This document discusses the legal and spatial aspects of the US-Canada border. It aims to highlight the complexity of creating legal spaces and will examine Canadian and provincial case law related to border issues. It will use the concepts of "brackets" and "frames" to analyze how legal language shapes understandings of the border. Specifically, it will look at how Supreme Court decisions define and reinforce the legal concept of borders. Key issues that will be examined include security certificates, search and seizure policies, and First Nations treaty rights. The overall goal is to bring attention to how legal rulings help establish and maintain the political nature of border regions.

1. B/orderingCanada
Legal and spatial performativities of the US/Canada border
Josh Labove
@jlabove

2. Work in progress that aims to:
call attention to the messiness
of making legal space

3. Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms
Customs Act
Jay Treaty Treaty Rights
Security Certificates
Ministerial Directions
A Canadian Legal Geographic Toolkit
Provincial & territorial case law

4. A theory of ‘brackets’ and ‘frames’

5. Framing the law
•The language and technical
nature of the judiciary
•Appellate law as arbitrator/
problem-solver
•Jurisdiction and scale as
performing ‘order’

6. Seeing the Supreme Court
as a border agency
How do decisions at the border
demonstrate and (re)produce
the legal conceptions of
borders?

7. The Charter as a ‘frame’
• Reading border disputes as
rights claims demands
identifying the architecture of
rights.
• Seeing the mechanics of
rights means we see the right
impinged/violated as well as
that which is bracketed off or
out.

8. Three ways of seeing bordering

9. Security certificates and the mobile border

10. Search and seizure at the border

11. First Nations mobility and Jay Treaty passage rights

12. Why does this
all matter?
Defamiliarizing banal politics and calling
attention to the performativity of legal spaces

13. Keep in touch:
jlabove@sfu.ca
@jlabove
www.sfu.ca/~jlabove