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Full-Text Articles in Law
Transitional Justice, Peace And Everyday Reality: Somalilands Experience With Justice And Security-Sector Reform, Siham Rayale
Transitional Justice, Peace And Everyday Reality: Somalilands Experience With Justice And Security-Sector Reform, Siham Rayale
LLM Theses
This paper looks at Somalilands transitional justice process and the role that legal pluralism has played in shaping its attempts at justice and security-sector reform. By utilizing concepts like hybridity and the everyday, this paper frames these processes with an understanding that while legal pluralism has established Somalilands peace and security infrastructure, it has created opportunities and challenges for marginalized and vulnerable groups. Such challenges include accessing and participating in legal reform initiatives that support social transformation. This paper concludes with the need to frame transitional justice, from the onset, in a way that recognizes the importance of communities as …
Aandaakonan Inaakonigewin: Considering An Anishinaabe Meaning To The Canadian Law On Consultation And Accommodation, Veronica Ann Guido
Aandaakonan Inaakonigewin: Considering An Anishinaabe Meaning To The Canadian Law On Consultation And Accommodation, Veronica Ann Guido
LLM Theses
Indigenous laws are resurging throughout Turtle Island and have vital roles to play in the creation and application of laws, governance structures, and decision-making. However, for this to happen, the understanding of the law which is predominant and dictates legal processes must change, specifically when such laws apply to Indigenous land and peoples. This will allow Indigenous legal orders – including Anishinaabe legal norms such as mutual aid, kinship, giftedness and doodem – to flourish. This thesis explores Anishinaabe law resurgence by asking: how can decision-making about land, natural resources, and Aboriginal rights through the duty to consult and accommodate …
Finding A Governing Law To Resolve Conflicts Of Tax Laws, Catharine Marie Mcmillan
Finding A Governing Law To Resolve Conflicts Of Tax Laws, Catharine Marie Mcmillan
LLM Theses
This thesis explores how tax treaty articles providing foreign tax recognition, distributive rules, meanings for undefined terms, and anti-treaty shopping rules implicitly employ conflict of laws "choice of law" ("COL/col") principles to derive the governing law in situations where more than one tax law and therefore more than one legal system applies to characterize a person or income. COL/col principles are implicitly acknowledged and specifically operate in tax treaties to reconcile contending tax laws and therefore legal systems. Considering tax treaty articles implore countries to ascertain the governing law through reconciliation, supranational approaches that advocate harmonization to ascertain governing law …
Health Insurance, A False Dichotomy And A Negative Right To Abortion In Canada's Maritime Provinces, Clare Joanne Shrybman
Health Insurance, A False Dichotomy And A Negative Right To Abortion In Canada's Maritime Provinces, Clare Joanne Shrybman
LLM Theses
This thesis examines the jurisdictional movement of abortion regulation resulting from R v Morgentaler and the barriers to abortion which emerged as a result of the transition in the Maritime provinces. Following decriminalization, the Maritime provinces responded by implementing health insurance barriers to clinic abortions, restricting access. While contemporary scholarship has predominantly examined the issue through a health law and positive rights lens, this thesis asserts that these barriers can most successfully be challenged as a negative rights violation of the Charters section 7 guarantee of security of the person. This is because, although the dichotomy between positive and negative …
Doomed To Fail: Ag-Gag Laws And The Canadian Charter, Samantha Lynne Skinner
Doomed To Fail: Ag-Gag Laws And The Canadian Charter, Samantha Lynne Skinner
LLM Theses
In late 2019, ag-gag laws began being introduced in Canada. Ag-gag laws are named for their intended effect of gagging activists from exposing the realities of the animal agriculture industry. Animal activists seek to gather and publicly disseminate information using means of bearing witness, undercover investigations, and civil disobedience. Ag-gag laws originated in the US in the 1990s, but saw a revival in the 2010s. In the US, animal law organizations such as the Animal Legal Defense Fund have been successfully challenging the constitutionality of ag-gag laws, with courts in six states finding ag-gag laws to violate the First Amendment …
How Will I Know? An Epistemology Of Lawyering, Emanuel Raul Tucsa
How Will I Know? An Epistemology Of Lawyering, Emanuel Raul Tucsa
PhD Dissertations
What does anyone know after a trial, after a witness gives testimony, or even after seeking the counsel of a lawyer? Hopefully, the answer to these questions has something to do with the truth. Legal systems claim to have truth-seeking functions. Lawyers have specific roles in the procedures by which legal systems seek the truth and these roles are informed by the norms of legal practice. Yet, lawyers' relationship to truth and knowledge remains underexplored in the philosophy of lawyering. I argue that the philosophy of lawyering needs to develop the epistemic branch of inquiry. The epistemic study of the …
Just Greening The Gulf: Sustaining Justice For Migrant Workers, Asma Atique
Just Greening The Gulf: Sustaining Justice For Migrant Workers, Asma Atique
PhD Dissertations
This dissertation investigates the relationship between doctrines and rhetoric of sustainable development (SD) and their compatibility with robust notions of migrant justice. I use migrant-workers-built Masdar City, Abu Dhabis "eco-smart city," as an entry point to examine this relationship. Drawing on Amartya Sen, I rely on a critical capabilities-based environmental justice lens that focuses on the full range of opportunities migrants have at home, in their destination country, and anywhere in between. While this lens offers a means-ends distinction and a pluralistic notion of justice, it must be further specified and supplemented by explicit accounts of structural constraints. The focus, …
Measuring Access To Civil Justice: An Empirical Study Of Ontarios Reform Initiatives, Matthew Dylag
Measuring Access To Civil Justice: An Empirical Study Of Ontarios Reform Initiatives, Matthew Dylag
PhD Dissertations
Access to civil justice remains one of the most pressing concerns within the legal community in Canada. Yet, despite over a half century of reform efforts, many people still struggle to resolve their legal difficulties in a timely and cost effective manner. Part of the reason that reform efforts have yet to solve this crisis is that scholarship has only recently begun to investigate possible measures that can evaluate whether programs and initiatives have positively impacted the ability of ordinary Canadians to resolve their legal problems. The primary purpose of this dissertation is to support the development of such measures …
To Set Aside Or To Not Set Aside The Agreement Pursuant To Section 56(4) Of The Family Law Act: Applying Relational Theory To Domestic Contracts Involving Spousal Support Releases And Waivers, Sara Kun
LLM Theses
This work applies the lens of relational theory to five Ontario Superior Court of Justice cases where a party previously executed a spousal support agreement, but subsequently sought to have it set aside pursuant to section 56(4) of the Family Law Act. While the outcomes in the five cases differed as to whether section 56(4) of the Family Law Act was successfully engaged and, if so, whether the judge in turn exercised his discretion to set aside the agreement, it is argued that the cases are united by a common theme that is resonant with relational theory. The distinct relational …
Ongoing Crimes And The Unlikelihood Of Punishment - Syria As A Case Study, Ghuna Bdiwi
Ongoing Crimes And The Unlikelihood Of Punishment - Syria As A Case Study, Ghuna Bdiwi
PhD Dissertations
Taking the war in Syria as a case study, this dissertation proposes an account of criminal accountability that merits the language that is expressed by calls for criminal accountability, even where physical punishment is not possible. Syria is, of course, a society that is in the midst of ongoing conflict one where almost every party on the battlefield is committing atrocity crimes against civilians. In response, and importantly while the conflict continues, the international community, the United Nations, and the Syrian diaspora have made calls for holding war criminals accountable. But, what are values of these calls if there is …
The Potential For A Family Law Tribunal, Patricia Lynn Robinson
The Potential For A Family Law Tribunal, Patricia Lynn Robinson
PhD Dissertations
This thesis considers the potential for tribunal adjudication in family law, particularly for custody and access cases. The central argument is that a paradigm shift away from adversarialism may enable experimentation with a holistic tribunal-based family law settlement system, at least for family law cases in which a best-interests-of-the-child determination is required. It is suggested that within a holistic tribunal settlement system, multi-disciplinary mediators and adjudicators could share decision-making responsibility, nurture tribunal expertise and develop transparent decision-making guidelines, while adjudication could be relegated to a secondary, inquisitorial component. New empirical research on mediation and adjudication processes in selected tribunals is …
Settling The Law: An Empirical Assessment Of Decision-Making And Judicial Review In Canada's Refugee Resettlement System, Pierre-Andre Theriault
Settling The Law: An Empirical Assessment Of Decision-Making And Judicial Review In Canada's Refugee Resettlement System, Pierre-Andre Theriault
PhD Dissertations
In light of rising numbers in the global refugee population, as well as new ideas for reforming the international refugee regime that emphasize refugee containment, there is reason to reaffirm refugee resettlement as a solid mechanism for burden-sharing, and perhaps the only obtainable durable solution for refugees in a protracted refugee situation. Canada has operated a robust refugee resettlement program for decades and is now presenting its private sponsorship of refugees program as a model to the rest of the world. Despite the significance of Canadas resettlement program, both domestically and internationally, few studies have investigated how the program is …
Regional Economic Community Courts And The Advancement Of Environmental Protection And Socio-Economic Justice In Africa: Three Case Studies, Rahina Bukar Zarma
Regional Economic Community Courts And The Advancement Of Environmental Protection And Socio-Economic Justice In Africa: Three Case Studies, Rahina Bukar Zarma
PhD Dissertations
Focusing on three regional economic communities (REC) courts in Africa that nevertheless possess a human rights jurisdiction i.e. the Court of Justice of the Economic Community of West African States (the ECOWAS Court), the East African Court of Justice (the EACJ), and the Southern African Development Community Tribunal (the SADC Tribunal) - this dissertation investigates the relationships among the RECs, states, activists and the courts themselves, as producing and framing the specific conditions under which environmental protection and socio-economic justice in the region in Africa are either advanced or stifled. The dissertation discusses the ways in which the mandates and …
Lawyering From Below: Activist Legal Support In Contemporary Canada And The Us, Irina Ceric
Lawyering From Below: Activist Legal Support In Contemporary Canada And The Us, Irina Ceric
PhD Dissertations
A vast literature has considered the proactive use of law as a tool by progressive social movements, but far less attention has been paid to the way activists respond to involuntary engagement with law as a result of repression and criminalization. This dissertation explores the legal support infrastructure of grassroots protest movements in Canada and the US by tracing the evolution of contemporary activist legal support through two periods. The tactic of jail solidarity and an emerging legal collective model are highlighted as the key features of the global justice organizing era (1999-2005) while in the second age of austerity …
Epistemological Justice In Strategic Challenges To Legislation Under Section 7 Of The Canadian Charter Of Rights And Freedoms, Dana Erin Phillips
Epistemological Justice In Strategic Challenges To Legislation Under Section 7 Of The Canadian Charter Of Rights And Freedoms, Dana Erin Phillips
PhD Dissertations
This dissertation responds to two recent developments in the landscape of Canadian constitutional litigation. First, the advent of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms has invited a wave of strategic constitutional challenges directed at systemic social reform, including many cases aligned with progressive social justice goals. Second, the focus of Charter litigation has shifted from legal interpretation and argument to the consideration of extensive evidence pertaining to social and legislative facts. The recent successes of a number of strategic Charter challenges to legislation brought on behalf of marginalized communities and involving voluminous evidentiary records suggests that the above developments …
Refugee Camps: In Search Of The Locus Of The Accountability Of The United Nations High Commissioner For Refugees (Unhcr) Under International Law, Zachary Lomo
PhD Dissertations
In this dissertation, I investigate the question how, and to what extent, can the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) be held accountable, under international law, for its contribution to the harms to the environment and lives of refugees resulting from refugee encampment in refugee camps that it helps create, fund, and manage? Using data from primary and secondary sources and borrowing from certain theoretical paradigms and schools of thought, I theorise about the policy-context; the decision-making processes that produce refugee encampment; the locus of accountability for the injurious consequences of refugee encampment in refugee-hosting states …
The Regulation Of Paralegals In Ontario: Increased Access To Justice?, Lisa Danielle Trabucco
The Regulation Of Paralegals In Ontario: Increased Access To Justice?, Lisa Danielle Trabucco
PhD Dissertations
The legal profession throughout most of Canada enjoys the privilege of self-regulation and a (purported) monopoly over legal practice. In Ontario, the Law Society must regulate so as to facilitate access to justice and protect the public interest. Critics argue that self-regulation is anti-competitive it allows the profession to control the market for legal services, increasing the cost of services and restricting access to them and serves professional interests over the public interest. The Ontario government introduced paralegal regulation to enhance access to justice. Regulation would increase consumer choice and the competence and affordability of non-lawyer legal service providers. The …
Fighting Climate Change With The Charter: An Inquiry Into The Effects Of Litigating The Right To A Healthy Environment, Kevin Patrick Berk
Fighting Climate Change With The Charter: An Inquiry Into The Effects Of Litigating The Right To A Healthy Environment, Kevin Patrick Berk
LLM Theses
This thesis examines whether the litigation of the legal right to a healthy environment can adequately advance the values of its supporters. This question is answered through examining scholarly arguments in favour of the right, promotional material from Environmental Non-Governmental Organizations (ENGOs) litigating the right, court documents, as well as the results of a select number of interviews with senior members of Canadian ENGOs. It is ultimately argued that the intervention of lawyers and the interpretation of judges will narrow the intended scope of the right. Additionally, it is argued that the act of choosing to litigate implicitly affirms the …
Access To Environmental Justice: Ngo Environmental Advocacy On Mining-Related Environmental Issues In Mongolia, Ulziilkham Enkhbaatar
Access To Environmental Justice: Ngo Environmental Advocacy On Mining-Related Environmental Issues In Mongolia, Ulziilkham Enkhbaatar
LLM Theses
In this thesis, I apply the theory of environmental justice to determine how NGOs use substantive and procedural environmental rights to advocate for mining-affected nomadic communities in Mongolia. Environmental NGOs often possess legal and scientific expertise pertinent to resolving and mitigating environmental risks and demanding justice for environmental damages on behalf of the mining-affected local communities. Based on the environmental justice theories, I have constructed a theoretical framework to examine how NGOs access and implement environmental justice tools, both domestically and internationally. Using a multi-methods research approach, including documentary analysis and qualitative interviews with NGO experts and lawyers, I was …
Self-Determination As Resistance To Legal Violence: Jurisdiction, Property, And The Geographies Of Conflict In Unistoten And Xolobeni, Daniel Luke Huizenga
Self-Determination As Resistance To Legal Violence: Jurisdiction, Property, And The Geographies Of Conflict In Unistoten And Xolobeni, Daniel Luke Huizenga
LLM Theses
Indigenous peoples struggles of the right to self-determination are often framed as claims against a unified state. However, explanation of the forces inhibiting the expression of Indigenous self-determination should not settle with an understanding of the imposing power of the state. As I show, the realization of self-determination is undermined by the cumulative effects of legal practices and knowledges that contribute to the division of collective autonomies and disruption of their governance practices. In this transnational and comparative work on the emerging right to consent to resource extraction in South Africa and Canada, I argue that we might understand these …