Re-Covering the Limits of Recognition: The Politics of Difference and Decolonisation in John Borrows' Recovering Canada: The Resurgence of Indigenous Law

The author examines John Borrows' innovative and complex critique of the origins of the settler colonial state and its law, contemporary Aboriginal rights jurisprudence, and government policies that have left Aboriginal communities dispossessed and marginalized. She critically reviews his proposals for the creation of a sui generis legal order in light of political theories of recognition; which, through employing liberal concepts of 'identity and difference,' rely upon essentialist notions of cultural difference. The author suggests that the theory of recognition as it is currently configured does not do justice to Borrows' notion of a sui generis legal order, which provides a blueprint for a movement to a more (genuinely) post-colonial legal and political culture than currently exists in Canada.