AP/HREQ 3450 6.00
Legal Institutions and Social Justice
This course examines the role of institutions of law from a critical human rights perspective. Different legal realms are explored, including Indigenous law, common law, and civil law, as well as different types law, including administrative law, family law, and criminal law. The focus will be on relationships of power that occur along legal lines, promoting and restricting justice.
The course objectives are to advance theoretical and empirical appreciation of legal institutions and enhance an analytical ability to critically examine problematic institutional / organizational components of law. The administration of discretionary powers and public accountability at different stages of the system are studied from history, domain, powers, accountability, roles and powers of various legal actors to legal dispositions. This course will grapple the contradictions between legal ideals and social practices. An analysis of the interaction between ideologies and institutions is a fertile terrain for understanding how legal injustices are reproduced in legal institutions. The main burden of this argument will be that an adequate grasp of the two fields may best be attained by conceptualizing them as interlocking spaces within a broader conceptual frame of social justice and equity. The course asks interrelated questions about the relationship between ideologies and institutions; that is, to what extent does the essence of law contributes to injustice. Informed by historical, socio- legal, economic and political perspectives, students will be able to demonstrate knowledge of the history, function and structure of legal institutions in Canada as well as develop meaningful progressive and strategic solutions.
Prerequisites: 24 credits.