Critical Conversations in Canadian Public Law

Critical Conversations in Canadian Public Law is a groundbreaking open-access collection of peer-reviewed essays showcasing interdisciplinary thinking on topical public law issues at the forefront of the evolving relationship between state and society.

In Canada, this relationship is undergoing a period of significant reinvention, as evidenced, for example, by the movements for reconciliation, decolonization and Indigenization, the calls to recognize and remedy systemic racism in institutions including police forces, and the recent extension of human rights protections to prohibit discrimination based on gender identity or expression.

These examples reveal that we are experiencing a moment where claims that challenge the normative foundations of the discipline of public law are being made in real time; claims about citizenship, rights, and access to resources and benefits; claims about what substantive and procedural fairness look like, and for whom; claims about the obligations and limits of the state to proactively address both historical and current injustices; and challenges to the underlying assumptions about the state itself.

Critical Conversations in Canadian Public Law highlights the intersections of critical perspectives–including intersectional approaches to decolonial and Indigenous legal theory, Indigenous constitutionalisms, critical race theory, feminisms, queer theory and critical disability theory–and public law topics, broadly defined.

This collection bridges the divide between traditional, largely liberal, public law scholarship and critical perspectives by centring critical theories as not only relevant, but imperative, to robust, fully contextualized understandings of contemporary public law challenges.