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Changes to the criminal law are needed so that complainants like Caitlan Coleman are treated with greater compassion and respect.

Negotiating Feminism traces the reflection of the feminist “sex wars” in contemporary debates about campus sexual violence reform in Canada and the United States – what Emily Bazelon has called the “return of the sex wars” on college and university campuses. Negotiating Feminism focuses on one issue in the return of the sex wars – the role of interests-based, consensual dispute resolution processes, including mediation and restorative justice, in changing the conditions that foster campus sexual violence on the ground. The political polarization of the return of the sex wars has prevented some colleges and universities from engaging with policy models that challenge the primacy of campus adjudication and other rights-based options. Complainants of campus sexual violence should be empowered to access any form of dispute resolution under law, whether rights-based or interests-based, that accords with their personal conception of justice. Empowering complainants in this way does not mean that colleges and universities should be willfully blind to the reality of substantive inequality that campus adjudication is intended to address. Yet acknowledging this reality should not require colleges and universities to essentialize about the nature of women’s injury or overdetermine the role of gendered power imbalances in producing the content of women’s interests in resolving their complaints otherwise. Feminist law and policymakers should negotiate between these competing imperatives and come together by instituting what Negotiating Feminism calls the “plural process” model of campus sexual violence reform. The plural process model recognizes that both rights-based and interests-based options can promote substantive equality for women and other historically marginalized groups – and it seeks to bring about that change.

The Canadian government has a long history of regulation, exploitation, and violence against lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, and two-spirit (LGBTQ2) people. One of the most painful chapters in this history is the “LGBT Purge,” a term that refers to the expulsion of LGBTQ2 service members and employees from the Canadian Armed Forces, Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and federal public service between 1955 and 1992. The LGBT Purge was the subject of a class action lawsuit filed in 2017 that resulted in a settlement agreement in 2018. On a parallel track to the settlement, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau issued a formal apology for the government’s history of state-sponsored discrimination against LGBTQ2 people in 2017. In this article, I consider these events from a legal historical and queer theoretical perspective. I focus on the potential of the settlement to promote reconciliation with LGBTQ2 people, contextualizing the settlement in light of neoliberal and homonationalist pressures on the class members to settle the past and forgive legacies of homophobic violence that continue to be felt today. Praiseworthy as the settlement terms might be, I conclude by arguing that forgiving the government’s history of discrimination against LGBTQ2 people is an historical impossibility.

Equality rights for LGBTQ+ peoples have a politically vexed relationship with substantive equality around the world. Critiques of the structural limitations and harmful, unintended consequences of rights claims have abounded in critical legal theory for decades. This chapter intervenes in these debates by mapping the structure and rhetoric of equality rights for LGBTQ+ peoples. Applying a legal analytical framework that originates in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s writing, the chapter focuses on the text of the Yogyakarta Principles on the Application of International Human Rights Law in Relation to Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, released in 2007 and supplemented in 2017. The rhetoric of the Yogyakarta Principles is trapped in what Sedgwick calls a “radical and irreducible incoherence” between conflicting conceptions of gender and sexuality that has constrained the mission of substantive equality worldwide, yet which may be fundamental to the praxis of rights claiming in the international human rights system. Equality rights talk is “queer” in this sense – irresolvable in theory, powerfully productive for LGBTQ+ peoples in certain legal contexts, and profoundly harmful to LGBTQ+ peoples and other equality-seeking groups in other legal contexts. Considering this fact, the chapter concludes by arguing that LGBTQ+ activists should think about how we might negotiate the conflicts of equality rights rhetoric more strategically and responsibly by operating, paradoxically, both within and without the constraints of international human rights system to promote gender and sexual diversity on the global stage.

This article traces the evolution of the feminist “sex wars” in contemporary debates about campus sexual violence reform in Canada and the United States – what Emily Bazelon calls the “return of the sex wars” at American colleges and universities. The "return of the sex wars" has been characterized by many of the same unproductive hostilities and painful acrimony as the original fight between feminist sex radicals and anti-pornography feminists over three decades ago. This article focuses on a particularly controversial issue in these debates: the role of consensual dispute resolution (i.e., negotiation, mediation, and restorative justice) in addressing campus sexual violence. Employing a two-person counter conversational methodology, the article stages a negotiation between two feminists with competing and representative views on this issue. Feminist concerns about consensual dispute resolution raise challenging questions about the rise of informal justice and its implications for the rule of law in campus sexual violence cases. The article concludes by arguing that the intense polarization and politicization of the "return of the sex wars" has led to a hollowing out of the feminist critical discourse in this area, which has prevented some feminists from engaging with consensual dispute resolution as a potentially viable and redemptive means of sexual regulation on campus.

The Federation of Law Societies of Canada’s Model Code of Professional Conduct recognizes the commitment of the legal profession to protect the public interest and respect the requirements of human rights laws. Following in the wake of the Statement of Principles controversy at the Law Society of Ontario, this article argues that the standard conception of lawyers’ professional role morality in Canada—the neutral partisan—takes a thin and “bleached out” view of legal ethics. In making this case, the article reads the limited body of professional discipline caselaw through the lens of critical theory to show that current practices of lawyer regulation pertaining to human rights and equality are underinclusive. Next, the article argues that lawyers have a positive obligation to promote substantive equality in their professional life and work. This obligation should be reflected by revisions to the Model Code and other professional regulatory measures to ensure that law societies take a comprehensive and systematic approach to promoting substantive equality within their mandate. As such, the purpose of the article is to shift the terms of professional debate about what protecting the public interest and respecting the requirements of human rights laws mean.

Feminist law and policymakers have been inspired by collectively generated experiences of emotion that help to shape what counts as justice and injustice in campus sexual violence cases. Focusing on events surrounding the Dalhousie University Faculty of Dentistry in 2014–2015, this article explains how emotional incitements in the case contributed to an infrastructure that supported formal and specifically carceral responses to campus sexual violence. Correspondingly, this article explains why alternative modes of legal and political formation that challenged the premises of the formal law, including restorative justice, were misread by some commentators as a form of “weak justice” and therefore outside the bounds of feminist action. The central claim of the article is not that particular emotional reactions are right or wrong, but that feminist law and policymakers should reflect on and assess their political force. Considering the ways that emotions are mobilized reveals the benefits and drawbacks of engaging with law in ways that feel emotionally gratifying and therefore politically necessary, but which can lead to harmful consequences that contradict feminist goals.

Feminist judgment projects have proliferated in recent years, with contributors in over twelve countries rewriting judgments to bring the relationship between law, gender, and equality to light. The requirements of feminist judgments vary between projects, but many of them require contributors to replicate the generic conventions of judgments and limit their reference to legal precedents and other materials available at the time of the original decision. This article reflects on the politics of feminist judgments, challenging the premises of the conventional methodology in contexts where the law cannot be redeemed through liberal legal methods. One such area is HIV non-disclosure. Canadian courts have repeatedly found that the criminal law has jurisdiction over a person's failure to disclose their HIV-positive status in sexual relations. The article argues that the law in this area should not be rewritten using the conventional methodology because the law should be abolished. In contexts like this, feminists should have recourse to an expanded referential universe, including creative tools, strategies, and forms of literary and artistic expression to represent gender and sexuality differently. The article concludes by constructing a "found poem" from the words of R. v Aziga, a 2023 decision of the Ontario Court of Appeal, to suggest a more progressive path forward in HIV nondisclosure cases.

Trump’s executive order and Pierre Poilievre’s stance on trans rights fuel a divide on gender equality. Trans rights and feminism are linked and both must be defended together.