Law Against The People

In this sweeping re-investigation of Canadian legal history, Harring shows that Canada has historically dispossessed Aboriginal peoples of even the most basic civil rights.

Plato has famously argued ...

This book consists of two parts: “The Law of Peoples,” a major reworking of a much shorter article by the same name published in 1993, and the essay “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” first published in 1997. Taken together, they are the culmination of more than fifty years of reflection on liberalism and on some of the most pressing problems of our times by John Rawls. “The Law of Peoples” extends the idea of a social contract to the Society of Peoples and lays out the general principles that can and should be accepted by both liberal and non-liberal societies as the standard for regulating their behavior toward one another. In particular, it draws a crucial distinction between basic human rights and the rights of each citizen of a liberal constitutional democracy. It explores the terms under which such a society may appropriately wage war against an “outlaw society” and discusses the moral grounds for rendering assistance to non-liberal societies burdened by unfavorable political and economic conditions. “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited” explains why the constraints of public reason, a concept first discussed in Political Liberalism (1993), are ones that holders of both religious and non-religious comprehensive views can reasonably endorse. It is Rawls’s most detailed account of how a modern constitutional democracy, based on a liberal political conception, could and would be viewed as legitimate by reasonable citizens who on religious, philosophical, or moral grounds do not themselves accept a liberal comprehensive doctrine—such as that of Kant, or Mill, or Rawls’s own “Justice as Fairness,” presented in A Theory of Justice (1971).

A Law Commission consultation paper 'A new homicide act for England and Wales?' was published as LCCP 177 (ISBN 0117302643) in April 2006.

This document, originally written in 1978, is a comprehensive report on the traditional forms of justice among Aboriginal peoples across Canada and the impact that western settlement had on those systems. It begins with a chapter on traditional justice among the Micmac and Naskapi. Part 2 covers the struggle for power as Europeans invaded traditional Aboriginal lands, and includes descriptions of civilizations & traditional justice of the First Nations of the central regions (Ojibwe, Iroquois, Huron). Part 3 covers traditional & European justice in the British colonial period, 1763-1867. Part 4 reviews the effect of Canadian legislation on Native peoples after Confederation, especially in the western provinces, and the numerous rebellions & protest actions against injustice. The final part covers the period from the granting of the unconditional franchise to Aboriginal peoples and the various movements for Aboriginal rights and a reformed justice system.