The Originalist Papers

Last year, I posted here the abstracts of two draft papers that Benjamin Oliphant and I had just finished writing. I am happy to report that both have now been published. The first one, “Has the Supreme Court of Canada Rejected ‘Originalism’?“, (2016) 42:1 Queen’s LJ 107, appeared back in January (despite what the journal says about the date!). The second, “Originalist Reasoning in Canadian Constitutional Jurisprudence“, (2017) 50:2 UBC L Rev 505, has only just come out.

In a nutshell, the first paper argues that, once we take stock of the developments in originalist thought (especially in the United States) over the last 30 years ― which too many Canadians who reject originalism out of hand have not done ― we realize that the answer to its title question is “no”. The precedents that are usually said to represent rejections of originalism do not support this conclusion. At most, they reject a type of originalism that no serious contemporary originalist endorses; they leave open the question of whether other originalist approaches might be used by Canadian courts.

The second paper answers this last question, from a descriptive perspective. It shows, with a variety of example drawn from the decisions both of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council and the Supreme Court Canada, spanning most of our constitutional history since Confederation, that our jurisprudence is replete with examples of originalist reasoning of various sorts. In some cases, courts look to the meaning of constitutional provisions at the time of their enactment; in others to the intentions of their framers; and in a few, perhaps even to the exact way in which the framers would have expected these provisions to operate. We do not claim that our constitutional law is systematically originalist; nor do we claim, in this paper anyway, that it ought to be. But we do argue that originalism has a significant, if underestimated, presence in Canada, and deserves careful study and serious consideration by Canadian lawyers, whether they be in practice, in academia, or on the bench.

Working on these papers has been a whirlwind. We’ve gone from discussions about putting together the couple of blog posts we’d written on originalism (which, we thought, would be enough to make up 3/4 of the single paper we were intending to write) to two published papers totalling 130 pages in just over 18 months. The papers took up a big part of my life (during an otherwise busy period involving the little matter of moving to New Zealand) ― and I’m pretty sure that it was the same for my co-author. I am very glad that these papers are now out of our hands, and beyond the reach of last-minute edits ― though you will see that we did our best on that front, even adding a post-script to the second paper after the Supreme Court granted leave to appeal in R v Comeau, the “free the beer” case, just a few weeks ago. (Thanks to the UBC Law Review editors for accommodating us!)

I do hope that we will return to this topic eventually, though. Working with Mr. Oliphant has been a real pleasure, and I am very grateful to him for having taken time out of his busy life as an actual lawyer to go on this crazy adventure. If all goes well, you will hear from us (jointly or severally, and perhaps both) again. But for now, I at least will celebrate a bit. (No, not really. I have other papers to write.) And you, well, you should read our papers, if you haven’t yet!

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