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In 1993, the Canadian Journal of Women and the Law published a special issue on racism in an effort to 'shift paradigms' in feminist legal scholarship in Canada. This article examines scholarship published in the journal since that time to evaluate to what extent this aspiration has been realized. Although some progress has been made, feminist theorizing around racism and colonialism is not being undertaken as a matter of course. Rather, this theorizing is pursued most often when an issue has obvious significance to racialized women. The author explores why feminists, and white feminists in particular, still do not regularly integrate the impact of racism and colonialism into their writing and the potential consequences of this choice. She argues that ignoring the role of racism and colonialism in legal scholarship perpetuates systems of domination, which feminism should be aggressively dismantling and thus impedes the feminist project. The author ultimately questions whether theorizing without meaningful analysis of the role of racism, colonialism, and other sites of oppression can still be considered feminist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Through the recently passed Assisted Human Reproduction Act, Canada has chosen to explicitly prohibit commercial surrogacy, while remaining silent on the issue of noncommercial or "altruistic" surrogacy. Although concerns about surrogacy arrangements tend to be raised only in relation to commercial surrogacy, many of the issues in question are opposite to the altruistic context as well. Indeed, the potential for exploitation may be even greater in noncommercial surrogacy. The author argues that the present framework of viewing altruistic surrogacy as morally acceptable is based on a western ideal of women's ability to make decisions freely in the family. This ideal is not only inaccurate in the western family model, but is particularly problematic for cultures in which patriarchal norms relegate women to vulnerable and relatively powerless positions within the family and society as a whole. Ultimately, the new Canadian law represents a harmful policy choice for women of all communities because it explicitly condemns one form of surrogacy, while at the same time implicitly, approving another potentially more dangerous form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the rulings of the Supreme Court of Canada on the case of R. versus Ewanchuk in 1999 concerning the defence in sexual assault cases' consent. It has been argued that an accused must have honestly and reasonably believed that consent is explicitly communicated to raise it as a defence. It was found out that the complainant did not expressly communicate non-consent. This could be attributed to the various factors such as, whether the complainant can consent the activity.