Law Commons^™

Time For Lawyers To Confront Anti-Roma Stereotypes, Sean Rehaag

Editorials and Commentaries

No abstract provided.

Access To Civil & Family Justice: A Roadmap For Change, Action Committee On Access To Justice In Civil And Family Matters

Canadian Forum on Civil Justice

There is a serious access to justice problem in Canada. The civil and family justice system is too complex, too slow and too expensive. It is too often incapable of producing just outcomes that are proportional to the problems brought to it or reflective of the needs of the people it is meant to serve. While there are many dedicated people trying hard to make it work and there have been many reform efforts, the system continues to lack coherent leadership, institutional structures that can design and implement change, and appropriate coordination to ensure consistent and cost effective reform. Major …

Limited Admissibility And Its Limitations, Lisa Dufraimont

Articles & Book Chapters

Among the challenges facing juries and judges in adjudicating cases is the obligation to use evidence for limited purposes. Evidence inadmissible for one purpose is frequently admissible for other purposes, a situation known as "limited admissibility". Where limited admissibility arises in jury trials, courts generally deliver limiting instructions outlining the inferences that can legitimately be drawn from the evidence and identifying prohibited lines of reasoning to be avoided. Limiting instructions represent an expedient solution to limited-admissibility problems, but they create obvious problems of their own. A thoughtful observer might suspect-as psychological studies confirm-that limiting instructions are likely to fail in …

Slow Violence, Law, And History, Doug Hay

All Papers

I read Rob Nixon’s engrossing and appalling book from the perspective of an historian who works on law. It opened to me an immense range of scholarship and activism of which I was only tangentially aware. But it also has themes that resonated, on almost every page, with things I study. Law certainly appears in the book. Here I want here to emphasize its importance to his argument, and to widen the discussion of chronologies.

Book Review: Visualizing Law In The Age Of The Digital Baroque: Arabesques And Entanglements, F. Tim Knight

Librarian Publications & Presentations

No abstract provided.

Meaningful Change For Family Justice: Beyond Wise Words: Final Report Of The Family Justice Working Group, Action Committee On Access To Justice In Civil And Family Matters

Canadian Forum on Civil Justice

Canadians do not have adequate access to family justice. For many years now reports have been telling us that cost, delay, complexity and other barriers are making it impossible for many Canadians to exercise their legal rights. More recently, a growing body of research has begun to quantify the extent of unmet legal need in our communities and to describe the disquieting individual and social consequences of failing to respond adequately to family legal problems.

Respecting Democratic Constitutional Change, Craig M. Scott

Commissioned Reports, Studies and Public Policy Documents

On Monday, January 28, 2013, I was privileged to table, on behalf of the NDP and in my capacity as Official Opposition Critic for Democratic and Parliamentary Reform, Bill C-470, An Act Respecting Democratic Constitutional Change. On the same day, my colleague Romeo Saganash, NDP Critic for Aboriginal Intergovernmental Affairs, tabled Bill C-469 that would require Canadian law and practice to respect the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. In this way, on that day, the New Democratic Party was making sure that Canadians know that our party sees the building and nurturing of sustainable and cooperative …

Jason Kenney's Proposal To Strip Citizenship From 'Terrorists' Undermines Canadian Values, Sean Rehaag

Editorials and Commentaries

No abstract provided.

National Action Committee On Access To Justice In Civil & Family Matters: Prevention, Triage And Referral Working Group, Action Committee On Access To Justice In Civil And Family Matters

Canadian Forum on Civil Justice

This report has been prepared by the Prevention, Triage and Referral (PTR) Working Group of the National Action Committee on Access to Justice in Civil and Family Matters. The Working Group first met in Ottawa on March 2, 2012 and subsequently created a first draft report. The group then consulted with key players in the PTR field across Canada and internationally, using a web survey with a link to a second draft of the report. The survey, conducted in the summer and early fall of 2012, requested feedback on 14 potential recommendations. While the 125 respondents were generally supportive of …

Austin Cooper Art Donation To Osgoode Hall Law School, Lorne Sossin, Austin Cooper

Osgoode Events

In 2013, Dean Lorne Sossin spoke with renowned criminal lawyer Austin Cooper about the art collection he would donate to Osgoode Hall Law School.

Ethical Lawyering In A Global Community, Trevor C. W. Farrow

Comparative Research in Law & Political Economy

The pressures and opportunities of globalization have dramatically changed the nature of legal practice. How and why we practice law? For whom and whose benefit? In what contexts? And on what terms? The answers to these questions are continuously changing as a result of current global trends. The communities served by lawyers, the practice contexts in which they work and the issues that they face are increasingly diverse, complex, transnational and global in character. All of these challenges demand new competencies and raise a host of new issues about ethics and professionalism. As a threshold matter, more and more lawyers …

The Good, The Right, And The Lawyer, Trevor C. W. Farrow

Comparative Research in Law & Political Economy

This essay considers whether there is a role for moral pluralism — or morality at all — in legal ethics thinking. In so doing, it has essentially two main goals. First, to contextualise the discussion, it very briefly looks at the leading conceptions of the lawyering role that have unsuccessfully grappled with the issue of morality and lawyering to-date. Second, and primarily, it looks at a new attempt to address these issues that is provided by Bradley Wendel in his recent book Lawyers and Fidelity to Law. This essay claims that while providing an elegant and admirable argument, Wendel’s book …

Victim Privacy And The Open Court Principle, Jamie Cameron

Commissioned Reports, Studies and Public Policy Documents

This Report takes a comprehensive look, in the administration of justice, at the tension between victim privacy and the open court principle. It discusses the common law foundations of openness in the justice system, and analyzes the Supreme Court of Canada’s decisions on this issue under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In considering the status of victims in the criminal justice system the Report focuses on privacy rights, especially for complainants in sexual assault proceedings. It includes chapters which offer comparative, transnational and international perspectives and the author’s reflections on these questions, as well as an extensive bibliography. …

Taxation Of Non-Residents On Business Profits, Jinyan Li

Articles & Book Chapters

The taxation of non-residents on business profits is important to developing countries in terms of raising revenue and encouraging foreign investment and trade. The source country has the legitimate right to tax business profits arising in its jurisdiction. Tax treaties impose no limits on such taxing rights, other than the obligation to tax net profits (instead of gross profits) in some situations, once the threshold for taxation is satisfied. As such, this source of tax revenue belongs to the source country. There is generally little expectation of the residence country of a non-resident taxpayer in sharing the tax revenue. It …

Experiences With Digitization Of Customary Court Cases In South Western Nigeria, Yemisi Dina

Articles & Book Chapters

This article describes my experiences on the digitization project of customary court cases in South Western Nigeria. I made a presentation to the African Section of the FCIL-SIS at the 106th Annual Meeting of the AALL on July 15, 2013.

Customary law is based on the tradition, customs and values of the people, and it varies in different ways. The terminology “customary law”, according to Park, is just a blanket description, as there are so many ethnic groups. Customary law covers various legal systems depicting each tribe’s customs and values. These are the two forms of customary law that are …

Ideas Of Fairness In Financial Services Dispute Resolution, Mary Condon

Articles & Book Chapters

In this chapter, I consider the various ways in which the idea of fairness is given content in this dispute resolution regime and try to understand how and why some of these ideas achieve legitimacy and some do not. A few framing comments should be made. First, the context for the analysis of fairness in this regime is that of two-party disputes, a context with which lawyers arc very familiar. On the other hand, the basic premise of the kinds of dispute resolution services discussed in this chapter is that they arc outside the formal legal system. For example, Gilad …

Ethical Lawyering In A Global Community, Trevor C. W. Farrow

Articles & Book Chapters

No abstract provided.

‘Islands Of Empowerment’: Anti-Discrimination Law And The Question Of Racial Emancipation, Faisal Bhabha

Articles & Book Chapters

In her evocative masterpiece, The Alchemy of Race and Rights, published in 1991, Patricia Williams captured a moment in American legal thought that marked a turning point in expressions about race and power, and the implications for social equality. It contained lessons extending beyond America’s unique race history, to the general social and political dynamics in liberal democracy that create conditions of privilege and exclusion. She invited us to think about the place of law in the social and institutional practices that sustain status quo hierarchies, despite proclaimed civil rights commitments to justice. She also inspired hope that the role …

Children Of Two Logics: A Way Into Canadian Constitutional Culture, Benjamin Berger

Articles & Book Chapters

Through an analysis of the Canadian case, this article explores the tension between the universal and the particular in modern constitutional imagination, arguing that the points of friction between these two “logics” of constitutionalism are invaluable entry points into understanding the defining features of various constitutional cultures. The article argues that to understand Canadian constitutional culture, both at the structural level and also in the finer strokes surrounding given issues, one must appreciate that Canadians are the children of two constitutional logics: that of the local, the particular, and harmonious relations between diverse communities achieved through political compromise, and that …

Lost And Found, Sonia Lawrence

Articles & Book Chapters

My reflections from the original symposium have been misplaced. They are inside a notebook I cannot find. The videotape of the day has been taped over. I do not remember what I said, probably because I have said too much in the interim. My thoughts, sentences, words, they happened, but they are lost.

When thinking about “Reigniting Critical Race” I think about my lost words. What does it mean to say “CRT as a lens is absent within the contemporary law school curriculum” when it is not absent, but unseen? I do not mean to suggest that anywhere in Canada, …

Situating Sarnia: Unimagined Communities In The National Energy Debate, Dayna Scott

Articles & Book Chapters

No abstract provided.

We Are All Here To Stay? Indigeneity, Migration, And ‘Decolonizing’ The Treaty Right To Be Here, Amar Bhatia

Articles & Book Chapters

This article examines issues of transnational migration in the settler-colonial context of Canada. First, I review some of the recent debates about foregrounding Indigeneity and decolonization in anti-racist thought and work, especially in relation to critical and anti-racist approaches to migration. The article then moves from this debate to the question of ‘our right to be here’, the relationship of this right to the treaties, and how migrant rights and treaty relations perspectives might interact in a context that must be informed by Indigenous laws and legal traditions.

A Story Of Marguerite: A Tale About Panis, Case Comment, And Social History, Signa A. Daum Shanks

Articles & Book Chapters

Those interested in social history contend that social norms deserve attention due to how they impact and are affected by historical events. This subfield has contributed significantly to how larger historical mosaics are understood, and how themes specific to marginalized groups are appreciated today. By presenting the story of enslaved Indigenous woman in New France who was the first Indigenous civil litigant in Canadian history, and focusing on her representation in the colonial legal system, a number of themes emerge. Canada’s history of slavery becomes better understood, and in so doing, a challenge to social historians is presented. By examining …

Security Interests In Bank Deposits Under Ucc Article 9: A Perspective, Benjamin Geva

Articles & Book Chapters

In the course of the 19th century, the process of the characterization of the bank deposit as a loan, so as to be owned by the banker to the customer as a debt on a loan, reached in the common law its logical conclusion. The landmark case is Foley vs Hill.

Realizing The Potential Of The Principled Approach To Evidence, Lisa Dufraimont

Articles & Book Chapters

Ron Delisle's concern that lawyers and judges be constantly mindful of the purposes and policies underlying the rules of evidence led him to become one of the pioneers of the principled approach to evidence. This paper seeks to evaluate the extent to which the efforts of Canadian courts to incorporate principles into evidence law have alleviated the problem of the complexity of the traditional rules. Evidentiary rules are complex because they are dense or technical. Evidentiary principles are more capable of flexible and contextual application than evidentiary rules, but principles too are complex in the sense that they are less …