Shauna Van Praagh

The Chutzpah of Chasidism

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.

Adolescence, Autonomy and Harry Potter: The Child as Decision-Maker

This paper integrates the worlds of Harry Potter and civil liability, in the context of exploring the ways in which the integrity of young people - their sense of self - deserves both respect and protection. By intertwining the two realms, each structured by its particular norms and narratives, the exploration emphasises the intricate connections among personal vulnerability, dignity and autonomy. Notions central to an understanding of the individual in the private law of civil liability, these aspects of the individual are just as firmly situated in Harry Potter. Thus, as the books illustrate how people, institutions and experiences shape the period that leads from childhood to adulthood, they reveal a complex yet necessary coexistence of dependence and self-reliance. So too, when the law deals with decision-making by young people, the difficulties with assuming or requiring autonomy against a backdrop of adolescence are stark. Often hidden from view in legal, as opposed to literary, narrative, the necessary tension between individual vulnerability and independence - given contour by the relationships in which the young person participates - is brought to light by bringing together the stories of Harry Potter with those of adolescent decision-making in law.

Women and (their) children: wrongs, rights and relationships

ABSTRACT As of the turn of the twenty-first century, a pregnant woman appears to be excluded from the Canadian private law of civil wrongs when it comes to any wrongfully inflicted harm on her own foetus. This article revisits and examines the images of pregnancy and maternity represented in the judgments in Dobson v. Dobson, a 1999 decision of the Supreme Court of Canada. Against the backdrop of contemporary discussions about surrogacy, the images put forth in Dobson – namely, the expecting woman, the autonomous woman and the woman as mother – represent more generally the co-existing and often entangled pictures with which the law grapples whenever pregnancy and maternity are at stake. This essay explores how we might imagine a more child-focused reflection of issues like those presented in Dobson. Without insisting on the applicability of children’s rights as set out in conventions or charters, it is possible to include the interests and perspective of children in a nuanced analysis of law’s engagement with pregnancy and maternity that does not compromise or erode women’s rights or interests. Indeed, a recognition of children’s interests in this context permits a juridical recognition of, and reconciling with, the complex and diverse realities of pregnancy and maternity.