Research Statement of Interest
Overview
I argue that legal recognition in Canada often functions as a mechanism through which dispossession is reproduced, rather than resolved. My research examines how legal institutions sustain this dynamic by shaping what can be seen, said, and acted upon—and with what consequences for claims that exceed dominant legal frameworks.
My dissertation, Governing Between Worlds: Injunctions, Harm, and the Limits and Possibilities of Legal Pluralism in Settler-Colonial Law, develops this argument through a study of injunctions in Canadian law. While much of the literature focuses on constitutional doctrine or landmark decisions, I instead examine how everyday legal practices structure outcomes on the ground. I show that injunctions operate as mechanisms that filter harm, narrowing complex, cumulative, and jurisdictional claims into forms legible within statutory legal categories. In interlocutory proceedings, courts tend to privilege immediate and administratively manageable harms—such as project delay or financial loss—while bracketing broader questions of governance, history, and cumulative effects. Indigenous legal orders enter the courtroom only through translation into concepts such as permits, property, and trespass. Seen in this light, injunctions function as capillary mechanisms of governance: diffuse, procedural, and embedded in routine practice, yet central to the reproduction of Crown authority. Building on this foundation, my future research develops a sustained program that extends the concept of filtering harm across institutional contexts. The program is organized around three interrelated projects.
Project 1: After the Injunction — Enforcement, Contempt, and the Transformation of Jurisdiction
My first project examines what happens after injunctions are granted, shifting the level of analysis from judicial outcomes to institutional process. Existing scholarship shows that injunctions are frequently granted in favour of the state and corporate actors (Pasternak and Céric 2023; Dalton 2022), while more recent work demonstrates that courts rarely treat commitments to Indigenous law as mitigating at sentencing (Do and Puddister 2025).
Building on this literature, I theorize injunctions as part of a broader mechanism that transforms jurisdictional conflict across multiple legal stages. Focusing on conflicts such as the Coastal GasLink pipeline and Wet’suwet’en resistance, I ask: how do injunctions move from provisional remedies to mechanisms of coercion? How are acts grounded in Indigenous legal obligations reconstituted as contempt and, ultimately, criminal liability? In this project, injunctions are best understood as part of an extended legal process that filters and reconstitutes Indigenous legal and political claims as they move across institutional sites—through injunction hearings, enforcement practices, contempt proceedings, and sentencing. Collective assertions of Indigenous law are recast as individualized acts of non-compliance, while competing legal orders are translated into administratively manageable categories. On this view, the marginalization of Indigenous law at sentencing is not incidental, but is structured in advance through earlier institutional transformations. This project contributes to debates on law and politics, policing, and Indigenous–state relations by offering a theoretical account of how legal institutions govern dissent and contain jurisdictional conflict over time.
Project 2: Harm Beyond the Project — Cumulative Effects and Legal Translation
The second project shifts focus to how harm is structured across institutional domains. It extends my analysis of filtering harm by examining how different sites of governance shape what counts as harm and whose claims can be recognized. Recent developments in Canadian impact assessment emphasize cumulative, relational, and long-term harms, including impacts on Indigenous governance and legal orders (Impact Assessment Agency of Canada 2025). Yet courts—particularly in injunction proceedings tied to major pipeline, logging, and resource development projects—continue to narrow harm to immediate, economically legible forms, privileging project delay and financial loss while discounting Indigenous legal obligations (Pasternak and Céric 2023; Dalton 2022). Much of the existing scholarship treats regulatory recognition and judicial reasoning as separate domains. This project instead brings them into a single analytical frame. It asks: why does recognition at the level of policy not carry through into judicial reasoning? How are cumulative and jurisdictional harms translated into narrower legal categories? Different institutional arenas, I suggest, operate with distinct logics of legibility that filter harm in patterned ways across boundaries. As claims move from regulatory processes into courts, they are not simply reconsidered but transformed: cumulative and relational harms are reduced to discrete and compensable forms, while broader questions of governance are set aside.
What distinguishes this project is its focus not only on how harm is defined within particular domains, but on how it is systematically transformed as it moves between them. Building on critiques of consultation and impact assessment (Do 2020; Hamilton and Nichols 2019) and injunction doctrine (Pasternak and Céric 2023; Dalton 2022), I show that these limitations form part of a broader institutional pattern in which recognition is progressively thinned across sites of governance.
Project 3: Beyond Recognition — Institutional Design and Legal Pluralism
My third project turns from diagnosis to institutional design. If existing frameworks translate Indigenous legal orders into dominant categories, what would it mean to design institutions that engage multiple legal orders on their own terms? Scholarship in legal pluralism and political theory has argued that the central challenge lies in creating institutional relationships between legal orders without subordination (Borrows 2005; McKerracher 2023). Work on UNDRIP has explored co-governance and shared decision-making frameworks. However, much of this literature focuses on principles or high-level models, with less attention to how pluralism operates within everyday legal procedures.
This project addresses that gap by focusing on the procedural sites where authority is exercised, particularly interlocutory proceedings such as injunctions. It asks what it would mean to redesign these processes so that Indigenous legal authorities participate as decision-makers rather than as sources of evidence. For example, I examine how injunction hearings might be restructured through joint Indigenous–Crown decision-making bodies, rather than through unilateral judicial determinations.
Meaningful legal pluralism, on this account, requires not only new institutional forms, but the redesign of existing legal processes. Building on my earlier work, I explore how injunctions and related procedures might be reconfigured to support non-subordinating relationships between legal orders. In doing so, the project moves beyond abstract models by grounding legal pluralism in the concrete redesign of legal practice.
Kavita Reddy 