Law and Race Commons^™

Twenty Years After Krieger V Law Society Of Alberta: Law Society Discipline Of Crown Prosecutors And Government Lawyers, Andrew Flavelle Martin

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Krieger v. Law Society of Alberta held that provincial and territorial law societies have disciplinary jurisdiction over Crown prosecutors for conduct outside of prosecutorial discretion. The reasoning in Krieger would also apply to government lawyers. The apparent consensus is that law societies rarely exercise that jurisdiction. But in those rare instances, what conduct do Canadian law societies discipline Crown prosecutors and government lawyers for? In this article, I canvass reported disciplinary decisions to demonstrate that, while law societies sometimes discipline Crown prosecutors for violations unique to those lawyers, they often do so for violations applicable to all lawyers — particularly …

Exploring The Role Of Mandatory Mediation In Civil Justice, Nayha Acharya

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

In this article, I offer a framing of the debates around mandatory mediation that rest on the premise that a legitimate civil justice process depends on unhindered access to an adjudicative system, which must be recognized as a procedural right. This is a keystone of the rule of law, and a valid legal system that deserves the authority that it asserts is contingent on this. My central thesis is that requiring mediation (which is independent of the rule of law) before allowing full access to adjudication compromises the procedural rights of legal subjects, and the rule of law principle. Such …

Doing Better For Indigenous Children And Families: Jordan’S Principle Accountability Mechanisms Report, Naiomi Metallic, Hadley Friedland, Shelby Thomas

Reports & Public Policy Documents

In Part 1 of this report, we attempt to summarize the long history that forms the context of the need for independent accountability measures to meaningfully address the discrimination identified by the CHRT in Caring Society and prevent similar practices in the future. Drawing from this context, in Part 2, we set out what we identify as 10 key accountability needs of Indigenous children and families that must be addressed in order to provide effective accountability. Finally, in Part 3, we discuss features of effective accountability mechanisms and propose three interconnected mechanisms that we believe address the accountability …

Human Rights At The Ocean-Climate Nexus: Opening Doors For The Participation Of Indigenous Peoples, Children And Youth, And Gender Diversity, Unwana Udo, Tahnee Prior, Sara L. Seck

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

No abstract provided.

Gender And Intersectionality In Business And Human Rights Scholarship, Melisa N. Handl, Sara L. Seck, Penelope Simons

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

In this article, we explore what intersectionality, as an analytic tool, can contribute to business and human rights (BHR) scholarship. To date, few BHR scholars have explicitly engaged in intersectional analysis. While gender analysis of BHR issues remains crucial to expose inequality in business activity, we argue that engagement with intersectionality can enrich and support this and other BHR scholarship. Intersectional approaches allow us to move beyond single-axis analysis, contest simplistic representations about gender issues and expose the complexity of human relations. It draws our attention to structures that sustain disadvantage such as racism, colonialism, social and economic marginalization and …

Submission To The Province Of Nova Scotia On Its Review Of The Intimate Images And Cyber-Protection Act - Leaf, Suzie Dunn, Rosel Kim

Reports & Public Policy Documents

The Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF) commends the Nova Scotia government for reviewing its Intimate Images and Cyber-protection Act (the Act) and seeking public input for this review. Nova Scotia has been, and continues to be, a leader in Canada for its role in advancing innovative laws and supports for people targeted by technology-facilitated violence (TFV), digital abuse, and the non-consensual distribution of intimate images (NCDII). As these forms of harmful behaviour evolve and become better understood, it is important to revisit this legislation to assess whether it is providing meaningful and accessible responses to such serious social …

Cash Back: A Yellowhead Institute Red Paper, Shiri Pasternak, Naiomi Metallic, Yumi Numata, Anita Sekharan, Jasmyn Galley, Samuel Wong

Reports & Public Policy Documents

Picking up from Land Back, the first Red Paper by Yellowhead about the project of land reclamation, Cash Back looks at how the dispossession of Indigenous lands created a dependency on the state due to the loss of economic livelihood. Cash Back is about restitution from the perspective of stolen wealth.

From Canada’s perspective, the value of Indigenous lands rests on what can be extracted and commodified. The economy has been built on the transformation of Indigenous lands and waterways into corporate profit and national power. In place of their riches in territory, Canada set up for First Nations a …

The Quotidian And Constitutive Practice Of Police Brutality Against Indigenous People, Elaine Craig

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

In Settler Colonialism, Policing and Racial Terror: The Police Shooting of Loreal Tsingine Sherene Razack gives voice to the settler colonial violence perpetrated against Loreal Tsingine, a 27-year-old Navajo women who was shot and killed by Austin Shipley. Shipley, a white male police officer, claimed he was trying to apprehend her for alleged shoplifting. The article, which is brilliantly and compellingly written (as is typical of all of Professor Razack’s work) makes several claims. Most centrally, however, she asserts that racial terror – a violence done at both structural and individual levels – is at the very heart of the …

Transforming Restorative Justice, Jennifer Llewellyn

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

From the global pandemic to the Black Lives Matter, the Me Too/Times Up and Indigenous reconciliation and decolonisation movements, the systemic and structural failures of current social institutions around the world have all been brought to our collective consciousness in poignant, painful and urgent ways. The need for fundamental social and systemic transformation is clear. This challenge is central to the work of dealing with the past in countries undergoing transition and in established democracies confronting deep structural inequalities and injustices. Rooted in lessons from the application of restorative justice across these contexts, this article suggests that grounding restorative justice …

Is It Actually Violence? Framing Technology-Facilitated Abuse As Violence, Suzie Dunn

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

When discussing the term “Technology-Facilitated violence” (TFV) it is often asked: “Is it actually violence?” While international human rights standards, such as the United Nations’ Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, have long recognized emotional and psychological abuse as forms of violence, including many forms of technology-facilitated abuse, law makers and the general public continue to grapple with the question of whether certain harmful technology-facilitated behaviors are actually forms of violence. This chapter explores this question in two parts. First, it reviews three theoretical concepts of violence and examines how these concepts apply to technology-facilitated …

Dispute Settlement Under The African Continental Free Trade Area Agreement: A Preliminary Assessment, Olabisi D. Akinkugbe

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The African Continental Free Trade Area Agreement (AfCFTA) will add a new dispute settlement system to the plethora of judicial mechanisms designed to resolve trade disputes in Africa. Against the discontent of Member States and limited impact the existing highly legalized trade dispute settlement mechanisms have had on regional economic integration in Africa, this paper undertakes a preliminary assessment of the AfCFTA Dispute Settlement Mechanism (DSM). In particular, the paper situates the AfCFTA-DSM in the overall discontent and unsupportive practices of African States with highly legalized dispute settlement systems and similar WTO-Styled DSMs among other shortcomings. Notwithstanding the transplantation of …

New Brunswick Needs A Public Inquiry Into Systemic Racism In The Justice System: Nova Scotia Shows Why, Naiomi Metallic

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

No abstract provided.

Searching For “Superchief” And Other Fictional Indians: A Narrative And Case Comment On R V Bernard, Naiomi Metallic

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

In R v Bernard, 2017 NBCA 48, the New Brunswick Court of Appeal upheld the lower courts’ reasoning that a Mìgmaw man living in the traditional Mìgmaq hunting territory of St. John, New Brunswick could not exercise his Aboriginal rights to hunt because he could not prove he descended from the particular subgroup of Mìgmaq who were at St. John at the time of contact with Europeans. In deciding so, the Court of Appeal rejected the argument that the Mìgmaq, as a nation, are the appropriate rights holders and ought to be the body deciding who can exercise the Mìgmaw …

New Brunswick Needs A Public Inquiry Into Systemic Racism In The Justice System: Nova Scotia Shows Why, Naiomi Metallic

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First Nations across New Brunswick have been demanding a public inquiry since the deaths of Chantel Moore and Rodney Levy at the hands of police barely a week apart from each other, and less than two months after the failed prosecution of the man alleged to have hit and killed Brady Francis. There are serious problems in the province’s justice system.

Mi’gmaq and Wolastoqiyik peoples are demanding more than just an investigation into the police conduct in Moore’s and Levy’s deaths; what is sought is a full examination of how New Brunswick’s justice system fails First Nations peoples in the …

Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence: An Overview, Suzie Dunn

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Technology facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) is a complex worldwide phenomenon with devastating results. Research to date shows that victim-survivors of intimate partner violence are tracked by their abusive partners who use technology to monitor their movements and communication. Many women journalists, human rights defenders and politicians face daily death threats and rape threats for speaking out about equality issues or for simply being a woman in a leadership role. Those with intersecting marginalized identities are at specific risk, with Black, Indigenous, and people of colour, LGBTQ+ people, and people with disabilities facing higher rates of attacks and concerted attacks that …

Creative And Responsive Advocacy For Reconciliation: The Application Of Gladue Principles In Administrative Law, Andrew Martin

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

A s a response to the estrangement and alienation of Indigenous peoples from the Canadian justice system, Gladue principles are central to reconciliation in sentencing and other criminal law contexts. However, the role of Gladue principles in administrative law more broadly remains uncertain. In this paper, I argue that the factors underlying Indigenous peoples’ estrangement and alienation from the justice system indicate estrangement and alienation from the administrative state itself, and thus Gladue principles appropriately apply in administrative law contexts. Using the results of a comprehensive search of reported decisions by tribunals and by courts on judicial review, I analyze …

The Daily Work Of Fitting In As A Marginalized Lawyer, Kim Brooks

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Despite increased public dialogue about the need for inclusion, marginalized lawyers adjust their behaviour to “fit” in their legal workplaces. In this article, the author presents the results of interviews with lawyers in Canada who self-identify as belonging to a marginalized group based on race, ethnicity, Indigeneity, gender or sexual identity, working-class background, and/or disability. Based on these interviews, the author advances a taxonomy of the five strategies employed by these lawyers to fit in to their workplaces: covering strategies, compensating strategies, mythologizing strategies, passing strategies, and exiting strategies. Marginalized lawyers employ covering strategies, which may be appearance-, affiliation-, advocacy-, …

When Law Frees Us To Speak, Jonathon Penney, Danielle Citron

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

A central aim of online abuse is to silence victims. That effort is as regrettable as it is successful. In the face of cyber harassment and sexual privacy invasions, women and marginalized groups retreat from online engagement. These documented chilling effects, however, are not inevitable. Beyond its deterrent function, law has an equally important expressive role. In this article, we highlight law’s capacity to shape social norms and behavior through education. We focus on a neglected dimension of law’s expressive role—its capacity to empower victims to express their truths and engage with others. Our argument is theoretical and empirical. We …

Race, Slavery And Justice: A Justice System Case Study, Camille Cameron

Reports & Public Policy Documents

We do not have to look far today in Canada to see the legacies of slavery in their full effect. One of these legacies is the way in which we have chosen to forget slavery, or perhaps to deny it, and to create a different narrative. “Slavery is Canada’s best-kept secret, locked within the national closet,” asserts Afua Cooper. Ask many Canadians about the history of slavery in Canada and they will talk about the Underground Railroad. This is what many of us learned in school, that slavery existed in America, not in Canada, and that Canada’s heroic, romantic role …

Nova Scotia Home For Colored Children Restorative Inquiry: Council Of Parties Third Public Report, Jennifer Llewellyn, Jean Flynn, Chief Judge Pam Williams, Deborah Emmerson, Michael Dull, Dean Smith, Wayn Hamilton, George Gray, Tony Smith, Gerald Morrison, Joan Jones

Reports & Public Policy Documents

The Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children Restorative Inquiry was established following a 17-year journey for justice by former residents of the Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children (NSHCC, or the Home). It was established under the authority of the Public Inquiries Act following a collaborative design process involving former residents, Government, and community members.

This public inquiry was the first of its kind in Canada to take a restorative approach. The Inquiry was a part of the Government of Nova Scotia’s commitment to respond to the institutional abuse and other failures of care experienced by former residents of the …

Nova Scotia Home For Colored Children Restorative Inquiry: Council Of Parties Second Public Report, Jennifer Llewellyn, Jean Flynn, Chief Judge Pam Williams, Deborah Emmerson, Michael Dull, Dean Smith, Wayn Hamilton, George Gray, Tony Smith, Gerald Morrison, Joan Jones

Reports & Public Policy Documents

The Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children Restorative Inquiry was established following a 17-year journey for justice by former residents of the Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children (NSHCC, or the Home). It was established under the authority of the Public Inquiries Act following a collaborative design process involving former residents, Government, and community members.

This public inquiry was the first of its kind in Canada to take a restorative approach. The Inquiry was a part of the Government of Nova Scotia’s commitment to respond to the institutional abuse and other failures of care experienced by former residents of the …

Reflections On Recommendation 12, Naiomi Metallic

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Regarding the Marshall Commission Report’s recommendation for increased representation of racialized persons within the judiciary.

Reflections On Recommendation 12, Naiomi Metallic

Reports & Public Policy Documents

This article focuses on the Marshall Commission Report’s specific recommendation for increased representation of racialized persons within the judiciary.

Counting Outsiders: A Critical Exploration Of Outsider Course Enrollment In Canadian Legal Education, Kim Brooks, Natasha Bahkt, Gillian Calder, Jennifer Koshan, Sonia Lawrence, Carissima Mathen, Debra L. Parkes

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

In response to anecdotal concerns that student enrollment in "outsider" courses, and in particular feminist courses, is on the decline in Canadian law schools, the authors explore patterns of course enrollment at seven Canadian law schools. Articulating a definition of "outsider" that describes those who are members of groups historically lacking power in society, or traditionally outside the realms of fashioning, teaching, and adjudicating the law, the authors document the results of quantitative and qualitative surveys conducted at their respective schools to argue that outsider pedagogy remains a critical component of legal education. The article situates the numerical survey results …

Fostering Equity And Diversity In The Nova Scotia Legal Profession, Douglas G. Ruck, Craig M. Garson, Robert G. Mackeigan, Carol A. Aylward, Innis Christie, Cora States, Candy Palmater, Douglas Keefe, Margaret Macdonald, Burnley A. (Rocky) Jones, Heidi Marshall, Heather Mcneill, Kelvin Gilpin, Judith Ferguson

Innis Christie Collection

The Province of Nova Scotia has, for many years, attempted, through a variety of means, to address issues of diversity and affirmative action. However, despite the lessons of history there are still those who question the need for programs and policies that promote, encourage and enforce equality. Even though significant advances have been made on many fronts Nova Scotia continues to struggle with issues of inequality. As with many problems faced by society acknowledging the existence of the problem is the first step towards developing solutions.

Redressing The Imbalances: Rethinking The Judicial Role After R. V. R.D.S., Richard Devlin Frsc, Dianne Pothier

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The decision of the Supreme Court of Canada in R. v. R.D.S. dealt with whether a trial judge's comments, about the interactions between police officers and "non-white groups", gave rise to a reasonable apprehension of bias in the circumstances. They strongly criticize the contrary ruling of the dissent as inappropriately drawing a false dichotomy between decisions based on evidence and decisions based on evidence and decision based on generalizations, and as improperly ignoring social context with an unwarranted confidence in the ideology of colour blindness. While more supportive of the majority's analysis, the authors also find cause for concern, with …

Redressing The Imbalances: Rethinking The Judicial Role After R. V R.D.S., Dianne Pothier, Richard Devlin

Dianne Pothier Collection

The Decision of the Supreme Court of Canada in R. v. R.D.S. dealt with whether a trial judge's comments, about interactions between police officers and "non-white groups", gave rise to a reasonable apprehension of bias in the circumstances. They strongly criticize the contrary ruling of the dissent as inappropriately drawing a false dichotomy between decisions based on evidence and decisions based on generalizations, and as improperly ignoring social context with an unwarranted confidence in the ideology of colour blindness. While more supportive of the majority's analysis, the authors also find cause for concern, with somewhat different emphasis in the nature …

Judging And Diversity: Justice Or Just Us?, Richard F. Devlin Frsc

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

It is clear that the inevitable is upon us: as a society Canada is undergoing significant social change and law, as a social institution and mode of social interaction and regulation, cannot be immune to such changes. I want to suggest to you that these transitions are more than statistical - they are cultural and in that sense they will generate significant changes, indeed challenges, to our conventional ways of doing things. Change is of course somewhat unnerving, even disturbing or threatening, but I want to ask what sort of responses are available to us as we attempt to continue …

Report On The Consultation With The Maritime School Of Social Work Community, Dianne Pothier

Dianne Pothier Collection

In my assessment there is a genuine and strong commitment to affirmative action and anti-racism at the MSSW. But that in itself is only the beginning. Real cross cultural understanding is a major challenge, and needs to be constantly worked at. In the process, mistakes will be made on all sides. Allowances need to be made for that. The School looks at itself compared to other institutions; critics look at the School compared to an ideal world. Neither perspective holds the complete truth. The MSSW needs to continue to work at the effectiveness of its affirmative action program, defining that …

We Can't Go On Together With Suspicious Minds: Judicial Bias And Racialized Perspective In R V Rds, Richard F. Devlin Frsc

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

In recent years it has been recognized that the Canadian judiciary has been drawn from only a relatively small cross section of the community, specifically privileged white males. As a result there have been calls for, and some action in pursuit of, appointment processes that are designed to diversify the bench in order to render it more inclusive. Gender and race are the two primary categories that are invoked as the benchmarks of diversity. While it would appear that numerically there seems to be some very modest progress towards the goal of achieving a more inclusive judiciary, significant qualitative, institutional …