Dans l'appel lancé aux auteurs en vue de ce numéro spécial sur l'exclusion, le comité de direction de la Revue les invitait à examiner non seulement la norme juridique et la jurisprudence sous l'angle de leur pouvoir de mise à l'écart mais aussi les institutions et les normes extra-juridiques; il leur proposait aussi de chercher, dans l'histoire des normes, l'origine des traitements inégaux.

La réponse à cet appel a dépassé notre attente. Si la majorité des auteurs ont centré leur propos sur la norme juridique et ses effets inégalitaires, ils n'en ont pas pour autant négligé les normes sociales et les institutions para- et extrajudiciaires; quelques-un(e)s d'entre eux ont carrément pris pour cibles des institutions sociales et des normes non-juridiques.

In our call for papers for this special issue of the Canadian Journal of Law and Society on “Law as a factor of exclusion,” we announced that we were seeking contributions on the discriminatory and exclusionary power of legal and non-legal norms and institutions. We also intimated that the use of historical approaches might prove revealing in analyses of statutes and other legislation, especially for their potential to uncover otherwise hidden legislative agenda.

The articles in this issue of the Journal meet and surpass our expectations. Each of the authors brings into sharp focus the central issues at stake in the announced theme. While the majority of the contributions take legislation and judicial decisions as their primary material, some are directed to exploring non-legal norms and social rules. Moreover, even in those contributions taking the state law as their object, the authors display a keen awareness of the power of social norms and social institutions; one of these deals specifically with the practices of the legal profession and the legal academy. Nearly all of the authors historicize their subject.

This paper examines gender relations within Ontario's Osgoode Hall Law School from the 1920s to the 1960s, focussing on the women who entered the school during this period. It analyzes their backgrounds and motives for entering law school and it also examines their experiences at the school and as articling students. This paper argues that the legal profession's insistence on its masculine nature shaped women law students' attempts to construct their own professional identities and to reconcile their professionalism with their gender, ethnic and racial, and class backgrounds (the majority of these women were Anglo-Celtic and middle-class). Yet while masculinity was the norm for both the profession and the law school, it was not a static, monolithic construct; it was constructed and expressed in a number of ways by male students and instructors at Osgoode Hall, particularly in the pages of the student press and through the activities of O s goode's student organization. Such struggles to define male law students' identities invariably affected women law students; in turn, through the Women's Law Association of Ontario, they worked to create an alternative space where women lawyers and students could work for change and attempt to reconcile professionalism and middle-class femininity.

This paper examines the British legal policy in Hong Kong which preserved Chinese customary law as a subtle and indirect form of social control. The initial takeover of Hong Kong by the British in 1841 was motivated by economic interest in China. Hong Kong was to be developed into an entrepôt under a laissez-faire government. In order to pacify the local subjects and the Chinese government, English law was applied to British subjects but the local Chinese were governed by Chinese customary law. Gradually, the interpretation of customary law by English judges and common law courts transformed and even created a new understanding of this law. The preservation of customary law had the paradoxical effect of ousting the local narrative. One hundred and fifty-six years have passed; Hong Kong has fulfilled the British dream of being a flamboyant commercial centre. However, in less than 150 days, Hong Kong will be elevated from the status of a British colony to that of “special administrative region” of China. Nonetheless, the rhetoric of laissez-faire government continues to be reflected in the policy of “high degree of autonomy.” The fate of Hong Kong is certainly unknown. Hopefully, the study of its past experience will shed some light on its future.

This article reports on three studies aimed at identifying ways in which seemingly neutral legislation may lead to discriminatory results. Three facets of workers' compensation legislation in Québec were examined in order to determine whether their application to injured women workers is equitable. The first study analysed 179 appeal decisions regarding claims for psychological disability relating to workplace stress. Results show that accessing compensation was more difficult for women than for men. Disparity in access could not be explained by individual differences. Discrimination operated by differential interpretations by decision makers of broad criteria (unusual stress) developed in the case law itself. The second study looked at legislative and administrative rules regarding compensation for inability to perform unpaid domestic work as a result of a compensable workplace injury. Differential obligations in the home conjugated with inadequate legislative programmes regarding domestic work led to under-compensation of women workers for the real economic consequences of their work injury. Thirdly preliminary results of a study of appeal decisions and policy regarding professional rehabilitation of injured workers are presented. Systemic discrimination is illustrated by the fact that pre-injury earnings are determinant in access to programmes and duration of rehabilitation benefits. Conjugated with systemic undervaluing of women's work, this leads to poorer access to appropriate rehabilitation programmes.

In this article the authors examine the phenomenon of creation of “childhood” and the role played by law, particularly by “puttng aside” young people with regard to their legal status. By carefully examining the evolution of Manitoba laws concerning youth between 1870 and 1924, one notices the gradual development of a specific legal space characterized by the necessity of adult control, residential fixation, moralization and interdiction for young people to be in certain public places. Putting this specific legal space Unto place was accomplished actualized by: 1) the development of new legal principles 2) the adoption of new legal designations to situations that require intervention, 3) the implementation of specific administrative structures underlying the application of this new youth legal system, 4) and the creation of a youth police. The impact of this creation is important: the transformation of the representation of youth; transformation of legal relations between children, parents and the State; global modification of the way of life of young people. But furthermore, the construction of “childhood” across the Manitoban legal system shows the transformation of necessities linked to the maintenance of a specific legal order.

Surnames tend to be indicators of a particular linguistic or ethnic background. For this reason, many states have sought, directly or indirectly, to influence the language of the surnames of their nationals. In this paper, the author demonstrates how surname policies have tended to reflect certain national identity objectives: to assimilate or to segregate particular ethnic communities, or to engage in national building exercises around a shared ethnic identity. These surname policies are particularly interesting in the context of ethnically diverse countries like the United States and Canada. The author draws on examples from these countries to illustrate how attitudes towards surnames reflect the inclusion or exclusion of particular communities from articulations of a national identity.

Members of the Chasidic Jewish communities of Montreal lead what appear to be insular lives, sharply defined by physical, cultural and religious boundaries. In describing and questioning the interface between Chasidic and non-Chasidic life and law, the author draws on the theoretical insights of legal pluralism, feminism and what has been labelled “everyday life.” These insights, combined in a critical way, provide the framework and justification for a focus on family relations and education, two crucial aspects of Chasidic experience and identity. Both family relations and education demarcate Chasidic space and communities; they also serve to show how the boundaries are transgressed, blurred, and complicated. Rather than searching for the clearly marked lines that divide Chasidim and non-Chasidim, then, the more fruitful project is one that acknowledges patterns of interaction and constantly changing meanings and practices. It is by recognizing and working with moving boundaries and messy intersections that a picture of life and law—both inside and outside a particular community—can emerge.

The social exclusion of aboriginals is defined as a condition of non-citizenship that results from a rupture between a Nation and its “history”. This break-up process implies that certain individuals and groups have lost access to social, civil and political rights. Historically, the marginalization of aboriginals registered in the cursus of the incorporation to the Nation-State that was translated by an internal policy of reduction and segregation that contributed to the appropriation of lands that were materially and symbolically linked to them. This article intends to understand the role played by law, in such a rupture process, by examining more specifically the effects of the Indians Act. The author conceives that the imposition of law to the First Nations, has been the producer of exclusions by starting and then reinforcing the material and identity break-ups. In conclusion, the author proposes six theoretical principles permitting analysis of the complexity of relations between law and exclusion.

The author begins with an evaluation of the topic of the present issue, “Law as an exclusion factor”, by fleshing out the strong polysemantics of expressions and concluding that relations between law and exclusion are probably ambiguous. To compare the different meanings and to play with the ambiguity generated by their coexistence, is the object of this article which relates to penal law because the suspicion of exclusion takes a large part of it. However, the penal theory presents it, on the contrary, as an effort to tear the humanity out of the archaic game of vindication. On the contrary, relying on recent anthropological works, the author suggests visualizing both the vindictive and penal spheres as two forms of legality equally regulated, of which the most exclusionary is the latter. But since nothing is simple in this game of law and exclusion, the author searchs next to verify the affirmation in examining the contemporary operations of penal law -the creation of incrimination and its application. By demonstrating different scenarios, the author finally achieves the demonstration of the complexity of the relation between law and exclusion and the impossibility of a too brief or a priori conclusion.

It has come to our attention that a number of errors were made in the reviews authored by Dr. Amyn B. Sajoo, published in volume 11:1 at pages 307–310 and 310–315. On pages 274, 307, 310 and the back one of the Journal, Dr. Sajoo's name was mispelled. In addition, footnote 3 on page 312 was amputated. The last sentence of the note should read: “I have sketched the unfolding dialectic and some of its ramifications in the ‘Islamic Ethos and the Spirit of Humanism’ (1995) 8 International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 579.” The Journal apologizes to Dr. Sajoo for these errors.