Law and social meaning: Defining rights and wrongs through administrative processing

Law and policy are implemented in the day-to-day practices of low-level officials and intermediaries who function at the interface between social relations and legal meaning and who act as gatekeepers to legal systems. This socio-legal analysis of the complaints process under the Ontario Human Rights Code reveals interaction and contest among legal and cultural understandings, the selective inclusion and exclusion of cases through the application of administrative reasoning, and the influences of professional and interest group communities on the perceived legitimacy of the complaint process. It contributes to a small but growing law and society literature that uses multidisciplinary approaches to investigate legal regimes in their social contexts.; This dissertation addresses the problem of how legal meaning is derived from social facts. Assertions of rights violations by human rights complainants have multiple dimensions and meanings. Domestic human rights legislation protects only some of these. The meaning of human rights violations is interpreted further through interactions with legal intermediaries and the application of administrative rules in a highly operationalised work environment. Through encounters among frontline agency staff, human rights lawyers and advocates, and potential human rights complainants, meaning, validity and justiciability are explored, challenged, and circumscribed.; This dissertation examines and analyses the social and administrative processes whereby domestic human rights law is accessed, imposed, and interpreted as a means to resolve individual grievances. It explores the roles played by staff and professional intermediaries in shaping, representing, legalizing and excluding human rights violations. It documents how agency staff struggle to reconcile a huge body of claims within expansive standards and restrictive rules. Concurrently, independent human rights lawyers and advocacy organizations challenge the agency to be responsive to a reform agenda that would constitute a radical structural change in provincial human rights administration. The core of this inquiry is how participants' expectations intersect with legal practices and administrative processes to transform experiences into cases. Interview data are examined for the images of social/legal relations they contain, and contextualized through reference to the history of human rights administration in Ontario, and analysis of Canadian case law and Ontario Human Rights Commission administrative policies. Additional contexts that emerged from the research include the professional aspirations of independent advocates, and the contested nature of the public interest in the human rights policy consultation and development process. The dissertation concludes that tensions remain between rights enforcement ideals and operational imperatives, between the general (public interest) and the particular (individual complainants), and between perpetuation and change.