Blessing Hypocrisy

After somewhat of a hiatus, I am back to blogging for the CBA National Blog. In a post they have just published, I come back to the issue of people smuggling, on which the Supreme Court delivered two decisions last week, which I summarized here. As I have already explained here and here, I believe that the laws that Canada (and other countries) has enacted to punish smuggling are hypocritical, because they harm the very people they purport to protect, the “victims” ― who are actually consenting clients ― of the smugglers.

While I use the National Blog post to reiterate the arguments against anti-smuggling laws, I also criticize the Supreme Court’s apparent blessing of them (or at least of the narrowed versions that emerge from last week’s decisions). The Court was wrong, I believe, to unthinkingly endorse laws that are unjust and hypocritical. Indeed, it probably should refrain from blessing legislative policies altogether.

Author: Leonid Sirota

Law nerd. I teach public law at the University of Reading, in the United Kingdom. I studied law at McGill, clerked at the Federal Court of Canada, and did graduate work at the NYU School of Law. I then taught in New Zealand before taking up my current position at Reading. View all posts by Leonid Sirota