Law Commons^™

Against Settlement In Transnational Business And Human Rights Litigation, Hassan M. Ahmad

All Faculty Publications

In Against Settlement, Owen Fiss argued that settlement may not always be the optimal result of civil suits, particularly those that involve novel or ambiguous areas of law or ostensible power imbalances. That work spurred a range of scholarship around the merits and demerits of settlement. And although the settlement versus litigation debate is now almost four decades old, its currency persists in common law systems in which courts are, at times, called upon to expand or even re-envision doctrines or procedural rules. This article revisits that debate. It applies Against Settlement to transnational business and human rights litigation that …

Judicial Activism In Transnational Business And Human Rights Litigation, Hassan M. Ahmad

All Faculty Publications

This article explores a more expansive adjudicative role for domestic judiciaries in the U.S., U.K., and Canada in private law disputes that concern personal and environmental harm by multinational corporations that operate in the Global South. This expansive role may confront—although not necessarily upend—existing understandings around the separation of powers in common law jurisdictions. I canvass existing literature on judicial activism. Then, I detail legality gaps in the selected common law home states, which can be broken down into four categories: i) failed legislation; ii) deficient legislation; iii) judicial restraint; and iv) judicial deference.

I suggest three ways to actualize …

Cle Working Paper No. 3/2021--A Roof Over Our Stomachs: The Right To Housing In Canada And Its Implications For The Right To Food, Tasha Stansbury

Centre for Law and the Environment

In 2019, the Canadian government passed the National Housing Strategy Act, legislating for the first time a human right to housing in Canada. This was largely the result of pressure from housing advocates to align Canada’s legislation with the right to housing embedded in international human rights instruments. Despite similar efforts, food rights advocates have not had the same success in having the right to food recognized in Canadian law. This paper considers the question of whether, and how, food rights advocates can use the process of achieving a legislated right to housing as a model in pursuing the legislation …

Assessing Sexually Harassing Conduct In The Workplace: An Analysis Of Bc Human Rights Tribunal Decisions In 2010–16, Bethany Hastie

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Sexual harassment in the workplace was first recognized as a form of discrimination in the 1980s. Since that time, the concepts of sexual harassment and discrimination have evolved substantially. This article explores how human rights tribunals address complaints of sexual harassment in the workplace through a case analysis of BC Human Rights Tribunal decisions from 2010 to 2016. Focusing on an examination of how the tribunal determines what constitutes sexually harassing conduct, this article suggests that, while human rights tribunals are advancing in their understanding and analysis of sexual harassment claims, there remain inherent limitations associated with the individualized nature …

Transparency Evolution: More Than The Right To Know, Ljiljana Biuković, Pitman B. Potter

All Faculty Publications

Providing an analysis of global regulation and the impact of international organizations on domestic laws, this collection grew out of a central objective to explore methods of domestic engagement with international trade and human rights norms, and the inherent difficulties in establishing balanced links between these two international law regimes. The common thread of the papers in this collection is a focus on the application of socio-legal normative paradigms in building knowledge and policy support for coordinating local performance with international trade and human rights standards in ways that are mutually sustaining.

Positive Obligations And Criminal Justice: Duties To Protect Or Coerce?, Liora Lazarus

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This chapter explores the relationship between criminal law, criminal process and human rights from a slightly different perspective. It demonstrates that while human rights may well be used to limit the excesses of security and law and order politics, the nature of the relationship between human rights and criminal justice cannot be captured alone by the view of rights as a limit on the coercive reach of the criminal law and criminal justice institutions. Increasingly, human rights, cast as positive rights, have resulted in claims for the extension of the criminal law, the creation of preventative duties or ‘protective policing …

China And The Human Right To Health: Selective Adaptation And Treaty Compliance, Pitman B. Potter

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The international community has devoted considerable energy to dialogue and exchanges with China on issues of treaty compliance in areas of trade and human rights, and while many improvements are evident in China’s legal regimes for trade and human rights, problems remain. Further, academic and policy discourses on China’s trade and human rights policy and practice are all too often conflicted by normative differences and illusions about them. The paradigm of “selective adaptation” offers a potential solution by examining compliance with international trade and human rights treaties by reference to the interplay between normative systems associated with international rule regimes …

Ballot Boxes Behind Bars: Toward The Repeal Of Prisoner Disenfranchisement Laws, Debra Parkes

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This paper takes seriously the objection that allowing prisoners to vote may have an impact on the outcome of elections or on the development of law and policy, given the extraordinarily high incarceration rate currently a reality in the United States. The reality that prisoners may have an impact on the outcome of elections is an argument in favour of allowing them to vote rather than against it. A progressive critique or constitutional challenge of prisoner disenfranchisement should call attention to the instrumental, as well as symbolic and constitutive functions of voting, and must defend the importance of having the …