The forum, which focuses on industrial relations, workplace discrimination and human rights issues, will be held today and tomorrow at the Beijing Conference Centre.聽YCPPL was awarded a聽major grant of $100,000 from the of (HRSDC) to organize the forum, which will bring together some of Canada's top thinkers in industrial and labour rights with聽key policy-makers and thinkers聽in China.

Right: Lesley Jacobs

"The Canada-China Forum is the first of its kind and reflects a new initiative of the Government of Canada in the realm of recalibrating their relationship with China involving university-led research units," says political science Professor Lesley Jacobs, director of YCPPL.

"Working with government officials in Canada and the Capital University of Economics and Business in Beijing, this event will bring together a 17-person Canadian delegation, including academics, senior government officials, representatives from human rights commissioners, and delegates from business, labour and NGOs, to provide a dynamic platform for an important comparative discussion of industrial relations and workplace rights with a view to relating these issues to international labour standards," says Jacobs.

In addition to Jacobs,聽91亚色 Professor Lorne Foster, director of the聽Master in Public Policy, Administration & Law program,聽will also be a principal investigator on this project. Jacobs and Foster, along with political science Professor Daniel Drache and Patrick Monahan, 91亚色's vice-president academic & provost, are in Beijing for the forum. Monahan will make the welcoming remarks to the delegates gathered in Beijing.

Canada鈥檚 ambassador to China, David Mulroney, along with a representative from the United Nations聽International Labour Organization and various Chinese dignitaries, will also deliver speeches to forum delegates.

"Being asked to lead such an event is a tremendous achievement for YCPPL and 91亚色," says Jacobs. "It offers an opportunity to聽demonstrate the dynamism and excellence of 91亚色 researchers and their research."

YCPPL聽encourages research on the role and impact of law in the formation and expression of public policy. More specifically, the聽centre focuses on constitutional, institutional and legal aspects of the public policy, as well as the international and transnational dimensions of law and public policy.

For more information, visit the website.

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The students, who are supervised by Innocence Project Director and Professor (left), filed an application last April asking that the Crown be compelled to retain all murder exhibits unless an inmate has approved their destruction or a court order has been obtained to authorize the destruction.

According to Young, the application was driven by frustration that the Innocence Project had 鈥渢o abandon a lot of cases due to the inability of the state to locate or find the evidence needed for us to reinvestigate.鈥�

Ontario Superior Court Judge Edward Belobaba ruled earlier this month that the Innocence Project鈥檚 application 鈥� launched in the name of Amina Chaudhary, 46, who is serving a life sentence for the Feb. 3, 1982 murder of eight-year-old Rajesh Gupta 鈥� was too broad and unmanageable. However, the judge did not throw out the constitutional challenge as the federal government had requested. Instead, he said the challenge can proceed if it is scaled down and pertains only to evidence in murder cases. Next step for the Innocence Project will be to amend the statement of claim in the case, which will likely be heard next year.

Young credits then second-year Osgoode students Ashley Audet, Kathleen Beahen and Leila Mehkeri with doing the research last year for the original application. 鈥淭hey chronicled all the problems and the various preservation of evidence policies in Canada,鈥� Young said. 鈥淚n April, before the school term ended, we completed the work and we filed.鈥�

This year, second-year JD students Noah Schachter and Genevieve Trickey were responsible for responding to the government鈥檚 motion to strike the claim. 鈥淭hey prepared the factum pretty much on their own with very little guidance from me,鈥� Young said.

鈥淚f we win this case, it will not only be a victory for the Innocence Project, but governments will have to come up with a more unified and comprehensive regime of evidence preservation for all types of offences," says聽Young. "Right now every police force, every court house and every lab maintains their own policies about preservation of evidence. Nobody works together; the left hand doesn鈥檛 know what the right hand is doing.鈥�

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91亚色 history Professor Marc Stein grew up in the suburbs of New 91亚色 City in the 1960s and 1970s with a passionate聽faith in the聽US Constitution and US Supreme Court as strong聽protectors of聽freedom, equality and democracy in the post-war era.

That faith was shaken in the 1980s when the Supreme Court justices upheld state sodomy laws, which he initially attributed to the conservative backlash of the Reagan era. Then, in the early 1990s as a graduate student, Stein stumbled across a 1967 decision upholding the deportation of Canadian citizen聽Clive Boutilier,聽which challenged his assumptions about the earlier liberalism of the US Supreme Court.

Boutilier vs. the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS)聽was one of the Supreme Court's first major gay rights cases, says Stein, an聽award-winning author, editor and teacher in 91亚色's Department of History, School of Women's Studies 补苍诲听Sexuality Studies Program, all in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies.

What the Supreme Court justices did in this case聽did not protect equality and freedom. Instead, they upheld a provision of the 1952 Immigration & Nationality Act that聽authorized the exclusion and deportation of aliens afflicted with psychopathic personality, which the US Congress, the INS and the Supreme Court interpreted to apply to homosexuals.

Canada had introduced its own version of the US immigration law in the 1950s, but repealed it in the 1970s, a few years after聽homosexuality was declassified as a mental illness in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The US didn't repeal its law until 1990.

Left: Marc Stein

Although liberals celebrate and conservatives condemn the US Supreme Court of the 1960s and 1970s for its rulings on issues such as abortion and birth control, Stein says, neither is correct in depicting the court of that era as sexually libertarian or egalitarian. He argues this point in his new book , which looks at six major Supreme Court cases聽鈥� Griswold, Fanny Hill, Loving, Eisenstadt, Roe and Boutilier.

More than half the book is devoted to the Boutilier case. Stein is the first scholar to examine this episode in any depth and to聽tell Boutilier鈥檚 tragic story following the Supreme Court ruling. Boutilier had moved from Nova Scotia to the US with his family in the 1950s and several of his brothers served in the US military. When he applied for US citizenship in the early 1960s and revealed that he had once been arrested, though not convicted, on a sodomy charge in New 91亚色 City, his legal troubles began.

In doing the research for the book, Stein studied liberal rulings on birth control, abortion, interracial marriage and obscenity, alongside the conservative ruling on homosexuality in Boutilier. What he found was that the sexual rights doctrine adopted by the Supreme Court from 1965 to 1973 was not liberal or egalitarian. In fact, it upheld heteronormative assumptions regarding "the supremacy of adult, heterosexual, marital, monogamous, private and procreative forms of sexual expression," he writes. Marital and reproductive rights were upheld; sexual rights were not. These decisions also reproduced and reinforced social hierarchies based on class, race, gender and citizenship. And liberal and leftist advocates who argued these cases before the Supreme Court "condoned sexual discrimination".

Right: Andrew Boutilier (left), Clive Boutlilier's brother; Joyce Boutilier, Andrew's wife; Clive Boutilier; and Eugene O'Rourke, Clive's partner

Their arguments in birth control and abortion cases, for example, distinguished between laws that interfered with marital and reproductive rights, which they challenged, and laws against adultery, fornication and sodomy, which they said were constitutional, says Stein.

In Boutilier鈥檚 case, the ruling concurred with the view that homosexuals suffered from psychopathic personality and so should be deported. After the decision, Boutilier鈥檚 case was all but forgotten. The decision against him didn鈥檛 conform to popular narratives about the liberalism of the US Supreme Court after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision on racial desegregation, so it was ignored.

Stein聽adds that many US gay and lesbian activists challenged discriminatory policies and practices during the 1950s and 1960s, but that was also forgotten, giving rise to the popular myth that the gay and lesbian rights movement began in the 1970s. In fact, says Stein, it started much earlier and was quite vigorous, as can be seen by the extraordinary coalition that defended Boutilier, which included immigration advocates, civil libertarians and gay rights activists.

"My book is the first to show that the US gay and lesbian movement of the 1950s and 1960s had a well-developed strategy of turning to the courts to defend sexual rights," he says.

The sexually conservative aspects of the Supreme Court's "liberal" decisions on abortion, birth control, interracial marriage and obsenity in the late 1960s and early 1970s vanished from the public consciousness. Instead, the US public came to believe that the Supreme Court's decisions of that era were sexually libertarian and egalitarian. Decades later, the Supreme Court itself seemed to adopt the public's point of view, declaring in its 2003 decision striking down state sodomy laws that the ruling was consistent with the decisions of the 1960s and 1970s, says Stein.

This, he says, is consistent with new theories of "popular constitutionalism," which emphasize the importance of popular understandings of legal rights.

Stein hopes聽Sexual Injustice will shed light on the implications of some of the Supreme Court鈥檚 decisions, as well as the sexual revolution, and help educate the public regarding heteronormative rights and privileges in the past and the present.

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91亚色 Professor Emeritus Victor S. MacKinnon, who retired from active teaching in the Department of Administrative Studies in Atkinson College聽in 1994, has died.

Left: Victor S. MacKinnon in 1969

Professor MacKinnon died in the early morning hours of March 9 in Augusta, Maine. An accomplished academic and administrator, Prof. MacKinnon's successful tenure at Atkinson included not only teaching, but also positions as the director of the Division of Social Science, chair of the Department of Administrative Studies and master of Atkinson.

鈥淗e was a scholar and a gentleman. He made a remarkable contribution to the early years of our school as chair of the Department of Administrative Studies in the 1980s and early 1990s, and as master of Atkinson College towards the end of his time at 91亚色,鈥� says Professor Paul Evans, director of the School of Administrative Studies in 91亚色's Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies.聽鈥淗e is remembered particularly for fostering the growth of programs and Atkinson College, introducing law courses and being very supportive of innovation.鈥�

Prof. MacKinnon was also a prolific author, publishing on constitutional law, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and statutory reform. He wrote extensively in numerous scholarly journals and law reviews, and made an impact on a number of areas of scholarly and intellectual life in Canada and internationally.

In recognition of his contribution to the academy and to building 91亚色, a commemorative scholarship was established in his name when he retired. A memorial is being planned for later this year. Members of the 91亚色 community, including retired colleagues of Prof. MacKinnon, are invited to contact Evans at ext. 5677 or pevans@yorku.ca if they would like to participate in the memorial or to obtain information about memorial donations to the Victor S. MacKinnon Award.

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