Domestic Violence, Precarious Immigration Status, and the Complex Interplay of Family Law and Immigration Law

Survivors of domestic violence must frequently navigate multiple legal processes, as well as the various administrative systems that provide crucial supports and resources. For women with precarious immigration status, navigation is made all the more challenging not only because immigration and/or refugee law processes are added to the array of legal domains to be navigated, but because their access to supports and resources is both restrictive and in flux, shifting along with the changes in their immigration status. Drawing from interviews with experienced lawyers and case law searches, I explore many of the intersections between family law and immigration law in cases of domestic violence. The picture that emerges is one of profound cross-domain influences: the mere existence of a family law legal proceeding, the evidence adduced, the findings made, and the outcome will each bear on decisions taken in the immigration realm, including whether a survivor will be removed from Canada, with or without her children. Similarly, a survivor’s precarious immigration status impacts family law decision-making in a multiplicity of ways, including in assessing allegations of “family violence” and in contextualizing the challenges of mothering in the context of deportability, both of which have enormous consequence for the safety and well-being of survivors and their children. As the lawyers interviewed made abundantly clear, the complex interplay of these domains and the grave harms that can materialize when there is lack of coordination calls out not only for experienced legal counsel in each domain, but intense collaboration and cooperation between counsel. The reality on-the-ground however is that the failure of many system actors to appreciate how actions taken in one domain will reverberate materially in another and the inadequacy of funding for representation in each of family law and immigration law and virtually no funding and no structure to support collaboration, significantly impair survivors’ access to justice

Domestic Violence, Precarious Immigration Status, and the Complex Interplay of Family Law and Immigration Law

Survivors of domestic violence must frequently navigate multiple legal processes, as well as the various administrative systems that provide crucial supports and resources. For women with precarious immigration status, navigation is made all the more challenging not only because immigration and/or refugee law processes are added to the array of legal domains to be navigated, but because their access to supports and resources is both restrictive and in flux, shifting along with the changes in their immigration status. Drawing from interviews with experienced lawyers and case law searches, I explore many of the intersections between family law and immigration law in cases of domestic violence. The picture that emerges is one of profound cross-domain influences: the mere existence of a family law legal proceeding, the evidence adduced, the findings made, and the outcome will each bear on decisions taken in the immigration realm, including whether a survivor will be removed from Canada, with or without her children. Similarly, a survivor’s precarious immigration status impacts family law decision-making in a multiplicity of ways, including in assessing allegations of “family violence” and in contextualizing the challenges of mothering in the context of deportability, both of which have enormous consequence for the safety and well-being of survivors and their children. As the lawyers interviewed made abundantly clear, the complex interplay of these domains and the grave harms that can materialize when there is lack of coordination calls out not only for experienced legal counsel in each domain, but intense collaboration and cooperation between counsel. The reality on-the-ground however is that the failure of many system actors to appreciate how actions taken in one domain will reverberate materially in another and the inadequacy of funding for representation in each of family law and immigration law and virtually no funding and no structure to support collaboration, significantly impair survivors’ access to justice

Homeless People and Welfare Recipients Suffer Under Restrictive Laws

Homeless people and social assistance recipients have the same goals as the rest of the population. Current laws only reinforce the stereotypes about the poor and homeless as lazy, unmotivated, and prone to crime. Welfare recipients and the homeless need to develop their autonomy so that they can be capable of improving their situation. Respecting the privacy of welfare applicants is more beneficial to helping them succeed than encouraging a hotline for others to report on their misdeeds.York's Knowledge Mobilization Unit provides services and funding for faculty, graduate students, and community organizations seeking to maximize the impact of academic research and expertise on public policy, social programming, and professional practice. It is supported by SSHRC and CIHR grants, and by the Office of the Vice-President Research & Innovation. [email protected] www.researchimpact.c

Grounding Access to Justice Theory and Practice in the Experiences of Women Abused by Their Intimate Partners

For women seeking to extricate themselves from the web of entrapment woven together by the multiple threads that make up the coercive control repertoire of their abusive intimate partners, it is often difficult to avoid engagement with legal systems. Yet, the legal systems they encounter—criminal, family, child welfare, immigration among them—are frequently unwelcoming (if not hostile), controlling, demeaning, fragmented and contradictory. While there has been a recent explosion of interest in “access to justice,” little attention has been paid to how we might conceptualize access to justice in a manner that speaks meaningfully to the circumstances of women who experience abuse in their intimate relationships. For such women, access to justice is curtailed not only by lack of representation, delays, costs, and procedural complexities—the obstacles commonly associated with access to justice failings—but by three inter-related phenomena: the enduring hold of an incident-based understanding of domestic violence; the failure of legal actors to curb men’s strategic use of legal systems to further their power; and the host of complications—contradictory expectations, inconsistent orders, repetitious proceedings, sweeping surveillance—that arise when women are compelled to navigate multiple intersecting legal systems. What is required, I argue, is a conceptualization of access to justice that places women’s safety and well-being at its core

Lessons in Access to Justice: Racialized Youths in Ontario\u27s Safe Schools

Access to justice is often equated with access to institutionalized dispute resolution processes, and the objective barriers that hinder such access-costs and delay most particularly-are commonly identified as the primary objects of reform efforts. In sharp contrast, when interviews and focus groups were conducted with racialized youths in Toronto regarding their experiences of access to justice in the context of school disciplinary matters, accounts of access to dispute resolution processes being impeded by costs and delay did not figure prominently. The interviews and focus groups revealed that many racialized youths scarcely ever considered accessing institutionalized dispute resolution processes largely because they lacked information that would enable them to name a potential legal problem, believed that blaming a powerful state actor was futile or would provoke retaliation, and had a deep skepticism regarding the ability of the legal system to dispense justice when claims are made. For the youths, understanding (as opposed to stereotyping), mutual respect, second chances, and the rule of law were the key features of access to justice

Legal Education: Nemesis or Ally of Social Movements?

There is much in legal education which contributes to lawyering practices that are fundamentally at odds with the formation of social movements. These practices include the individualization of client problems; the reshaping of the realities of clients\u27 lives into legal categories or boxes; the commitment to instrumentalism (that is, to securing a favourable legal result); and lawyer domination and control and the correlates of client silence and passivity. The genesis for these features of dominant lawyering practices can be traced, at least in part, to legal education. More specifically, legal education\u27s emphasis upon doctrinal analysis, its tendency to trade upon an existing stock of legal categories or stories, and the relative inattention paid to fundamental critiques of the status quo contribute to these lawyering practices

Accessing Justice Amid Threats of Contagion

Plans to prepare for a global pandemic have proliferated in recent years, and “legal preparedness” has emerged as a critical component of such plans. Commonly, the threat of disease is analogized to terrorism and recast as an issue of national security. In this framing, laws authorizing surveillance, containment, and forced treatment are understood as necessary. Law’s promise of protection against abuses in the exercise of such powers through procedural rights of review offers meagre comfort for critics concerned that individual liberties will readily yield to national security and public health in the context of an actual pandemic. An alternative framing shifts the focus to marginalized populations and existing disparities that account for the markedly disparate impacts of disasters. In shifting the frame, a broader conceptualization of law’s role emerges, one in which the redistribution of the burden of pandemics and access to the social determinants of health become central