Bad Law: Rethinking Justice for a Postcolonial Canada

Former Alberta judge John Reilly examines the Canadian justice system after years of confronting its failures in relation to Indigenous peoples and communities.

In Bad Law, Reilly revisits assumptions he once held as a judge and asks how Canadian legal institutions might change in a postcolonial society. Building on arguments developed in his earlier books, he focuses on the effects of adversarial and punitive justice and on what he learned from Indigenous communities during his legal career.

Reilly contrasts the dominant criminal-justice model with restorative approaches rooted in Indigenous legal and community traditions. He uses historical examples, legal cases and personal experience to argue for a system that places greater emphasis on repairing harm, restoring relationships and reducing the conditions that contribute to repeated offending. These are Reilly’s arguments, presented from his perspective as a former jurist.

The book is suited to Indigenous law, restorative justice, Canadian politics, public policy and legal-reform collections. It is both a critique of existing institutions and an account of an individual judge changing his mind.

John Reilly is the bestselling author of Bad Medicine: A Judge’s Struggle for Justice in a First Nations Community and Bad Judgment: The Myths of First Nations Equality and Judicial Independence in Canada, along with the recently released Bad Law: Rethinking Justice with an Indigenous Perspective. After 33 years in public service as a circuit court judge, Reilly retired, having become disillusioned with the Canadian criminal justice system and in particular its treatment of Indigenous people. Still publicly active and openly critical about the law, politics, and the legal system, he now seeks to challenge people to rethink the true meaning of justice, the need for drastic changes in the criminal justice system in Canada, and the need to change our attitudes towards Indigenous people. John lives in Calgary, Alberta.