“Transnational Conservation Contracts” is an ambitious piece by Natasha Affolder that creates a taxonomy of transnational conversation contracts and then brings those different forms of agreements under a cohesive umbrella. To that end, she is working to define a category of legal discovery, or at least to translate that category from conservation biology to law. Her chapter also seeks to advance our understanding of that area; indeed her big claim is that “[t]rasnational environmental law is being made by contract”. The piece is just a teaser, and worth reading because I expect Natasha will follow it up with more, especially more on the complex fairness challenges that arise in this emerging area.

Natasha can be found at UBC’s law faculty. Her research focuses on transnational environmental law, with an interest in state actors, but not limited to interactions between states.

Mercy is an essential component of the architecture of justice. That’s the claim in Benjamin Berger’s chapter, “Poetry, Mercy, and the Phenomenology of Justice”.

Ben’s chapter, which is a readable introduction to his work, lands on the experience of justice. In this chapter, Ben teases out how to bridge the messiness of life with the legal and philosophical contours of justice. He uses the narrative of Jonah as a foil to reveal the role that mercy plays, or at least might play, in our understanding of justice. Ben’s argument is most clearly stated when he concludes that the reading of the Book of Jonah offered by his chapter “one in which the analogy between the judgment of Nineveh and the plant have poetic pride of place, offers an interpretation of this aphorism faithful to the central themes and preoccupations of the book: to commit to abstract judgment alone is folly; and doing so estranges one from the virtue of mercy, with its unsettling but vital demand to connect one’s sense of justice with the perplexities of lived experience”.

Ben Berger’s work spans criminal and constitutional law and theory, law and religion, and the law of evidence. He makes a major contribution as the editor in chief of the CJLS.

Eric Adams is a legal historian with a penchant for constitutional and employment law. He’s also a Dal grad.

Try out “Errors of Fact and Law: Race, Space, and Hockey in Christie v. York” (2012) 62 UTLJ

The piece might best be characterized as legal geography. It bucks the trend of minimizing the significance of facts by stopping squarely on them and lingering. Eric’s tracked through the political, economic, and social context of the case, digging through discovery and court transcripts. He’ll take you from Christie the man, to nature of hockey in communities in Montreal in the 1930s and 40s, to Canada’s Olympic boxing hopeful, Raymond Clifford McIntyre. There are great stories along the way, including in the conclusion which draws out, only briefly, something of the lives of the advocates in the case.

A teaser:

“If hockey was a game that made the nation, then boxing was the sport that threatened to tear it apart. Set against the backdrop of racial violence in the United States, in the summer of 1936, on the eve of Berlin’s racially-charged Olympic Games, a boxing tournament infused the York tavern with new rules and meanings about who belonged.”