Introduction to Critical Conversation in Canadian Public Law

Abstract

The introductory chapter to Critical Conversations in Canadian Public Law situates the book "in the midst of some of the most significant social, economic, and political struggles of the past decade", from the COVID-19 pandemic to the Gaza genocide. The introduction describes how the book "seeks to reflect and ignite critical conversations about the centrality of public law and its institutions, broadly defined and deeply contested, to the (re)production of current inequities." It outlines two ways in which the collection is "critical": first, the critical legal methods employed by the contributors (e.g., acknowledging law's political operation, understanding law's relationship with power, and looking beyond descriptive accounts of law to consider its materiality and normativity); and second, "in terms of the importance, urgency, and necessity of deepening our understandings of the relationship between public law and contemporary inequities." Finally, the introduction identifies "five cascading themes reflected across the chapters in this collection—and across our varied experiences with the law—that are pivotal to the law's consistent mobilization to reify extant power disparities in society [...] exceptionalism, capitalism, segmentation, incrementalism, and formalism."

Keywords: Public Law, Indigenous Legal Orders, Critical Race Theory, Feminist Legal Theory, Queer Legal Theory, Critical Disability Theory