Constitutional law
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The Only Thing Worse Than Being Talked About
Is being talked about in a court decision that’s available online for all to see. At least if you’ve sued a former employer, and are looking for a new job. At the Volokh Conspiracy, Eugene Volokh reports on a case in which a man who believes he lost employment opportunities because prospective employers found out… Continue reading
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À quoi sert le lieutenant-gouverneur?
Le Globe and Mail a publié une chronique intéressante de Carolyn Harris, une historienne (et auteure d’un blogue sur l’histoire de la monarchie), réagissanat aux récents propos de Pauline Marois concernant la monarchie canadienne et, plus spécifiquement, l'(in)utilité du lieutenant-gouverneur dans la structure constitutionnelle québécoise. Selon ce que rapporte Mme Harris, Mme Marois aurait affirmé… Continue reading
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Oui… Non… Peut-Être?
La question de l’application de règles de la Loi électorale québécoise concernant les dépenses électorales des citoyens à des activités sur internet, que j’ai déjà abordée ici et ici, refait encore surface. Selon un article de Radio-Canada, le Directeur général des élections a d’abord conclu que liberaux.net, un site farouchement opposé au Parti libéral du Québec,… Continue reading
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Brandishing Banishment
There was an interesting op-ed yesterday in the Globe & Mail, by Lorne Neudorf, a Cambridge PhD candidate, discussing the status and use of banishment as a punishment in Canadian law. Contrary to what we might be incline to suppose, banishment, understood as a legal injunction preventing the person subject to it from living in… Continue reading
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Interpreting Interpretations
I would like to come back to the two cases I mentioned in yesterday’s post―A.-G. Canada v A.-G. Ontario, [1937] A.C. 326, better known as the Labour Conventions Reference, and Missouri v. Holland, because they might tell us something about a problem much broader than the issue (important though it is in its own right) that… Continue reading
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The Moneyed Interests
Restrictions on pre-electoral spending by citizens and groups other than political parties and their candidates (known in the jargon as “third-party spending”) have gained a rather unlikely supporter: Tom Flanagan. Prof. Flanagan, arguably Canada’s most prominent conservative thinker, has come out in support of such restrictions in an op-ed in the Globe and Mail. This… Continue reading
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Minus the Mandatory Minimum
Last week, another mandatory minimum sentence introduced as part of the federal government’s “tough-on-crime” agenda was declared unconstitutional, this time by the Ontario Court of Justice. The provision at issue in R. v. Lewis, 2012 ONCJ 413, is par. 99(2)(a) of the Criminal Code, and imposes a mandatory minimum of three-years’ imprisonment for a first-time firearms… Continue reading
Double Aspect 