Law Commons^™

Sandbagging In Canadian Law And Practice, Camden Hutchison

All Faculty Publications

In the language of mergers and acquisitions, “sandbagging” refers to situations in which a buyer brings an indemnification claim for a breach of the seller’s representations and warranties that the buyer was aware of prior to closing. In contractual negotiations, sellers often argue that sandbagging allows unscrupulous buyers to reduce the agreed-upon purchase price by abusing the indemnification mechanism. For their part, buyers argue that sandbagging can protect their legitimate contractual interests, particularly in cases where a seller seeks to dispute a valid indemnification claim. This tension between buyers and sellers is heightened by the fact that the legal status …

Access To Environmental Justice In Canadian Environmental Impact Assessment, Thomas Gilmour, Jocelyn Stacey

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Contemporaneous reforms to Canada and British Columbia’s environmental impact assessment legislation have the potential to advance Access to Environmental Justice. Access to Environmental Justice is the ability of individuals and communities who are disproportionately and negatively impacted by environmental decisions to access legal and regulatory processes and to have their concerns heard and addressed through environmental decision-making and dispute resolution. Access to Environmental Justice connects concepts of environmental justice, public participation, the rule of law, and access to justice to provide a framework for evaluating the implementation of environmental impact assessment laws. We conducted a preliminary analysis of early implementation …

Tort Law: Cases And Commentaries, Samuel Beswick

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Preface

The law of obligations concerns the legal rights and duties owed between people. Three primary categories make up the common law of obligations: tort, contract, and unjust enrichment. This casebook provides an introduction to tort law: the law that recognises and responds to civil wrongdoing. The material is arranged in two main parts. Following a brief introduction (§1), the first main part addresses intentional, dignitary and dishonesty torts as well as corresponding defences and remedies (§2-§10). The focus pivots with a consideration of the overarching theories and goals of tort …

Low Impact Development In The Coquitlam River Watershed: Barriers And Facilitators In Municipal Laws, Stepan Wood

Centre for Law and the Environment

No abstract provided.

The Future Of Unfair Terms Regulation In Commercial Contracts, Marcus Moore

All Faculty Publications

What is the future of unfair contract terms regulation? To date, regimes of unfair terms regulation have shared several key operational features, but have diverged on the question of the scope of regulation: some regimes focus on consumer contracts or exemption clauses, while other regimes include all commercial standard form contracts. Both domestic and transnational commerce would be well served by broader harmonisation of unfair terms regulation. But divergence on the basic question of the scope of regulation has hindered such harmonisation. Some important recent developments suggest a possible trend towards regulation of a scope which includes all standard form …

The Role Of Pornography In The “Rough Sex” Defence In Canada, Lisa Gotell, Isabel Grant, Elizabeth Sheehy

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Drawing upon the authors’ earlier research studying the consent defence when it is used to suggest that the complainant agreed to “rough sex” involving violence, this paper develops an extended analysis of the complex role of pornography in these decisions. This paper focuses on a subset of “rough sex” cases, where pornography played a role in “scripting” the accused’s behaviour. Thematically, these cases included: those where the accused had a substantial history of consumption of violent pornography; cases in which the accused forced the complainant to view pornography as part of the assault; cases where the accused recorded the attack, …

The Risks To Refugee Law Of Humanitarian Responses To Flight From Ukraine, Catherine Dauvergne

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The invasion of Ukraine that began in February 2022 provoked an enormous exodus of people fleeing to safety by crossing Ukrainian borders into neighbouring states to seek refuge. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported that as of mid-May 2023 more than eight million people had fled the conflict in Ukraine and crossed a border into another European state, and more than five million of these people were registered for temporary protection of some sort. Many of these people were warmly welcomed, and further-flung states raised their hands to provide assistance and refuge as well. Support for these …

Post-Conviction Disclosure In The Canadian Context, Alexandra Ballantyne, Tamara Levy, K.C.

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It is common knowledge that the criminal justice system is fallible and prone to human error. The most egregious of such errors is the conviction of an innocent person. While wrongful convictions have been acknowledged in Canada in the last few decades, they are mostly regarded as rare and extraordinary events.16 In response to this perception, experts have identified the challenge of determining the number of wrongful convictions and their exact causes.17 A 2019 study estimates that at least 85 people have been exonerated in Canada.18 The recent advent of the Canadian Registry of Wrongful Convictions creates a centralized location …

Administrative Procedures As Tax Enforcement Tools, Wei Cui, Jeff Hicks, Michael Wiebe

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We study how common administrative procedures affect firm tax evasion. We begin with the counter-intuitive observation that many firms bunch above, rather than below, large notches in China’s corporate income tax. Cross-sectional patterns suggest that administrative procedures in the prepayment and refund system served as de facto enforcement tools that prevented some firms from accessing the reduced tax rates below the notches. Following a regulatory reform that eliminated these procedures, bunching below the notches increased dramatically. The results imply a tradeoff between reducing administrative barriers and allowing much taxpayer non-compliance in low-compliance environments.

Social Control And Homeless Encampments: Shifting The Role Of Shelters Through Judicial Review, Alexandra Flynn

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This paper examines the recent Canadian judicial decisions in relation to the eviction of encampment residents from public space to analyze what constitutes “reasonableness” in government decision-making in relation to short-term shelters. I argue that courts have called into question a key aspect of social control that relates to unhoused populations: the institutional belief that temporary shelters serve as a reasonable form of accommodation and an appropriate alternative to living in encampments. Recent legal decisions have challenged both this institutional belief and the methods used by officials to track which shelters are available. I conclude that the legal approach of …

Boom Or Bust: The Public Trust Doctrine In Canadian Climate Change Litigation, Hassan M. Ahmad

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Over the past few years, Canadian courts have heard the first climate change cases. These claims have been commenced on behalf of youth and future generations who allege that governments have failed to meet or, otherwise, uphold greenhouse gas reduction targets under the Paris Agreement. This novel area of litigation has brought forth creative legal arguments to expand or re-envision existing doctrines in order to place blame for what continues to be a warming planet and increasingly unstable ecosystems. This article investigates the public trust doctrine. In Canadian courts, the doctrine’s limited and arguably parochial interpretation has diverged from its …

The Chinese Tax System: Where It Stands And How We Should Study It, Wei Cui

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This book chapter offers an overview of where China’s tax system stands, critically assesses recent scholarship on Chinese taxation, and urges researchers to attend more to normative questions of tax design (e.g., economic efficiency and redistribution). After surveying major tax instruments deployed in China today, the chapter reviews recent studies of taxation’s impact on the Chinese economy, arguing that such scholarship often falls short of providing systematic support for policy analyses, and that ignoring normative questions in tax design leads to poor conceptual framing in positive analyses. The chapter then considers some themes at the intersection between Chinese political institutions …

The Governance Of Public Space By Legally Unique Bodies: A Case Study Of Vancouver’S Granville Island, Alexandra Flynn, Claire Stevenson-Blythe

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This paper focuses on the governance of Granville Island, a former industrial stretch of land that operates as an arts destination abutting the city’s waterfront. While Granville Island might look like any other neighbourhood in Vancouver, it is in fact owned and managed by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, a federal agency, on behalf of the Government of Canada. This paper examines what it means, democratically speaking, for the federal government to operate public space in a city. Public entities are each legally unique, raising questions as to how public entities and their relationships with other entities can be …