2012

From Blogger

Statistical Evidence and Bias

I have posted previously about Sean Rehaag’s empirical analysis of immigration decisions. He also authored an analysis of refugee claim data for 2011: Data obtained from the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) through an Access to Information Request reveals vast disparities in refugee claim recognition rates across IRB Members in 2011. In 2011, some Members […] Read more

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Procedural Fairness in Extradition

The Supreme Court of Canada decided two interesting terrorism cases last Friday. R. v. Khawaja, 2012 SCC 69 has been grabbing most of the headlines because the Court upheld (though narrowly defined) anti-terrorism offences enacted shortly after 9/11. There were constitutional issues in the companion case of Sriskandarajah v. United States of America, 2012 SCC […] Read more

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Not to say I told you so

But, I told you so. In my piece on the Supreme Court of Canada’s copyright pentalogy (to appear next year in Michael Geist’s edited collection), I predicted that the concurrent jurisdiction innovation would cause confusion. Sure enough, counsel for the losing party in Pastore v. Aviva Canada Inc., 2012 ONCA 887 made an application for […] Read more

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Lost in Translation

I have posted previously about the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in Doré v. Barreau du Québec, 2012 SCC 12. It is a very important decision about the importance of Charter rights in administrative decision-making and judicial review. But there seems to be a difference between the French and English versions of the decision, written […] Read more

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Interpreting Regulations — Kevin Stack

Kevin Stack has posted Interpreting Regulations on SSRN. Here is the abstract: The age of statutes has given way to an era of regulations, but our jurisprudence has fallen behind. Despite the centrality of regulations to law, courts have no intelligible approach to regulatory interpretation. The neglect of regulatory interpretation is not only a shortcoming […] Read more

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Sending a Quashed Decision Back to the Initial Decision-maker Caused a Reasonable Apprehension of Bias

The long title explains the result in Conseil des montagnais de Natashquan c. Malec, 2012 CF 1392, a case about alleged discrimination against Aboriginal educators.An initial decision unfavourable to the applicant was made, but quashed on judicial review. It was sent back to the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal for re-decision. The President sent it back […] Read more

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Conflicts of Interest and Bias

There is a very brief discussion in a recent Alberta Court of Appeals decision, Kretschmer v Terrigno, 2012 ABCA 345, of the relationship between the rule against bias and imputed conflicts of interest. The most interesting point to emerge is that the rule against bias, applied to adjudicators, may be less demanding than the rules […] Read more