Disaster as a Legal Concept

Is ‘disaster’ a legal concept? Legal sources from within Canada and around the world provide conflicting answers to this question. In some instances, both the concept and experience of disaster are treated as legally irrelevant. In others, disaster is defined with a level of precision that defies decades of disaster research highlighting the contextual and contested nature of disasters. This article makes the case that disaster must be analysed as a legal concept. Disaster is everywhere in law – often combined with significant legal effects – though it is mostly overlooked or oversimplified. Disaster, where it exists in law, exists mostly in fragments. By drawing together an analysis of Canadian legal sources with disaster law scholarship, this article argues that law creates a kaleidoscope of disaster, consisting of variable and shifting meanings and legal effects. Understanding disaster as a kaleidoscope, rather than as individual fragments, reveals disaster’s distinctive, untapped legal potential: disaster demands a contextual legal analysis, one that attends to the particularities of the people and places affected.