Registering Cosmetics? The Constitution of Legal Form and Injurious Substance in Canada (1945–1946)

Abstract

In midcentury Canada, legislative drafters, government lawyers, food and drug officials, and ministers grappled with cosmetics. Faced with constitutional concerns about cosmetic licensing, these actors drafted legislative amendments that would instead require cosmetics to be registered. In contrast to people or land, the registration of products, substances, or things has received little attention in sociolegal scholarship. Building on work investigating law's temporalities and materiality, this account traces how in-formed by the constitutional doctrine that apprehended substances through the legal form of prohibition, cosmetics were rendered in draft legislation as constituted of ingredients that may cause injury. Injury, in this account, is a material-temporal regime. Yet cosmetic injury was neither static nor singular, as it was catalysed differently by distinctive regulatory devices. This is shown by last-minute changes to the bill which retooled cosmetic registration, from an information extraction device for anticipating future harms, into a recording device for capturing latent harms.

Registering the Everyday: Documents, Bureaucracy, and the Socio-Legal

“…Whilst the papers draw on a range of methods across socio-legal inquiry, design theory, and legal history, each of the papers explore the state's perspective on registration. The papers, as a collective, provide insights into how registration is regarded by state actors: as an ocular tool of regulation (Tessaro, 2023 , a malleable instrument to manage crises (Jacob and Saksena, 2023), and in relation to the form, they invite us to explore what registration and legal documents might need to become, if they are to have any role in advancing social justice (Ryan, 2023). What roles can be played by narrative, flexibility, and sensitivity to the relationship between the material everyday and the abstraction compelled by the register?…”