Spirited away: Asylum law and the institutional violence of legal discourse

Abstract

I can’t honestly say I remember, but the chances are it was cold: this was early March in Montreal after all and it usually is. I wandered south out of the Latin Quarter down through Chinatown and, as the buildings became gradually either taller or older — one or the other — through the business district. The Federal Court building was just on the corner there, after the road works and next-door to that ludicrously overpriced café with the pasta in the window. Through the revolving doors I found a man in a uniform and a dark blue hat with a badge sitting at a desk in the centre of a large room, only a metal detector for furniture and his security cameras for company. A few garbled words in F..