Digital Commons Network^™

Non-Waivability In Labour Law: An Australian Perspective, Joellen Riley Munton

Comparative Labor Law & Policy Journal

Australian industrial relations laws traditionally provided detailed mandatory standards through a system of arbitrated occupation-based awards. In the years since a shift to enterprise bargaining, the system has tolerated a greater level of flexibility, even in the way that legislated minima are framed. The options for waiving otherwise mandatory standards are, however, limited by procedural protections. The Fair Work Commission maintains a supervisory role to ensure that workers are “better off overall” as a consequence of their bargains. This article explains the many ways in which Australian labour standards permit flexible application, within constraints designed to preclude exploitative practices.

Bibliography On Indigenous Rights In Canada, 1995-2025, Leslie Haddock, Kent Mcneil

All Papers

No abstract provided.

‘Prov[Ing] What You Already Know’: The Overreliance On Medical Evidence In Adjudicating Ontario Disability Support Program Applications, Alison Imrie

Journal of Law and Social Policy

The Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) relies heavily on medical evidence when adjudicating applications. In doing so, it positions healthcare providers as the undisputed experts on applicants’ disabilities. This poses particular challenges for applicants with under-recognized or misunderstood medical conditions like Myalgic Encelphalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS), who may struggle to obtain adequate medical care and thus adequate medical evidence for the purpose of ODSP applications. Through qualitative interviews with five individuals with ME/CFS who applied for ODSP, this paper illuminates the particular challenges faced by those with ME/CFS and other under-recognized disabilities in the ODSP application process. Drawing on literature …

Osgoode Syllabus Of Courses And Seminars: 2026 - 2027, Office Of Student Services

Syllabi

No abstract provided.

Access To Algorithmic Justice Working Paper: Introducing The A2aj’S Canadian Legal Data: An Open-Source Alternative To Canlii For The Era Of Computational Law, Simon Wallace, Sean Rehaag

Commissioned Reports, Studies and Public Policy Documents

The Access to Algorithmic Justice project (A2AJ) is an open-source alternative to the Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII). At a moment when technology promises to enable new ways of working with law, CanLII is becoming an impediment to the free access of law and access to justice movements because it restricts bulk and programmatic access to Canadian legal data. This means that Canada is staring down a digital divide: wellresourced actors have the best new technological tools and, because CanLII has disclaimed leadership, the public only gets second-rate tools. This article puts CanLII in its larger historical context and shows …

Navigating The Paths To Justice: A Study On The Role Of Social Supports In Responding To Justiciable Events, Andrew Pilliar

Journal of Law and Social Policy

This article reports the results of an in-depth qualitative study of advice-seeking behaviours in a large Canadian city. Nine participants were recruited from neighbourhood houses in the Vancouver area to discuss their experiences in responding to one of two kinds of justiciable event: a personal injury or a government benefits problem. The paper offers a detailed discussion of nuances in how individuals experienced, characterized, and took action in response to their justiciable problem. Notably, many of the research participants spoke about the importance of social supports and the contingent nature of those supports, both in understanding what they had experienced …

Trauma-Informed Judicial Practice Meets Therapeutic Jurisprudence: Compassionate Written Judgments In Child Protection Cases, Shelley Kierstead

Articles & Book Chapters

Trauma arises from profoundly distressing life events, and manifests in a range of often overwhelming physical and psychological symptoms. The legal community is increasingly recognizing that clients living with trauma need trauma-informed services—that is, services that “recognize, understand and minimize” the long-term impact of trauma. A trauma-informed approach acknowledges that “effective interventions with people require both the avoidance of retraumatization and the presence of respectful and supportive interventions that help people rebuild their lives.”

Doing More, Doing Better? A Critique Of The Criminalization Of Coercive Control, Janet Mosher, Shushanna Harris, Jennifer Koshan, Wanda Wiegers

Journal of Law and Social Policy

Canada stands on the verge of ushering in a new criminal offence related to coercive control in the context of intimate relationships. In this paper we critically evaluate this development, drawing out lessons from past criminalization efforts and in particular, their impact on Black women and their communities. Our analysis raises significant questions about the potential of the proposed offence to deliver on the promises held out by its proponents. We argue that not only will these promises go largely unrealized, but the ongoing harms of criminalization–harms that manifest not only in the criminal law sphere but in child welfare …

Trauma-Informed Judicial Practice Meets Therapeutic Jurisprudence: Compassionate Written Judgments In Child Protection Cases, Shelley Kierstead

All Papers

Society has become acutely aware that trauma arises from many life events and manifests in a range of physical and psychological symptoms. The legal community is increasingly recognizing that clients living with trauma effects would be much better served with trauma-informed services. While much of the emerging literature in the legal field focuses on lawyers’ work, there is growing recognition that judges can also play a role in responding effectively to trauma.

In child protection cases, trauma frequently exists at different yet related levels – for the child who is the subject of protection proceedings, and for one or more …

Osgoode Syllabus Of Courses And Seminars: 2025 - 2026, Office Of Student Services

Syllabi

No abstract provided.

Indigenous Justice Initiatives: A Summary Current To 2024, Kito Romero, Dara Heravi, Karen Drake, Yanika Mullings-Smith

Commissioned Reports, Studies and Public Policy Documents

This resource is intended to provide a guide to Indigenous justice initiatives across what is now known as Canada, based on publicly available information. The guide includes information on independent Indigenous courts that operate under the authority of an Indigenous people and separately from the Canadian legal system, Indigenous Persons Courts that operate within the Canadian legal system yet apply or uphold Indigenous laws, and restorative justice initiatives available to Indigenous peoples. This resource also includes academic literature on Indigenous laws, Indigenous justice models and practices, evaluations of existing Indigenous justice initiatives, and international comparative works. The focus is on …

(Un)Necessary Evils?: Ethical And Emotional Conflicts For Social Change Lawyers In Canada, Marina Francesca Mckenzie

LLM Theses

This thesis concerns an exploratory study about “social change” lawyers in Canada. Based on qualitative interviews, I aim to provide a modest but in-depth examination of the experiences and practical challenges these lawyers face in their work and how they navigate them. I find their approaches are divided between external and internal, both of which are affected by lawyers’ positionalities and experiences. “External approaches” concern how they reconcile conflicts in their values and responsibilities to different groups—namely individuals, communities and social movements—with each other, and with their obligations to the legal profession. Meanwhile, “internal approaches” concern how they navigate conflicting …

Access To Justice And The Legal Profession: Three Questions, Trevor C. W. Farrow

Articles & Book Chapters

There is an increasing recognition – from all sectors of the legal system, including the former Chief Justice of Canada – that justice is in crisis. Even though we have some of the best judges, lawyers, and law schools in the world, delays in the civil, criminal, and family justice systems are massive and increasing. Costs of legal help are going up. An increasing number of people are trying to represent themselves. Legal aid is available only for the least well-off and only for a limited range of services. Many communities feel alienated and do not see themselves represented by …

R. V. Sharma: Reckoning With Destabilizing Truths In Constitutional Equality Adjudication, Debra Parkes, Sonia Lawrence

The Supreme Court Law Review: Osgoode’s Annual Constitutional Cases Conference

The Supreme Court of Canada’s 2022 decision in R. v. Sharma provides a window on contemporary but divergent judicial approaches to systemic racism in the criminal legal system and how these inform equality challenges based on race. The Sharma majority follows a trend identified by Efrat Arbel in recognizing the “crisis” of Indigenous mass incarceration using language which diffuses the causes of the crisis and does not generate urgent redress. However, in some cases, including in the Sharma dissent, recognition by judges can be an acceptance of accountability as part of the system which has produced these effects. We then …

From Rights To Justice: Perspectives On Access To Disability Justice In Britishcolumbia (Attorney General) V. Council Of Canadians With Disabilities, C. Tess Sheldon, Karen R. Spector, Ruby Dhand

The Supreme Court Law Review: Osgoode’s Annual Constitutional Cases Conference

Relying on the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in British Columbia (Attorney General) v. Council of Canadians with Disabilities as illustration, this paper aims to broaden perspectives about the availability of disability rights and disability justice. The first section considers the access to justice concerns that flow from the initial decision to deny standing to the Council of Canadians with Disabilities. Second, it addresses the barriers to accessing justice for persons with disabilities that grounded the case and the disproportionate impact of the impugned mental health legislation on equity-denied communities. The final section evaluates the persistence of procedural and substantive …

A Lifeline During Custodial Interrogations? The Right To Counsel And Reflections On R. V. Dussault And R. V. Lafrance, Amar Khoday

The Supreme Court Law Review: Osgoode’s Annual Constitutional Cases Conference

In 2022, the Supreme Court of Canada issued two judgments with respect to the constitutional right to counsel: R. v. Dussault and R. v. Lafrance. This right is located in section 10(b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Specifically, both decisions concern an accused’s right to reconsult counsel in the context of custodial police interrogations. Further to earlier Supreme Court jurisprudence regarding an individual’s constitutional right to counsel, an accused is permitted to consult a lawyer prior to police questioning. Police must refrain from questioning the individual until that individual has had an opportunity to consult a lawyer. …

Osgoode Syllabus Of Courses And Seminars: 2024 - 2025, Office Of Student Services

Syllabi

No abstract provided.

Exploring The Importance Of Criminal Legal Aid: A Canadian Perspective, Trevor C. W. Farrow, Marcus Pratt

Articles & Book Chapters

There is a growing global recognition that, in order to address the current access to justice crisis, more research, together with a better understanding of data, is needed. This article, through an examination of existing legal aid research primarily in the area of criminal law, explores some of what we know and do not know about the relative benefits and costs of providing different kinds of criminal legal aid services. Although not a comprehensive review of all available research, this article identifies data strengths and gaps and the need for further research and reforms.

Canadian “Dreamers”: Access To Post-Secondary Education, Elise Mercier, Sean Rehaag, Francisco Rico-Martinez

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

Youth with precarious legal status (PLS) in several provinces are entitled to access primary and secondary education regardless of their immigration status. However, once they graduate from high school their opportunities for post-secondary education are highly constrained. This article sets out an argument for expanding post-secondary educational opportunities for PLS students, drawing on the example of the only existing program in Canada targeting such students: York University’s “Access for Students with Precarious Immigration Status Program.” The article considers possible legal impediments to the establishment of such programs, including offences under Canadian immigration legislation, and argues that charges against post-secondary institutions …

Legalbench: A Collaboratively Built Benchmark For Measuring Legal Reasoning In Large Language Models, Neel Guha, Julian Nyarko, Daniel E. Ho, Christopher Ré, Adam Chilton, Aditya Narayana, Alex Chohlas-Wood, Austin Peters, Brandon Waldon, Daniel Rockmore, Diego A. Zambrano, Dmitry Talisman, Enam Hoque, Faiz Surani, Frank Fagan, Galit Sarfaty, Gregory M. Dickinson, Haggai Porat, Jason Hegland, Jessica Wu, Joe Nudell, Joel Niklaus, John Nay, Jonathan H. Choi, Kevin Tobia, Margaret Hagan, Megan Ma, Michael A. Livermore, Nikon Rasumov-Rahe, Nils Holzenberger, Noam Kolt, Peter Henderson, Sean Rehaag, Sharad Goel, Shang Gao, Spencer Williams, Sunny Gandhi, Tom Zur, Varun Iyer, Zehua Li

All Papers

The advent of large language models (LLMs) and their adoption by the legal community has given rise to the question: what types of legal reasoning can LLMs perform? To enable greater study of this question, we present LegalBench: a collaboratively constructed legal reasoning benchmark consisting of 162 tasks covering six different types of legal reasoning. LegalBench was built through an interdisciplinary process, in which we collected tasks designed and hand-crafted by legal professionals. Because these subject matter experts took a leading role in construction, tasks either measure legal reasoning capabilities that are practically useful, or measure reasoning skills that lawyers …

The Practitioner King - A Study Of Legal Education And Practice In Pakistan, Summaiya Zaidi

PhD Dissertations

This dissertation is a study of legal education and practice in Pakistan and investigates the rise of the legal practitioner through a socio-historical examination. It seeks to determine the extent to which legal education in Pakistan is bound by colonial norms of practice through a genealogy of the legal practitioner in South Asia where the practitioner emerges as a dominant actor in the legal field. This dissertation argues that the fields of legal education and practice cannot be studied separately because the two are intimately connected for three main reasons: firstly, the law degree serves as an entry requirement to …

The International Patent Practice Narrative: Patent Agents, Epistemic Capture And The Patent Bargain, Wissam Joseph Aoun

PhD Dissertations

This work explores the question of how professionalization of patent agency along with its accompanying discourse has affected the direction of international patent institutions and networks. Professionalization of patent agency is defined as the government regulation of who may provide patent agent services to the public through the form of professional licensing requirements. To the extent that professionalization of patent agency has created a unique discourse of patent agency, to what degree and in what respects has this discourse transformed global patent institutions? In particular, has this discourse created a form of ‘epistemic’ or ‘cultural’ capture that has the effect …

Intersections Between Precarious Housing And Residential Tenancy Law: A Review Of A Complex Exile And Recent Legal Scholarship On Residential Tenancies, Anna Lund

Journal of Law and Social Policy

This review essay challenges siloed thinking about housing precarity by bringing a sociological account of emergency shelters in Ottawa, Canada–Erin Dej’s book A Complex Exile–into conversation with recent scholarship from Canadian academics on residential tenancy law.3 One intuition underlying this essay is that we need to think about these disparate legal regimes as comprising a bigger system of housing law. Bringing these areas of law into conversation with one another allows us to identify common themes and these may inform statutory reform initiatives, changes to practice, and advocacy on related social issues. Promising innovations in one area of housing law …

A Call For Evidence-Based Research In Adr, Methura Sinnadurai, Benjamin Vanderwindt, Patricia Mcmahon, Trevor C. W. Farrow

Articles & Book Chapters

In any three-year period, almost half the adult population in Canada will experience at least one justiciable civil or family problem. Few, however, will have the resources to resolve their legal problems, thus highlighting longstanding barriers that make access to justice such a pressing issue in Canada. Among many global justice initiatives, a prominent call to action is Goal 16 of the 2030 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, which commits nations to work towards ensuring equal access to justice for all by 2030. Although there is no single strategy to achieve this, evidence-based practices in all areas of civil and …

Community Justice Services: Models From Around The World, Lisa Moore

Canadian Forum on Civil Justice

This document examines community justice services. It highlights approaches and models for local justice outreach and legal assistance effectuated by organizations around the world. The organizations profiled in this document all provide legal assistance in some form to underserved, underprivileged, vulnerable, and/or marginalized populations. In many cases, geographic location is an important factor determining who can access legal help, but it is not the only factor or necessarily a prerequisite. Across the diverse community justice services included in this document, legal assistance is provided virtually, in-person, by phone, or in hybrid formats to individuals living within or beyond a given …

Strengths And Opportunities For Sustainability, Ab Currie

Canadian Forum on Civil Justice

At the mid-point of this three-year pilot project, the evidence suggests that the Mobile Rural Law Van is accomplishing its primary objective of better meeting the needs of people in rural Wellington County and North Halton. Is the success after two summers and one winter of operation sustainable? Sustainability is about more than just money, more than cost and about cost per person served. Sustainability depends on how the project operates and how it is connected with the community being served. This paper identifies the non-monetary factors that make the Law Van project sustainable, suggesting adjustments that might be made …

Selected Dispute Resolution Bibliography, Shannon Moldaver, Trevor C. W. Farrow

Articles & Book Chapters

Included in this bibliography is a selected set of dispute resolution and related professional responsibility and access to justice readings, primarily (although not exclusively) with a general negotiation and mediation focus. This bibliography is not comprehensive. Rather – given the breadth of dispute resolution, legal process, professional responsibility, and access to justice materials available – this bibliography includes a brief sampling of available readings that may be of interest to those studying, practicing, or thinking about dispute resolution.

From Serving The Needs Of The Few To Serving The Needs Of The Many, Ab Currie

Canadian Forum on Civil Justice

From the outset, the objective of the Rural Mobile Law Van project has been to expand service in underserved rural areas, first to rural Wellington County in the summer 2019 pilot project and then in the second three-year phase of the project from 2021 to 2024 to Wellington County and to the adjacent North Halton area as well. The mobile law van operates between May and the end of October. During the fall and winter when Canadian weather becomes too inclement for an outdoor service the winter “law van” moves to various indoor venues in the same towns where the …

You Have To Find Them First And That’S A People-Centered Process: Learning About People-Centered Justice Through The Rural Mobile Law Van, Ab Currie

Canadian Forum on Civil Justice

This paper is an assessment of the Mobile Rural Law Van project at the mid-point of a three-year project, turning the lens of people-centricity on the project. The observations on people-centricity do not represent the results of structured research in which people centricity is defined, indicators developed and measured. Rather, it is part of the accumulating lessons learned as the project matures over time.

Community-Based Justice Research (Cbjr) Project: Exploring Community-Based Services, Costs And Benefits For People-Centered Justice, Trevor C. W. Farrow, Ab Currie

Canadian Forum on Civil Justice

The CBJR Project is a collaborative international initiative featuring exciting new research exploring the costs and benefits of community-based justice. The CBJR Project partners include the Katiba Institute in Kenya, the Center for Alternative Policy Research & Innovation in Sierra Leone and the Centre for Community Justice & Development in South Africa, with collaboration and support from the Canadian Forum on Civil Justice and the International Development Research Centre.

Since 2018, the CBJR Project partners have been working to learn more about the benefits, costs and opportunities of providing and scaling various community-based justice services and initiatives, as well as …