The Court on Conventions

In academia if not so much elsewhere, the sesquicentennial of Confederation is being used an occasion for some retrospectives on Canada’s constitutional development that go back further than what Ian Holloway ironically calls the “year zero” of 1982. One such retrospective was a very successful conference organized by Matthew Harrington that was held at the Université de Montréal a couple of weeks ago; another, not coincidentally, is a book/special issue of the Supreme Court Law Review edited by prof. Harrington. The book consists of chapters by various Canadian academics examining specific areas of the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence in the realms of constitutional structure, individual rights, and private law.

My own contribution deals with constitutional conventions. In a nutshell, it is a review of the Court’s engagement with constitutional conventions, from the 1930s and into the early 21st century ― I don’t discuss the Reference re Senate Reform, 2014 SCC 32, [2014] 1 SCR 704, because that discussion would have required a separate, and longer, paper. (That paper is what I presented at the UdeM conference; I hope to have it ready for submission soon enough.) I do review some of the scholarly responses to that jurisprudence, and reiterate my own view that the Court’s take on conventions is misguided and should be revisited. Here is the abstract:

Conventions are among the most important rules of the Canadian constitution. Yet orthodox legal theory does not recognize them as being rules of law, a view which the Supreme Court of Canada endorsed in the Patriation Reference. Nevertheless, both before and after the Patriation Reference, the Court’s jurisprudence engaged with existing or alleged constitutional conventions. This article reviews this jurisprudence, and the scholarly commentary that responded to it. It concludes that the Court’s endorsement of the orthodox view that there exists a rigid separation between conventions and law was poorly justified, and ought to be abandoned.

The paper is available on SSRN. As Lawrence Solum says, download it while it’s hot!

Author: Leonid Sirota

Law nerd. I teach constitutional law at the Auckland University of Technology Law School, in New Zealand. I studied law at McGill, clerked at the Federal Court of Canada, and then did graduate work at the NYU School of Law. View all posts by Leonid Sirota