Name: Bad Law
Price: 171.77 RON
Availability: InStock
Author: John Reilly
ISBN: 9781771603348

Bad Law: Rethinking Justice for a Postcolonial Canada

John Reilly

Former Alberta judge John Reilly examines the Canadian justice system after years of confronting its failures in relation to Indigenous peoples and communities.

In Bad Law, Reilly revisits assumptions he once held as a judge and asks how Canadian legal institutions might change in a postcolonial society. Building on arguments developed in his earlier books, he focuses on the effects of adversarial and punitive justice and on what he learned from Indigenous communities during his legal career.

Reilly contrasts the dominant criminal-justice model with restorative approaches rooted in Indigenous legal and community traditions. He uses historical examples, legal cases and personal experience to argue for a system that places greater emphasis on repairing harm, restoring relationships and reducing the conditions that contribute to repeated offending. These are Reilly's arguments, presented from his perspective as a former jurist.

The book is suited to Indigenous law, restorative justice, Canadian politics, public policy and legal-reform collections. It is both a critique of existing institutions and an account of an individual judge changing his mind.

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Descriere

From the bestselling author of Bad Medicine and its sequel Bad Judgment comes a wide-ranging, magisterial summation of the years-long intellectual and personal journey of an Alberta jurist who went against the grain and actually learned about Canadas indigenous people in order to become a public servant. Probably my greatest claim to fame is that I changed my mind, writes John Reilly in this broadly cogent interrogation of the Canadian justice system. Building on his previous two books, Reilly acquaints the reader with the ironies and futilities of an approach to justice so adversarial and dysfunctional that it often increases crime rather than reducing it. He examines the radically different indigenous approach to wrongdoing, which is restorative rather than retributive, founded on the premise that people are basically good and wrongdoing is the aberration, not that humans are essentially evil and have to be deterred by horrendous punishments. He marshalls extensive evidence, including an historic 19th-century US case that was ultimately decided according to Sioux tribal custom, not US federal law. And then he just comes out and says it: My proposition is that the dominant Canadian society should scrap its criminal justice system and replace it with the gentler, and more effective, process used by the indigenous people. Punishment; deterrence; due process; the socially corrosive influence of anger, hatred and revenge; sexual offences; the expensive futility of wars on drugs; the radical power of forgivenessall of that and more gets examined here. And not in a bloodlessly abstract, theoretical way, but with all the colour and anecdotal savour that could only come from an author who spent years watching it all so intently from the bench.