Aboriginal Knowledges in Specialized Courts: Emerging Practices in Gladue Courts

Abstract

Reforms to Canadian sentencing law in 1996 and the Supreme Court of Canada decision R. v. Gladue [1999] opened the door to a new normative set of legal practices that endeavour to integrate racial knowledge about offenders' collective and individual experiences of race relations and oppression into traditional legal criminal practices. One outcome of the reforms and court cases was the formation of dedicated Gladue courts for Aboriginal peoples. This paper explores the formation of Gladue courts, the legal techniques used to produce contextualized racial knowledges, how this information is admitted as evidence before the court, and how this knowledge is used to reframe legal subjects and the risk they pose.