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Criminal Law

Criminal justice

Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University

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Full-Text Articles in Law

Metaphysics & Morals In Canadian Criminal Justice: A Pragmatic Analysis Of The Conflict Between Neuroscience And Retributive Folk Psychology, Sarah Greenwood Oct 2020

Metaphysics & Morals In Canadian Criminal Justice: A Pragmatic Analysis Of The Conflict Between Neuroscience And Retributive Folk Psychology, Sarah Greenwood

LLM Theses

The retributive justification of Canadian criminal law contains several assumptions about human nature that conflicts with what neuroscience has established regarding human behavior and the function of rationality. Interdisciplinary discourse on this conflict between law and neuroscience has unnecessarily implicated the free will debate and is further stagnated by epistemic cultural differences between the two disciplines. To avoid these roadblocks, this thesis applies the methodological principles of pragmatic philosophy. Rather than asking which description of human nature is true, pragmatic inquiry focuses on the difference either would make in practice. This analysis reveals that retributive folk psychology in practice causes …


Improving The Criminal Justice System In Nigeria Through Restorative Justice: Lessons From Canada And New Zealand, Olaniran Akintunde Oct 2018

Improving The Criminal Justice System In Nigeria Through Restorative Justice: Lessons From Canada And New Zealand, Olaniran Akintunde

LLM Theses

This thesis argues the need for Nigeria to incorporate restorative justice within its criminal justice system. Its prevailing adversarial system is bedevilled with various challenges such as over- incarceration, recidivism, high rates of juvenile crime and prison congestion. The work draws lessons from Canada and New Zealand, two jurisdictions that have made improvements to similar systems like Nigeria via the adoption and practice of restorative justice. The advantages that a restorative justice alternative bring to criminal justice administration in Nigeria include less use of incarceration, improvement in social relationships, rehabilitation and the reintegration of young offenders. The thesis recommends that …


Person(S) Of Interest And Missing Women: Legal Abandonment In The Downtown Eastside, Elaine Craig Jan 2014

Person(S) Of Interest And Missing Women: Legal Abandonment In The Downtown Eastside, Elaine Craig

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Women are disappearing. Sixty-nine of them disappeared from the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver between 1997 and 2002. Northern communities in British Columbia believe that more than 40 women have gone missing from the Highway of Tears in the past thirty years. The endangered do not come from every walk of life. Most of these women are Aboriginal. Many of them are poor. To be more precise then, poor women and Aboriginal women are disappearing. Aboriginal women in particular are the targets of an irrefutable epidemic of violence in Canada today. Robert Pickton is thought to have murdered almost 50 of …


Imagining Success For A Restorative Approach To Justice: Implications For Measurement And Evaluation, Jennifer J. Llewellyn, Bruce P. Archibald, Don Clairmont, Diane Crocker Oct 2013

Imagining Success For A Restorative Approach To Justice: Implications For Measurement And Evaluation, Jennifer J. Llewellyn, Bruce P. Archibald, Don Clairmont, Diane Crocker

Dalhousie Law Journal

Whether restorative justiceis "successful," or not, is a complex question. Attempts to answer this question by practitioners, professionals, and scholars have often been bounded by common notions of success in standard criminal justice terms. The authors of this paper suggest that ifrestorative justice is properly understood in terms of its focus on relationship, success should be measured on new and different dimensions. This paper seeks to bring a relational imagination to the scholarly effort of capturing the essence ofrestorative justice and figuring out how to assess its successes and failures. The authors offer a foundation and agenda for future research …


Why Restorative Justice Is Not Compulsory Compassion: Annalise Acorn's Labour Of Love Lost [A Review Of 'Compulsory Compassion: A Critique Of Restorative Justice,' Annalise E. Acorn (Vancouver: University Of British Columbia Press, 2004)], Bruce P. Archibald Jan 2005

Why Restorative Justice Is Not Compulsory Compassion: Annalise Acorn's Labour Of Love Lost [A Review Of 'Compulsory Compassion: A Critique Of Restorative Justice,' Annalise E. Acorn (Vancouver: University Of British Columbia Press, 2004)], Bruce P. Archibald

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Annalise Acorn has produced an immensely engaging book about love, sexuality and law, written with verve and elan; however, it paints a hugely misleading picture of restorative justice that could be seriously damaging to what is arguably the most significant development in criminal justice since the emergence of the nation state. Restorative justice is changing the nature of criminal justice systems the world over. The Canadian criminal justice system is a leader in this regard, though it is far from being alone. Simplistic and dysfunctional systems of punitive criminal justice are being altered and supplemented by restorative programs that are …


A Brave New World Of Criminal Justice: Neil Gerlach's Genetic Imaginary, Steve Coughlan Jan 2005

A Brave New World Of Criminal Justice: Neil Gerlach's Genetic Imaginary, Steve Coughlan

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

In this well written and intriguing book, Neil Gerlach asks why the criminal justice system has accepted DNA evidence in much the same way that our Anglo-Saxon predecessors accepted trial by ordeal. Why have we not instead shown the same caution we show polygraph evidence? To be sure, he does not present the issue in those terms, and might shudder at the analogy. Still, the central issue he pursues in the book is the question of how DNA evidence has managed to assume its current aura of infallibility, as evidence which is somehow uniquely objective and "true": how it has …


Criminology: A Reader's Guide, Bruce P. Archibald Apr 1993

Criminology: A Reader's Guide, Bruce P. Archibald

Dalhousie Law Journal

As a journeyman law teacher, sometime sociologist, enthusiastic law reformer, and an occasional dabbler in criminology and comparative law, this volume came to me like manna from heaven. It's an intelligent catalogue of almost all I ever wanted to know but most often never had time to read. Modestly called "a reader's guide", this book will serve a multitude of purposes for anyone with an interest in criminology. It is an excellent starting point for the student wishing to commence research on nearly any serious criminological topic. Criminal justice professionals who wish to step out of their narrow niche and …


Jailbirds In Mid-Victorian Halifax, Judith Fingard Oct 1984

Jailbirds In Mid-Victorian Halifax, Judith Fingard

Dalhousie Law Journal

The social history of crime and criminal justice in the nineteenth century has recently tended to emphasize two themes: first, attitudes towards crime and punishment, and the administrative reforms of institutions which grew out of those attitudes; second, the nature of criminality, particularly of serious crime and long-term trends, as revealed in case studies of offences in particular localities, including computer-based, statistical profiles of criminal populations. Both these approaches have their strengths, but it must be recognized that they are heavily weighted in favour of the theoretical, the institutional, and the statistical; they are also predominantly concerned with the view …