Mark Mancini
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“Purposive” Does Not Equal “Generous”: The Interpretation Act
It is often said in Canada that statutes must be interpreted “purposively” and “generously.” Many cite the federal Interpretation Act’s s.12, which apparently mandates this marriage between purposive and generous interpretation: 12 Every enactment is deemed remedial, and shall be given such fair, large and liberal construction and interpretation as best ensures the attainment of its Continue reading
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What Needs to Be Said
Sometimes people say things that need to be said. These things may make us uncomfortable. They may force us to look in the mirror. They may ask us to really sit and think about our conduct. We might not like to hear these things, but they might start a discussion. Or maybe they will force Continue reading
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The Sex Appeal of Power
I’ve noticed a disturbing trend recently, in both politics and law. The idea is what I call the “one-way ratchet fallacy” of power. It goes like this: when an institution or entity obtains power of some kind, that power will only ever be used to fulfill certain goals rather than others. That is, people might Continue reading
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The Self-Own of Court-Packing
2020 dealt us another major blow last week, when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away at the age of 87. Justice Ginsburg, agree or disagree with her jurisprudentially, was an inspiration to many. Rightly so. She was a trailblazer. Incidentally, for anyone interested, there is a great movie about her life in the law: “On Continue reading
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On John Willis and the Pesky Politics of Administrative Law
John Willis was and is considered one of Canada’s most important administrative law academics. As a student of administrative law and the law of judicial review, one cannot skip Willis’ classic works, like his books “The Parliamentary Powers of English Government Departments” and “Canadian Boards at Work”—and his caustic papers, including his attack on the Continue reading
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Vavilov in the Prisons
By now, Vavilov—the case in which the Supreme Court re-jigged Canada’s standard of review framework—has received sustained attention, including from yours truly. Over at Administrative Law Matters, Professor Daly has a running post outlining how Vavilov has been applied in some particular interesting cases. And on SSRN, Jamie Chai Yun Liew has an excellent article Continue reading
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On Canadian Statutory Interpretation and Recent Trends
I have had the pleasure of reading (for the first time front-to-back) the legal interpretation classic, Reading Law by Justice Scalia and Bryan Garner. For Canadian courts struggling with how to source and use purpose when interpreting statutes, Reading Law provides valuable assistance. It does so by outlining two schools of thought on how to Continue reading
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Results-Oriented Conservatism: A Defence of Bostock
Should textualism lead to more “conservative” outcomes as a matter of course? No. Those who wish to transform textualism—a methodology of interpretation—into a vessel for conservative policy outcomes are in the wrong business. Instead of being in the business of law, they are in the business of politics. For years, a small group of Canadian Continue reading
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ESA II: The Standard of Review and Rogers
In Entertainment Software Association, Stratas JA for the Court set out a number of important comments about statutory interpretation and international law. I dealt with those comments in a previous post. I write again about this case to highlight Stratas JA’s comments on the standard of review. Particularly, Stratas JA was faced with the propriety Continue reading
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The Continued Relevance of “Jurisdiction”
This post is co-written with Leonid Sirota One of the innovations of Vavilov was its dispatch of so-called “jurisdictional questions” from the standard of review analysis. A long-time feature of Canadian administrative law, jurisdictional questions were said to arise “where the tribunal must explicitly determine whether its statutory grant of power gives it authority to Continue reading
Double Aspect 