Showing posts with label Mariana Valverde. Show all posts

Striking down prostitution laws

Mariana organized this panel on striking down prostitution laws. It was taped by the CBC and is available as a podcast on The Sunday Edition.

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Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies has a new director.

The Centre is delighted to announce that Kelly Hannah-Moffat has been appointed as the Centre’s new director, starting July 1, 2013.

Professor Kelly Hannah-Moffat, who has a PhD from the Centre, is currently Vice-Dean Undergraduate at the University of Toronto in Mississauga (UTM); she was previously chair of Sociology at UTM, and has been cross appointed to the Centre of Criminology and Sociolegal Studies for many years. She is active in the Law and Society Association as well as the American Society of Criminology. She is member of the Editorial Advisory Board for Punishment and Society, British Journal of Criminology, Theoretical Criminology, and Canadian Journal of Criminology.

While doing her PhD, Kelly worked as a policy advisor for Madame Justice Arbour on the Commission of Inquiry into Certain Events at the Prison for Women in Kingston; she was also the President of the Toronto Elizabeth Fry Society. In 2001, she received the Radzinowicz Memorial Prize for the best article in published in the British Journal of Criminology. She is the author of one influential book about women’s imprisonment, Punishment in Disguise, co-editor of Gendered Risks (with Pat O’Malley) and author of numerous articles on parole, risk, gender, and social justice and punishment. Her current national SSHRC project (with P. Maurutto) examines specialized courts (domestic violence, Aboriginal, community/wellness and drug courts) and how legal practices such as bail, sentencing, and case processing have collectively changed as a consequence of the hybrid approaches used in these courts.

Outgoing director Professor Mariana Valverde will be on leave for one year, and will be working on three major projects. One is a theoretical book on spatiotemporal scales in law, tentatively entitled Chronotopes of Law (to be published by Routledge UK). Together with three colleagues, she has also started work on a SSHRC-funded empirical project on public-private partnerships in local governance (in the Greater Toronto area), for which she is the PI. And she hopes to have time to finally read the pile of urban history books that form much of the material for the long-delayed SSHRC-funded historical sociology project on the legal tools used in major global-North cities to separate ‘good’ from ‘bad’ neighbourhoods.

Renting out a private parking spot in Toronto is illegal

Online services match private driveways to people needing parking. But it breaks city bylaws — and some say it’s time the city updated them.

Mariana Valverde, a criminology professor at the University of Toronto, has published a book on city bylaws and the need to overhaul them. A new issue, for instance, is the online rental of private parking spots in Toronto - illegal under its bylaws, which were written before the Internet age.

Mariana Valverde, a criminology professor at the University of Toronto, has published a book on city bylaws and the need to overhaul them. A new issue, for instance, is the online rental of private parking spots in Toronto - illegal under its bylaws, which were written before the Internet age.

For $80 a month, you can rent a west-end driveway on College St. Or there’s an off-lane spot in the Annex for $100. A Yorkville driveway goes for $12 per day.

Kijiji, Craigslist and parkatmyhouse.com list dozens of available parking spots for rent in Toronto. The problem, however, is that renting out private parking is technically illegal in this city and could result in a $25,000 fine, although that’s unlikely.

Parking rental websites are among new services created by computer- and smartphone-savvy developers that enter legal grey areas in Toronto. And some people say it’s time the city updated those bylaws.

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