office ($10.50 for students, $13.50 for others) or in cash on the evening ($12.00 for students; $15.00 for others).

top

Law and Society

Thursday March 13, 2003

Faculty Conference Room, Faculty of Law, UBC

(4:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. - coffee to follow)

Hegemonic Tales and Everyday News:

Rethinking Legal Lore in U.S. Mass Culture

Michael McCann, University of Washington (co author: William Haltom, University of Puget Sound)

Abstract: Realist socio-legal scholars have amply demonstrated that allegations by business-supported tort reformers regarding a civil litigation explosion in the contemporary U.S. are grossly exaggerated and misleading. But why does the "common sense" about hyperlexis remain so pervasive and powerful? We develop a social constructionist approach to illustrate that ordinary news coverage and other mass media representations of civil litigation, litigants, and lawyers along with traditional moralistic norms of individual responsibility are critical to understanding the power of reform rhetoric. Moreover, we outline how this normative logic embedded in legal lore has mattered greatly both in elite neo-liberal agenda setting politics and as a disciplinary force within ordinary social practice.

Michael McCann is Professor of Political Science and Gordon Hirabayashi Professor for the Advancement of Citizenship (since fall, 2001) at the University of Washington. A former chair of the Political Science department, he is the founding director of the Comparative Law and Society Studies (CLASS) Center and director of the recently reconstructed undergraduate Law, Societies, and Justice program. McCann is the author of Taking Reform Seriously: Perspectives on Public Interest Liberalism (Cornell, 1986) and Rights at Work: Pay Equity Reform and the Politics of Legal Mobilization (Chicago, 1994); the latter was both awarded the Pritchett Prize for best book by the Law and Courts section of APSA and named co-winner of the Law and Society Association biennial best book prize. He is also the principal co-editor of Judging the Constitution: Critical Essays on Judicial Lawmaking (Little, Brown, 1989), in which he authored two chapters

McCann has published essays in Law & Society Review, Law and Social Inquiry, and other social science journals as well as in edited books on numerous subjects, including: the politics of legal mobilization challenging racial, gender, and class discrimination; law and social movements; how the U.S. Supreme Court matters; the politics of cause lawyering; "new property" rights and environmentalism; everyday disputing and legal resistance; studies of rights consciousness; and contested conceptions of rights in a globalized world. He is nearing completion of a co-authored book titled Law's Lore: Tort Reform, Mass Media, and the Social Production of Legal Knowledge. Also in progress is an essay about the ambiguous advances of civil rights during the Cold War and a long developing book project regarding issues of identity, strategy, and violence in the legal struggles of Asian-American cannery workers in the Pacific Northwest (titled A Union By Law). McCann teaches a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses on law and society topics, for which he received a university-wide Distinguished Teaching Award in 1989.

Comparative Law and Society Studies Center at the University of Washington http://depts.washington.edu/class/index.html

Law, Societies and Justice http://depts.washington.edu/class/lsj/directory.html

top

Law and Society Seminar Series

Coach House, Green College,

Thursday, February 27, 2003, 5:00-6:30 p.m.

The Harms of Restorative Justice

The impressive growth of restorative justice initiatives rests, in part, on the rhetorical appeal of claims to provide ‘alternatives’ to conventional ‘criminal justice.’ One such claim touts restorative justice practices as distinctive because they focus on healing the harms caused by local conflicts. Such practices do not, so supporters argue, determine guilt, pass judgment, formulate appropriate punishments, or other presumed staples of retributive criminal justice. Instead, restorative justice emphasizes ‘healing’ loosely defined ‘harms’ generated by specific conflicts. A closer look at the seemingly innocuous idea of ‘healing harms’, however, exposes profound dangers that attach to medical model presumptions of wholeness, order and purity. Situated within wider modern frameworks, such discourses define conflict as a necessarily harmful breech of an otherwise peaceful whole. Justice emerges, that is, when such breeches are effectively restored, when harms are healed as it were. This paper challenges the idea that justice necessarily involves ‘healing’ (or ‘health’) or ‘harm’, indicating several fundamental paradoxes within the advocates’ rationales. Its critique alludes to another possibility: reformulating justice beyond restorative advocates’ assumptions about healing the harms of conflict.

George Pavlich is a Professor in the Department of Sociology and an Associate Dean in the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research at the University of Alberta. His work has been published in areas that include critical criminological theory, restorative justice, governmentality studies, social theory, socio-legal studies and the sociology of law. He is also the author of Justice Fragmented: Mediating Community Disputes Under Postmodern Conditions (Routledge, 1996), Critique and Radical discourses on Crime (2000) and is a co-editor of Rethinking Law, society and Governance (with G Wickham, Hart Publishing, 2001) and Sociology for the Asking (with M Hird, Oxford University Press, forthcoming). He is currently working on a critique of discourses surrounding restorative justice practices.

==================================================

LAW AND SOCIETY LIST. (Listowner: pue@law.ubc.ca) A Law and Society list provides information about events. It is not a discussion list and no more than one mailing per week during the academic year should be expected.

To subscribe: law-and-society-request@interchange.ubc.ca message body (not subject field): subscribe end

Dinner is served at Green College at 6:30 p.m. To book dinner phone 822-0912 before 10:00 a.m. on the preceding business day. Specify vegetarian or non-vegetarian option when you phone. Dinner can be paid by purchase of tickets in advance from the Green College Office ($10.50 for students, $13.50 for others) or in cash on the evening ($12.00 for students; $15.00 for others).

top

 Law and Society Seminar Series & Green College Outreach Committee

Coach House, Green College, February 25, 2003, 7:30 p.m.

PIVOT: Law for the Marginalized

"PIVOT" is a volunteer organization working in Vancouver's downtown eastside to advance the interests and improve the lives of marginalized persons through law reform, legal education, and strategic legal action. According to its "vision" statement: All Canadians are entitled to receive equal protection and benefit under the law, but for illicit drug users and sex trade workers the court system functions as a treadmill rather than a vehicle of justice. This is not for lack of legal instruments that could be used to protect their interests: the Charter and Human Rights Codes apply to all, regardless of social status. Nevertheless, sex trade workers and drug users have seen little benefit from such protections. This is a direct result of their position in society: they lack the knowledge, integration and resources to defend their legal rights and entitlements.

Founded in the fall of 2000, Pivot Legal Society is the only advocacy group in Canada working for systematic legal change on behalf of sex trade workers and illegal drug users.

Pivot's mandate is simple: to advance the interests and improve the lives of of marginalized persons, in particular drug users and sex trade workers, through the use of law reform, legal education, and strategic legal action.
The basic concept underlying both Pivot's name and mandate is that the pressure point of social change is to be found at the lower edge of legal and social boundaries. By aggressively advancing the interests and defending the legal entitlements of the most marginalized and disenfranchised in society, Pivot aims for a "trickle-up" effect of respect and acceptance that will ultimately benefit all.
http://www.pivotlegal.org/beta/index.php

Speakers:

Katrina Pacey (UBC Law Student and member of Board of Directors of Pivot Legal Society)

John Richardson (Executive Director of Pivot)

Doug Byers (Pivot; & Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU).

Session Chair: Emma Cunliffe

LAW AND SOCIETY LIST. (Listowner: pue@law.ubc.ca) - notices only - normally no more than one mailing per week during the academic year - To subscribe: law-and-society-request@interchange.ubc.ca message body (not subject field): subscribe end Dinner is served at Green College at 6:30 p.m. To book dinner phone 822-0912 before 10:00 a.m. on the preceding business day. Specify vegetarian or non-vegetarian option when you phone. Dinner can be paid by purchase of tickets in advance from the Green College Office ($10.50 for students, $13.50 for others) or in cash on the evening ($12.00 for students; $15.00 for others).

top