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This work explores the question of how professionalization of patent agency along with its accompanying discourse has affected the direction of international patent institutions and networks. Professionalization of patent agency is defined as the government regulation of who may provide patent agent services to the public through the form of professional licensing requirements. To the extent that professionalization of patent agency has created a unique discourse of patent agency, to what degree and in what respects has this discourse transformed global patent institutions? In particular, has this discourse created a form of ‘epistemic’ or ‘cultural’ capture that has the effect of delegitimizing other valid forms of discourse? Through the application of several methodologies, namely, historical analyses, doctrinal analyses and qualitative empirical work, this study attempts to create what epistemic capture theorists refer to as a capture story, which is a story of how cultural influences of a regulated industry – here, professional patent agents – come to dominate the regulatory discourse to the exclusion of other viable, competing conceptions of what constitutes the public interest. This work concludes that professionalization of agency within the patent system is interconnected with enablement as an organizing principle of the patent system as a social institution. Prior to professionalization, when agency was democratized throughout the patent system, so too was democratized enablement a guiding principle of the patent system. The formation of a unique, legitimized professional patent agent epistemic community has resulted in diminishing the democratization of enablement across the patent system as a social institution. This work discusses several of the practical and normative implications of the diminishing value of democratized enablement. Finally, this work concludes with a discussion of the future prospects of agency within the patent system.

This qualitative study examines the complex interplay between the financial regulatory landscape and financial inclusion in a post-war jurisdiction. The global debates surrounding the deployment of financial inclusion initiatives virtually center on many legal and non-legal discourses, thereby making this a significant study. This study further identified specific thematic strands which highlight how financial inclusion is regulated and administered in a post-war jurisdiction by amplifying the lived experiences of individuals that are caught between the regulatory structure of financial inclusion. In particular, this doctoral research further examines how stakeholders engaged in financial inclusion have shaped the financial regulatory landscape. By applying a local level analysis of banking practices coupled with daily lived experiences, this research aimed to explore the strengths and limitations in the delivery of financial inclusion efforts. The study employed an interdisciplinary approach, which created narratives contextualized within the jurisdiction this study was conducted. This study seeks to present theoretical and legislative developments that uncover how banking law is interlaced in policy and cultural formation using financial inclusion as an illustrative vehicle. This study is further designed to showcase theoretical and legal influences, as well as a guide in navigating this legal research project by providing original contributions of the fieldwork conducted in a post-war jurisdiction.

The legal profession throughout most of Canada enjoys the privilege of self-regulation and a (purported) monopoly over legal practice. In Ontario, the Law Society must regulate so as to facilitate access to justice and protect the public interest. Critics argue that self-regulation is anti-competitive it allows the profession to control the market for legal services, increasing the cost of services and restricting access to them and serves professional interests over the public interest. The Ontario government introduced paralegal regulation to enhance access to justice. Regulation would increase consumer choice and the competence and affordability of non-lawyer legal service providers. The Law Society agreed to regulate paralegals in the public interest. After decades of discord between lawyers and non-lawyers, paralegal regulation was implemented in 2006. Many were opposed to lawyers regulating competitors. For some, it was akin to having the fox watch over the chickens. It also confounded self-regulation the legal profession now regulating itself and others. Paralegals are licensed to provide legal services directly to the public independent of lawyers but they are regulated by lawyers. The Law Society has declared paralegal regulation a success and itself the right choice of regulator. This dissertation explores whether paralegal regulation has increased access to justice, as the government promised and Law Society claims. It examines the history of the legal profession and Law Society in Ontario and the events leading to paralegal regulation. Using both market control and the cultural history of the legal profession as theoretical underpinnings, and through the lens of access to justice, this dissertation analyzes the Law Societys exercise of regulatory authority over paralegals and undertakes empirical research of paralegal representatives at the Workplace Safety and Insurance Appeals Tribunal. This dissertation concludes that paralegal regulation has done little to increase access to justice and that self-regulation and the Law Societys manner of regulating are barriers to increased access to justice.

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.

A vast literature has considered the proactive use of law as a tool by progressive social movements, but far less attention has been paid to the way activists respond to involuntary engagement with law as a result of repression and criminalization. This dissertation explores the legal support infrastructure of grassroots protest movements in Canada and the US by tracing the evolution of contemporary activist legal support through two periods. The tactic of jail solidarity and an emerging legal collective model are highlighted as the key features of the global justice organizing era (1999-2005) while in the second age of austerity era (2008-2018), I discuss evolving approaches to law collective work in various protest movements and highlight a renewed focus on anti-repression as a framing praxis of both organizing and legal support. Grounded in my own activist legal support work over more than two decades, this research rests on data arising from detailed interviews and analysis of more than 125 archival documents. I develop two areas of inquiry. First, I trace critiques of movement lawyering in the legal literature to demonstrate that those critiques are often shared by legal support organizers. Divergent opinions on the appropriate role of lawyers and norms of professional ethics in law collective practice reflect long-standing contradictions in progressive lawyering practice. Accordingly, I argue that the legal work of non-lawyer activists ought to be understood as a complementary if also sometimes disruptive model of movement lawyering. Second, I demonstrate that an analysis of radical legal support speaks to the post-arrest experiences of protesters and the impact of such repression on mobilization phenomena largely absent from the literature on state repression of social movements. I consider this dynamic through the lens of legal mobilization, arguing that the pedagogical work of law collectives, understood as a site of social movement knowledge production, plays a significant role in mediating the complex relationship between repression and mobilization. I conclude by exploring the legal consciousness of activist legal support organizers and argue that the education and organizing praxes of law collectives are evidence of a form of prefigurative, counter-hegemonic legality.