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University of Toronto Law Journal

Volume 68, No. 1

UTLJ Online:  <http://bit.ly/utlj681> http://bit.ly/utlj681

 

Special Issue:  Transfiguring Justice: Trans People and the Law

 

Articles: 

 

Don't be so hateful: The insufficiency of anti-discrimination and hate crime
laws in improving trans well-being

Florence Ashley

The question of judicial protection of trans people has come to the fore in
recent years, culminating in Bill C-16 which added gender identity and
gender expression to the federal anti-discrimination and hate crime laws. In
this article, the author contests the notion that anti-discrimination and
hate crime laws are effective in mitigating anti-trans harassment,
discrimination, and violence. Suggesting that the model of anti-trans acts
which underlies anti-discrimination and hate crime laws is erroneous, the
author argues that the law's impact on trans well-being will be modest and
that a careful analysis of anti-trans attitudes enables us to identify a
number of more effective governmental avenues toward trans emancipation.
<http://bit.ly/utlj681a> http://bit.ly/utlj681a

 

Gender identity, gender pronouns, and freedom of expression: Bill C-16 and
the traction of specious legal claims

Brenda Cossman

Bill C-16, An Act to Amend the Canadian Human Rights Code and the Criminal
Code was a government bill intended to provide equal protection of the law
to trans and gender non-binary Canadians. It protects individuals from
discrimination within the sphere of federal jurisdiction, as well as
protecting against hate propaganda and hate crimes, on the basis of gender
identity and gender expression. The opposition to previous legislative
attempts to protect trans rights focused on questions of sex-segregated
spaces such as public bathrooms. In the course of the debate over Bill C-16,
however, a new discourse of opposition emerged: Bill C-16 was said to be a
fundamental threat to freedom of expression.  <http://bit.ly/utlj681b>
http://bit.ly/utlj681b

 

 

The origins of gender identity and gender expression in Anglo-American legal
discourse

Kyle Kirkup

Anglo-American lawmakers are in the midst of introducing a series of
anti-discrimination protections for trans people. By and large, they are
making this change by adding the terms 'gender identity' and 'gender
expression' to a variety of human rights law instruments. In June 2017, for
example, the Parliament of Canada passed Bill C-16, An Act to Amend the
Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code. The legislation adds the
terms 'gender identity or expression' to the Canadian Human Rights Act,
along with the hate crimes provisions of the Criminal Code. Similar pieces
of legislation have been introduced in the United States and the United
Kingdom. While legal scholarship has spent considerable time debating the
merits of such legislation, comparatively less attention has been paid to
the plural, and often contradictory, history of 'gender identity' and
'gender expression.' This article traces the origins of these terms, arguing
that 'gender identity' is the product of mid-century psychiatric discourses
that constructed trans people as a narrow class of persons.
<http://bit.ly/utlj681c> http://bit.ly/utlj681c

 

The banishment of Isaac: Racial signifiers of gender performance

Ido Katri

This article suggests that a performative reading of discrimination cases
allows for the recognition of intersectional harms and facilitates a broader
systemic account of exclusion from resources and opportunities. Revealing
the protected category of sex as a prohibition against discrimination on the
basis of gender performance, the article considers how signifiers marked on
the gendered body shape the protected categories relating to race and
ethnicity. The article suggests that racial/ethnic signifiers and sex/gender
performance function reciprocally to construct material realities of
exclusion from resources and opportunities. Drawing on the trans position in
anti-discrimination, the article offers a nuanced reading of discrimination
suffered by Jews of Arab decent, the Mizrahim, under Israeli law.
http://bit.ly/utlj681d

 

Review Articles:

 

The definitive article

Alice Ristroph

Professors teach, and scholars theorize, something called 'the' criminal
law. A new book by Lindsay Farmer is ostensibly about criminal laws in
England over the past two centuries, but it shows that in that place and
time there developed a concept of criminal law as a singular, cohesive, and
enduring institution that can and should be theorized independently of any
particular jurisdiction, statute, case, or code. The grip of this concept is
powerful, this review essay argues. This way of thinking about criminal law
now spans national borders - and it creates significant obstacles to penal
reform in the United States and elsewhere. This review essay focuses on two
implications of the modern understanding of 'the' criminal law: the claim
that criminal law has some extra-legal nature, core, or essence and the
conceptual divide between substance and procedure.  <http://bit.ly/utlj681e>
http://bit.ly/utlj681e

 

Thinking like a private lawyer

Christopher Essert

In this review essay of their books, Private Wrongs, Corrective Justice, and
The Idea of Private Law, I discuss some aspects of the approach to private
law (and, in particular, tort law) taken by Arthur Ripstein and Ernest
Weinrib. Among the elements of their view that I highlight are: the role of
a 'form of thought' and its relation to questions of 'fit'; the centrality
of correlative or relational normativity; the particular kind of
justification that they take to be appropriate in the context of private
law; and the importance of indeterminacy.  <http://bit.ly/utlj681f>
http://bit.ly/utlj681f

 

 

The University of Toronto Law Journal has taken a broad and visionary
approach to legal scholarship since its beginnings in 1935. Its first
editor, Professor WPM Kennedy, hoped that the journal would foster a
knowledge of law "as [the] expression . of organized human life, of ordered
progress, and of social justice." The University of Toronto Law Journal has
since established itself as a leading journal for theoretical,
interdisciplinary, comparative, and other conceptually oriented inquiries
into law and law reform. The Journal regularly publishes articles that study
law from such perspectives as legal philosophy, law and economics, legal
history, criminology, law and literature, and feminist analysis. Global in
relevance, international in scope, it publishes work by highly regarded
scholars from many countries, including Australia, Israel, Germany, New
Zealand, the United States, and the United Kingdom.

 

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