Criminal Law/Policy
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Booze, Fights, and Federalism
As Justice Fish pointed out in a recent lecture on “The Effect of Alcohol on Canadian Constitution,” “alcohol has nurtured our constitutional development from its earliest days.” Canadian constitutional lawyers can proudly say, with Churchill, that we “have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of” us. For instance, the double aspect… Continue reading
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Petty Punishment
The Court of Appeal for British Columbia has struck down yet another element of the “tough-on-crime” agenda of the Conservative government in a recent decision, Whaling v. Canada (Attorney General), 2012 BCCA 435, holding that the abolition of accelerated parole could not be applied to prisoners sentenced before the coming into force of the Abolition of Early Parole… Continue reading
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Death Penalty and Dignity
The topic of tomorrow’s class in Jeremy Waldron’s Human Dignity seminar is the death penalty and, having blogged about the sorts of arguments that are made for and against it here and here, I want to come back to the topic, because a couple of things caught my eye as I was doing the readings. One… Continue reading
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A Strike against Three Strikes
The Superior Court of Ontario has struck down another element of the Conservative government’s “though-on-crime” legislative programme last week, in R. v. Hill, 2012 ONSC 5050. (I blogged about another such case here.) The provision at issue in Hill was s. 753(1.1) of the Criminal Code, which provides that if an accused is convicted of… Continue reading
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Words and Misdeeds
Following up on my musings here and here on the reasons why we think it is sometimes permissible to punish a person for saying something that is likely to cause others to act in a certain way, and sometimes not, my friend Simon Murray asks a very sensible question: in what other cases do we sanction people… Continue reading
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The Rewards of Punishment
I wondered aloud, yesterday, about the difference between falsely shouting “fire” in a theatre and causing a panic, and producing an incendiary video likely to cause murderous violence half a world away. Actually, I wondered whether there was any difference; I wasn’t able to come up with a convincing distinction. Eugene Volokh, over at the… Continue reading
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Shouting Fire
A hateful idiot makes a nasty video about Islam and posts it on Youtube. Predictably enough, similar things having happened a number of times over the last few years, murderous violence breaks out in some Muslim countries as a consequence. (Unusually, there have been Western victims this time.) Predictably too, some people have been calling… 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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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 