In late October, I will be presenting a paper at a conference organized by the Canadian Bar Association in honour of former Supreme Court of Canada Justice Louis LeBel. I have spent the last couple of weeks working on a draft and will share it with readers in a series of posts. In this post, […] Read more

I posted about the first-instance decision in Canadian Arab Federation v. Canada (Citizenship and Immigration), 2015 FCA 168 a while ago. Here, the Minister refused to enter into a new agreement with the Federation because of what he perceived as anti-semitic comments by one of its representatives. My particular interest is in the procedural fairness […] Read more

Naraine v. Canada (Attorney General), 2015 FC 934 recently provoked the breathless — and breathtakingly misleading — headline: “Prison can’t take porn channels away from inmates, federal court rules“. The trigger for the Naraine litigation was apparently a parliamentary hearing on sexual harassment in the federal workplace before the Standing Committee on the Status of […] Read more

As has often been said by administrative lawyers waiting at bus-stops, you wait ages for a major case on the exercise of ministerial powers by subordinates and then two come along at once. There is an excellent review of the general principles in MacMenamin J.’s judgment for the Irish Supreme Court in W.T. v. Minister […] Read more

Legal blogging remains a poor cousin to other forms of academic writing. Times are beginning to change, especially with the increased recognition of the concept of academic ‘impact’, something social scientists are becoming more and more adept at measuring. Yet there are modest steps that online communities can take to increase the academic recognition of […] Read more

A rant from a footnote in a paper I am working on, discussing amongst other things Toronto (City) v. C.U.P.E., Local 79, [2003] 3 SCR 77: Hereafter “CUPE (2003)”. I call it CUPE (2003) to distinguish it from C.U.P.E. v. New Brunswick Liquor Corporation, [1979] 2 SCR 227, which is generally referred to as “CUPE”. […] Read more

Though it is slightly different from the usual fare I serve up here readers may be interested to know that I have a paper in a forthcoming volume of the Queen’s Law Journal on constitutional change. My contribution focuses on recent developments in Canada and the United Kingdom, the main common theme being the narratives […] Read more

Two from the collection edited by Mark Elliott and Hanna Wilberg, The Scope and Intensity of Substantive Review: Traversing Taggart’s Rainbow. First, Elliott, “From Bifurcation to Calibration: Twin-Track Deference and the Culture of Justification”: Questions about substantive judicial review – its legitimacy, its appropriate intensity, its proper limits – often appear to be as intractable […] Read more

Say you were a legislator who wished to dress up a criminal offence as a regulatory penalty, perhaps because you wanted to avoid triggering the constitutional protections that attach to criminal proceedings. You would presumably impose an extraordinarily large fine, include language that has connotations of guilt and set out an informal process. Now, say […] Read more

That is one possible reaction to Timothy Endicott, “Comity Among Authorities”: An authority often needs to take account of the decisions of another authority, in order to carry out its own responsibilities. This essay outlines general principles of the approach that authorities ought to take toward the decisions of others. The most important is the […] Read more