History – Page 2 – Double Aspect

Such a Person

A recent biography highlights (some of) Thomas Cromwell’s influence on the constitution

I have just finished reading Sir Diarmaid MacCulloch’s very interesting Thomas Cromwell: A Life, and thought I’d share some of its constitutional history highlights. Inevitably, I suppose, for a book written by a religious historian, Sir Diarmaid’s telling of Cromwell’s life and times focuses more on religious issues than on legal or, say, economic ones. No doubt this serves to emphasize aspects of the story to which others (including Hilary Mantel, the source of prior knowledge about Cromwell for me and, I suspect, for many others) devote less attention.

At the same time, I was at times wishing for a little less theological detail, and a bit more about the other aspects of Cromwell’s story. For example, one Cromwellian innovation of whose origins constitutional lawyers today should be at least approximatively aware since it bears the name of Cromwell’s royal master are Henry VIII clauses, which allow the Crown to make rules that will override and have the force of statutes enacted by Parliament. Yet Sir Diarmaid refers to the legislation in which such power was granted to Henry VIII, the Statute of Proclamations, only in passing in the conclusion of the book. From a lawyer’s perspective, this is disappointing – though of course Sir Diarmaid doesn’t set out to speak to lawyers in particular. In any case, here are some of the legally-relevant nuggets.

Probably the most significant constitutional legacy that Sir Diarmaid attributes (in part) to Cromwell has to do with Parliament’s role. The great changes of Henry VIII’s reign ― above all the break with Rome and the manifold interventions in the affairs of the English Church were ratified by Parliament. Other reforms, in the law and in social policy, were implemented or at least attempted to be implemented through acts of Parliament too. As Sir Diarmaid points out,

[t]his intensive use of Parliament in the 1530s, a crucial moment in its consolidation and growth when many other such assemblies in Europe were atrophying, had implications not merely for the religious future of Tudor England, but for the shape of national history thereafter. When, over the next 400 years, other European commonwealths evolved into something like nations, it was usually through an exercise of will by monarchs who felt little need of their medieval representative assemblies. Cromwell the Parliamentary veteran is the most likely candidate for having promoted Parliament in the kingdom of England at this moment. (236)

The consequence of Cromwell’s involvement of Parliament into the great matters of state was that

[t]he King’s leading men were far more frequently Parliament men from the 1530s – more precisely, they became Commons men, if a peerage did not bar them and provide a seat in the other place. … From Thomas Cromwell’s time onwards, royal advisers mostly knew what it was to sit through the squabbles, the excitement and the tedium of a Tudor Parliamentary session. (547)

Related to this transformation of Parliament from occasional forum in which consent to taxation might be generated (in return for the airing and, perhaps, redress of grievance) to a central policy-making instrument, is another Cromwellian innovation that is still with us today: by-elections. These aren’t particularly necessary when a Parliament only sits for a brief period and then is dissolved. But “in a Parliament which eventually sat over an extraordinary and unprecedented seven years”, (215) they were a most useful device. It is Cromwell who came up with it, in 1532-33.

Cromwell’s influence is also still felt in the legislative process. He hadn’t come up with the idea, but embraced and regular the use of

what was then a very recent innovation in Parliamentary procedure. It has become known as a ‘division’, and is the method by which Lords and Commons vote at Westminster right up to the present day: separating out ayes and noes into their respective groups. Until the 1520s, decisions in Parliament were customarily taken by the same ancient procedure which elected knights and burgesses to the Commons: acclamation, or, to put it another way, shouting very loudly. The louder shout won. This procedure worked best when (as in well-regulated committees throughout history) there was already general agreement and the heat had been taken out of the issue in question. In circumstances of bitter disagreement, it became clumsy and contestable. The first recorded instance of a division was in contention over a royal tax demand in the 1523 Parliament … It is possible that the King’s advisers had used the division as a way of flushing out and making visible the core of the opposition. (159)

Cromwell had been one of the opposition in 1523; as a royal advisor, and the king’s agent in the House of Commons a decade later, he made use of the division himself. As Sir Diarmaid later explains

Unity was a prized good in medieval and Tudor England: division was an aberration from the norm, hence the government’s use of voting by division in Parliamentary proceedings as a way to shame people into conformity. (240)

Cromwell helped shaped not only the legislative, but also the executive branch of government. The Privy Council appears, officially, during his time as (in effect) Henry VIII’s chief minister. Sir Diarmaid notes that while the term “Privy Council” had been used earlier, “from 1537” it acquires a new meaning and refers to

a set number of people specifically named to that position, no more than twenty or so. The phrase continued into the early Stuart age to describe the main body for executive government, and still remains fossilized in the British governmental system. … [T]his newly formalized body sat not as a vehicle for [Cromwell’s] power, but to check it. The Privy Council’s further formalization, with its own clerk and minute-book, occurred immediately on his fall in 1540: a move designed to prevent any fresh Thomas Cromwell from emerging to usurp the power now distributed among Henry VIII’s closest advisers. (398)

Recent events have reminded us, of course that this Cromwellian, or rather anti-Cromwellian, innovation is “fossilized” in the Canadian governmental system too, as provided by section 11 of the Constitution Act, 1867 – clerk and all.

In addition to Parliament and the executive, left a mark on the judiciary too. Indeed he held a judicial office himself (while also occupying various positions in the other two branches): that of Master of the Rolls. As with Parliament, if perhaps even less predictably, Cromwell’s tenure proved a turning point since it had the effect of “as it turned out permanently transferring the Mastership of the Rolls from the domain of Chancery-trained clerics to lay common lawyers”. (271)

Another, and more sinister, long-lasting though thankfully expunged Cromwellian legacy was the first statute criminalizing “buggery”. Its causes, in fact, were partly related to the competition between the lay and the ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Sir Diarmaid explains that

After the Papacy had created a body of canon law and church courts to administer it in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, such matters of morality as this had been the concern of church lawyers in the Western Church, and not of the King’s courts. The Act was the first major encroachment in England on that general principle, a phenomenon which occurred right across sixteenth-century Europe, Catholic and Protestant alike. (241)

But the conflict wasn’t just jurisdictional. The statute appears to have been “directly linked” to the perception, among English protestants, of “the unnaturalness of clerical celibacy generally [and] monastic corruption in particular, and so … looks like a new try-out in Cromwell’s programme of intervention in the affairs of monasteries and friaries”. (241) But of course the criminalization was not limited to wayward monks and friars. Innocent men were collateral damage in this fight – though it is perhaps naïve to think that, but for it, homosexuality would not have been criminalized.

Of course, Cromwell was on the side, or rather the chief instrument, of repression in other ways too. Disagreement with the policies he steered through Parliament at his royal master’s behest was not welcome:

If the official theory of the 1530s ran that the realm was united with one voice as expressed in Parliament, once this expression had been made anyone dissenting was not a true subject, or churchman, lord, knight or burgess. The fate of such individuals could be dire. If Cromwell crafted the rhetoric, he was also put in charge of enforcing the consequences. (236)

And, still on the subject of repression of dissenters, it is impossible to speak of Cromwell without also speaking of Thomas More. In Sir Diarmaid’s telling, neither man comes out well. Before he became the great symbol of freedom of conscience, More was in his capacity as Lord Chancellor a devotee of persecution. As he

felt himself increasingly boxed in and at odds with the King’s plans, he turned to waging implacable war on enemies of the Church whom he could crush without inhibition. Gone were the days of Cardinal Wolsey, when no one was burned at the stake for heresy: More had a positive relish for burning heretics. Since 1529, he had been saying so at savage length in print, in flat rejection of Wolsey’s conciliatory line, and although claims by angry Protestants of the next generation that he personally tortured heretics have no evidence to back them up, his words now became Church policy. (160)

Indeed, More had a “strong sense of being caught up in a cosmic battle for the soul of Europe between the Papacy and the forces of Antichrist”. (161) He has, of course, been fortunate in his biographers―but the real, historical More seems to have been closer to the sour and stern character depicted by Dame Hilary than to the hero whom so many, myself included, have long admired.

For all that, there is little doubt that More’s execution was nothing more than judicial murder. Sir Diarmaid writes that Cromwell

choreographed the judicial procedures which briskly led to More’s execution. The court’s decision was based on evidence from Richard Rich, Solicitor-General and already firmly within Cromwell’s circle of patronage, in front of jurors carefully picked by Master Secretary [one of Cromwell’s titles]. Few historical accounts have managed to make the tale of Rich’s career anything better than despicable in its opportunism and chameleon-like profession of religious belief; he is likely to have distorted what he had heard in interviews with More. (279; reference omitted)

Sir Diarmaid notes that Cromwell seems to have felt rather terrible about the whole thing:

in Cromwell’s jottings of remembrances for action … he could not bring himself to name More in relation to the business of execution … [T]he note read “When Master Fisher shall go to execution, and also the other”. (280)

Perhaps it would be unfair to say “crocodile tears”. Yet even if Cromwell’s conflicted feelings were genuine, that hardly reduces his responsibility for putting a man to death for his beliefs (however fanatical and they may otherwise have been), and in a perversion of the legal process.

Cromwell was, then, a paradoxical figure in constitutional history. He was a man who abetted royal authoritarianism, including in its murderous tendencies, of which he would himself become a victim. But he was also a man who ultimately could claim the credit for aggrandizing Parliament and setting it on the trajectory that would lead, first, to a confrontation with the Crown in which, under the leadership of a Cromwell’s nephew’s great-grandson, Parliament would judicially murder Henry VIII’s nephew’s grandson, Charles I, and then to finally securing dominance over the Crown a century and a half after Cromwell’s downfall. Not that Cromwell would necessarily have been pleased with any of that. It is perhaps for the best that we do not know the consequences of our actions.

For Your Freedom and Ours

Honouring and learning from the 1968 Red Square Demonstration

Fifty years ago today, on August 25, 1968, eight men and women came out on Red Square to protest against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

They held up some banners, perhaps the most famous of them (pictured) repurposing the old Polish slogan “For our freedom and yours“, originally used to protest the Tsarist empire; for this protest by Russians, the words became “For your freedom and ours”. It only took the KGB a few minutes to attack the protesters (one of whom had several teeth knocked out), break up their banners, and arrest them. One gave in to pressure to declare that she had been there by accident; the others did not. Five were put on trial and sentenced to the Gulag or to exile. Two ― Natalya Gorbanevskaya, who had recently given birth (and come to the Red Square with a stroller!) and Viktor Fainberg, the one who had had his teeth knocked out ― were instead declared to be mentally ill and interned in psychiatric institutions, avoiding the Soviet authorities the embarrassment of putting them on trial.

I think it is worth commemorating this protest, not just to honour its participants, but also because they have something important to tell us about what it means, and what it can cost, to be free. A number of them spoke to Vladimir Kara-Murza Jr. for a documentary on the dissident movement in the Soviet Union (the discussion of the 1968 Red Square Demonstration is here), and their thoughts are relevant not only to historians, or to those struggling against regimes that are generally recognized as authoritarian, but also to anyone trying to resist a stifling atmosphere of unfreedom that can exist even in the absence of overt repression, and even in the midst of widely professed belief in free expression.

Freedom has two aspects: internal and external. Free individuals are free thinkers; they do not accept received wisdom, prevailing opinions, and common sense as dogma. Free individuals are also free agents; they act consistently with their sense of right and wrong. Meaningful external freedom, freedom of action, is not possible without internal freedom, freedom of thought. But freedom of thought alone is insufficient. One might be able to count oneself as a king of infinite space while bounded in a nutshell, but not, as we know, if one has bad dreams. And one of the points that that Mr Fainberg makes in the documentary is that “bad dreams” are the inevitable consequence of not acting in accordance with one’s understanding of how one ought to act: “the biggest fear” a person can have, he says,

is fear of the past. Because if you’ve betrayed yourself in the past, if you betrayed your own dignity, you will have that worm inside you, which will eat you from inside, in the present and in the future, and you will not be able to escape it.

This is a point I have already made here, quoting from JS Bach’s St John Passion, where Peter laments his own inability to escape “the pain of [his] misdeed”, his betrayal.

To be free, then, is both to think and to act for oneself, and not on the demand of authorities. Just what acting for oneself involves will depend both on the individual and on the circumstances ― sometimes, it means to worship or preach, sometime to speak or write, sometimes to get together with others on the public square and try to shame the government. All these actions, however, are in some sense public, visible, even ostentatious. To repeat, purely internal freedom, though it may be of some value, is in the long run unavailing. On the contrary, to think freely and to fail to act on these thoughts is to set oneself up for bitter shame and remorse. A free thinker will become a free agent, if only to avoid this outcome. As Gorbanevskaya put it in the documentary, the protest, for her, was a way to ensure that she would “have a clean conscience”. This is no doubt somewhat false, or at least uncalled for, modesty. Protesting, on Red Square, against a defining policy of the Soviet government was an act of incredible bravery. But it is not to slight the protesters to say that they feared a guilty conscience more than the KGB and the Gulag. On the contrary.

The Soviet authorities in 1968 knew this. This is why they took no chances. They did not just stop people from acting. They did their best to impose uniformity of thought. They never fully succeeded, of course, but they never stopped trying. They demanded that all Soviet citizens, especially educated ones, devote years to the study of Marxist “classics”; they forbade “hostile” or “subversive” book being published or even read; and they demanded loud, public, professions of commitment to the ideology and policies of “the Communist Party and the Soviet Government”, the louder and more public the more significant ― or suspect ― the target of the demands was. As Orwell understood so well, forcing people to speak in particular ways meant forcing them to think in particular ways too.

Yet paradoxically the authorities’ obsession with ensuring that all Soviet citizens thought alike gave the few who thought differently a power of their own. In Gorbanevskaya’s words,

[a] nation minus even one person is no longer an entire nation. A nation minus me is not an entire nation. A nation minus ten, a hundred, a thousand people is not an entire nation, so they could no longer say there was nationwide approval in the Soviet Union for the invasion of Czechoslovakia.

This is why it was so important for the Soviet system to crush even the relatively few people who opposed it ― and why, in a sense, their small numbers did not matter very much. Not everyone thought alike, therefore not everyone acted alike, therefore others saw that dissent existed, and started thinking and acting freely in their turn.

Free thought is thus a standing danger to any authority that wants all those subject to it to conform to its demands. Latter-day egalitarian moralists understand this as well as the Communists of yesteryear. (And, any egalitarian moralists who might be reading this: don’t tell me that you are right, or that you are redeeming the many sins of white-man-kind; the Communists also thought that they were building heaven on earth. Including when they were invading Czechoslovakia.) Hence their shamings, their online mobs, and their demands for attestations and statements of principles. They desperately want to control people’s very thoughts and beliefs, because they sense that, if people are not made to get on with the programme in their minds, they will, sooner or later, start speaking out against the programme too, call scrutiny upon it, and expose its unexamined assumptions, its logical deficiencies, and its leaps of blind faith.

This is not to say that the moralists are quite like their forbears in every respect. They (mostly) do not beat those who disagree; they they not imprison them; they do not torture them in psychiatric “hospitals”. The pressure, for now, is mostly economic and reputational. I do not mean to make light of it; I do not mean to judge anyone who thinks it is too much; I certainly do not mean to pretend that I am braver or stronger than others. When I think of those eight who went out on Red Square that day, and of the seven who did not give in to the threats and the violence ― the real violence, not just the unpleasant words ― that they were subjected to do, I do think that the demands on our strength and courage are not yet very high. But if we do not start practising being free now, we won’t be very good at it if one day we really need to.

Despotism, Revisited

Thoughts upon belatedly reading an (anti-)administrative law classic

I have, rather belatedly, read an (anti-)administrative law classic, The New Despotism by Lord Hewart’s ― an attack on the power of what would come to be called the administrative state published in 1929 by the then-Lord Chief Justice of England. The book made quite an impression when it was published, prompting the government to set up an inquiry, and even has its own Wikipedia page. However, I don’t think The New Despotism is often discussed in Canada these days. (A quick HeinOnline search shows no more than occasional citations in the past decade; and, what little that’s worth, I hadn’t heard about it until I sat in on my colleague Vernon Rive’s administrative law lectures.) So perhaps some comments here may be of interest, if only to my fellow dabblers, despite the book’s antiquity.

In a nutshell, Lord Hewart was alarmed by the expansion of unreviewable legislative and adjudicative powers delegated by Parliament to officials within the executive branch. While he is almost certainly skeptical of the administrative state generally, Lord Hewart mostly suspends this skepticism and focuses his attacks not on the exercise of power by administrative decision-makers as such, but on the fact that, all too often, administrative power is exercised more or less secretly, without the persons affected by it being able to make submissions to decision-makers, or without decision-makers having to take these submissions into account, or to explain how they reached the conclusions they did. He criticizes legislation empowering administrators to override statutes, or to interpret and apply them without any judicial oversight. Such legislation, he insists, creates a system that is not, properly speaking, one of “administrative law”, such as it exists in Europe (Lord Hewart doesn’t share A.V. Dicey’s notorious disdain for continental administrative law), but one of “administrative lawlessness”.

The remarkable thing is that, while it is fashionable to describe The New Despotism (insofar as it is referred to at all) as a “tirade” delivered by an apologist for the nightwatchman-state dark ages, his critique has been largely accepted ― including by the latter-day defenders of the administrative state ― and incorporated into modern administrative law. Whatever our views on the Canadian (and American) practice of deference to administrative interpretations of statutes, even those who defend this practice accept that some judicial oversight over administrative decision-makers is constitutionally essential. And they, like their critics, would share Lord Hewart’s indignation at decision-making processes in which anonymous officials may act without receiving evidence or submissions from affected parties, whom they need not appraise of their concerns, and are not required to give reasons. He might not be kindly remembered, but in a very real sense, Lord Hewart won the battle of ideas. Pro- or anti-administrativists, we largely agree with him, and indeed among ourselves. The outstanding disagreements are of course significant, but not nearly as significant as the general assent to the subjection of administrative decision-making to judicial review in matters both procedural and substantive.

Interestingly, however, this consensus was not implemented in the manner Lord Hewart envisioned. It is largely reflected in the development of the common law, and not so much in changes to legislative practice which he urged. Some legislative changes have occurred. In particular, there are better, though I suspect still deficient, mechanisms for Parliamentary review of regulations, which Lord Hewart called for. But legislatures have not ceased purporting to delegate vast and unreviewable powers to the executive. What has changed is that the courts came to take a much more skeptical approach to such legislation, and seldom give it its full effect. This, I think, is not surprising. Lord Hewart thought that, to eradicate administrative lawlessness, “what is necessary is simply
a particular state of public opinion”, for which to “be brought into existence what is necessary is simply a knowledge of the facts”. (148) This seems almost touchingly naïve ― almost, because, as a former politician himself, Lord Hewart ought to have known better. It is implausible that public opinion can be drawn to, let alone firmly focused on, issues that are bound to strike non-lawyers as purely technical matters. This is something worth pondering as we reflect on the relative legitimacy of judicially-articulated and legislated rules, whether generally or specifically in the context of administrative law.

Let me now go back to the disagreement between those who favour judicial deference to administrative decision-makers and those who resist it. That Lord Hewart would surely have been in the latter camp will not persuade anyone who is not, given his reputation as an arch-anti-administrativist. But there is another jurist, whose name carries more authority in Canada than Lord Hewart’s, whom I am happy to claim for non-deferential camp (to which I belong): none other than Lord Sankey, of the “living tree” fame. In an extra-judicial speech, delivered just months before the opinion in Edwards v Canada (Attorney General), [1930] AC 124, a.k.a. the Persons Case, and quoted by Lord Hewart, Lord Sankey emphasized the importance of the Rule of Law, and of the courts as its enforcers:

Amid the cross-currents and shifting sands of public life the Law is like a great rock upon which a man may set his feet and be safe, while the inevitable inequalities of private life are not so dangerous in a country where every citizen knows that in the Law Courts, at any rate, he can get justice. (151)

And then, describing the threats to the courts’ role in upholding the Rule of Law, Lord Sankey pointed to

what has been described as a growing tendency to transfer decisions on points of law or fact from the Law Courts to the Minister of some Government department. (151)

And as for Lord Hewart himself, he did have an answer to at least one objection to judicial oversight of the administrative state that the defenders of deference still trot out from time to time: that allowing unobstructed judicial review of administrative decisions will lead to too much costly litigation. (For instance, in Edmonton (City) v Edmonton East (Capilano) Shopping Centres Ltd, 2016 SCC 47, [2016] 2 SCR 293, Justice Karakatsanis’ majority opinion claimed that “[a] presumption of deference on judicial review … provides parties with a speedier and less expensive form of decision making”. [22]) Lord Hewart responded to this concern by pointing out that

what is desired is not that there should be endless litigation but rather that litigation should be rendered as a rule unnecessary by the diffused and conscious knowledge that, in case of need, recourse might be had to an impartial public tribunal, governed by precedent, and itself liable to review. (155)

The point is one that goes to the very nature of the Rule of Law:

Nobody outside Bedlam supposes that the reason why Courts of law exist in a civilized community is that the founders of the State have believed happiness to consist in the greatest possible amount of litigation among the greatest possible number of citizens. The real triumph of Courts of law is when the universal knowledge of their existence, and universal faith in their justice, reduce to a minimum the number of those who are willing so to behave as to expose themselves to their jurisdiction. (155)

Just last year, the UK Supreme Court adopted essentially this reasoning in R (Unison) v Lord Chancellor [2017] UKSC 51, in the course of explaining the importance of access to adjudication ― perhaps ironically, in that case, adjudication in administrative tribunals, albeit ones functioning quite differently from those decried by Lord Hewart. Arch-anti-administrativist he may have been, but Lord Hewart was a more intelligent, and is a more relevant, jurist than those who dismiss him might realize. If you are interested in administrative law and haven’t read The New Despotism, you probably should read it.

A Constitutional Moment

Confederation as a constitutional moment, in George Brown’s words

I take a break from talking about the Saskatchewan Catholic school funding case, and turn from dealing with unanticipated consequences of compromises struck at Confederation to the time when these compromises were being made. It is common enough in Canada to denigrate these compromises, a tendency encapsulated in the former Justice Binnie’s comment, his exit interview with the Globe and Mail, that we couldn’t possibly be originalists because

[w]e don’t have a Jefferson or an Alexander Hamilton or a Benjamin Franklin, for us to read their views on what the Constitution does or doesn’t mean. At the Quebec conference, Sir John A. Macdonald’s most memorable reflection was: “Too much whisky is just enough.” That was the guidance we got as to our Constitution.

The Quebec conference was held behind closed doors, so we don’t actually know what memorable reflections were made there. But we have plenty of other sources to consult, if we take an interest in the thought of the Fathers of Confederation. (Many of these sources are now easily available on the Macdonald Laurier Institute’s Confederation Project’s website, thanks to the hard work of my friend Alastair Gillespie.)

I think it’s fair to say that, on the whole, the Fathers of Confederation did not quite have the philosophical depth or literary talent of Alexander Hamilton and James Madison. But that is a rather absurd standard by which to measure any group of statesmen. Considered in their own right, they were much more serious thinkers, not to mention better expositors of their ideas, than they are usually given credit for. Their constitutional endeavours involved a great deal of compromise and concession, as they openly acknowledged (in contrast, perhaps, to the self-assured Publius). But if did not meditate on the meaning of separation of powers, or advance theories of federalism, or leave cryptic thoughts on judicial review for us to decipher, they carried out a practical demonstration of how to solve constitutional and political problems that was, in its own way, no less impressive ― and has arguably better stood the test of time, for now anyway.

As Mr. Gillespie’s work shows, the accomplishments of Confederation are perhaps best appreciated if presented in the words of those who made them possible. So, to finally get to the point of this post, here is an excerpt from George Brown’s speech during the “Confederation Debates”, during which the legislature of the then-Province of Canada considered whether to support the plan developed at the Quebec Conference. Mr. Gillespie’s paper on Brown does not quote it, but it made an impression on me when I read it recently, and I wanted to share it. Having noted that the candidates supporting the confederation plan have been receiving wide popular support in recent elections, Brown goes on to argue that people outside Canada ― which is to say, mostly, in the United Kigdom and in the United States ― have been noticing too:

And well, Mr. Speaker, might our present attitude in Canada arrest the earnest attention of other countries. Here is a people composed of two distinct races, speaking different languages, with religious and social and municipal and educational institutions totally different; with sectional hostilities of such a character as to render government for many years well-nigh impossible; with a Constitution so unjust in the view of one section as to justify any resort to enforce a remedy. And yet, sir, here we sit, patiently and temperately discussing how these great evils and hostilities may justly and amicably be swept away for ever.

We are endeavouring to adjust harmoniously greater difficulties than have plunged other countries into all the horrors of civil war. We are striving to do peacefully and satisfactorily what Holland and Belgium, after years of strife, were unable to accomplish. We are seeking by calm discussion to settle questions that Austria and Hungary, that Denmark and Germany, that Russia and Poland, could only crush by the iron heel of armed force. We are seeking to do without foreign intervention that which deluged in blood the sunny plains of Italy.

We are striving to settle for ever issues hardly less momentous than those that have rent the neighbouring republic and are now exposing it to all the horrors of civil war. Have we not then, Mr. Speaker, great cause of thankfulness that we have found a better way for the solution of our troubles than that which has entailed on other countries such deplorable results?

Now the last paragraph strikes me as an exaggeration. Were the differences between Upper and Lower Canada, British and French Canadians, Protestants and Catholics, truly comparable the conflict over slavery that caused the American Civil War? Brown might have been afflicted with the same blindness about the nature of that war that made Lord Acton, the great liberal, support the South in the name of preserving federalism. But he was also in a self-congratulatory mood (and readers of Mr. Gillespie’s paper will understand why Brown had cause for self-congratulation just then), and no doubt a boastful one, as any politician trying to sell others on his dearly held idea.

Yet despite his rhetorical excess, Brown was fundamentally right. It is true that the differences of religion, to say nothing of the forces of nationalism, had ― and have since he spoke ― often led to hatred, to open conflict, to outright war. The Fathers of Confederation found a way, not to sweep them away for ever, admittedly, but to create a constitutional framework within which opposing forces could be accommodated, and indeed made to work together, in a way that not only kept them at peace, but created one of the most successful polities of the last century and a half.

Contrary to what the denigrators like to say, the mid-1860s (and perhaps the longer period from the late 1850s to the mid-1870s) were a true “constitutional moment” in Canada. It deserves our respect, and our attention. We need not be uncritical of those who made this moment possible. But we profit, to this day, from their practical wisdom and political talents. We should not forget that.

First of All Our Laws

Natural law in a Québec Court of Appeal decision in 1957

Starting with the Reference re Alberta Statutes, [1938] SCR 100, but mostly in the 1950s, the Supreme Court of Canada issued a series of decisions which came to be known as upholding an “implied bill of rights” in the Canada. The actual holdings of these decisions were often relatively narrow ― they held, for example, that provinces could not outlaw political or religious ideas, because doing so was part of Parliament’s criminal law power. Yet both the obiter comments of some judges and the general trend of these cases seemed to give a fairly clear indication that the Supreme Court would, to some extent at least, resist the arbitrary exercise of both legislative and executive power in Canada, and protect civil liberties.

Understandably less well-known are the decisions of the lower courts that tended to the same effect. In Morin v Ryan, [1957] Que QB 296 (CA), for instance, the Québec Court of Appeal awarded damages to a plaintiff it founded to have been defamed by being characterized as a “militant communist” ― a decision F.R. Scott described as “a healthy check on incipient McCarthysm”. Another such decision, which I have recently come across, is Chabot v School Commissioners of Lamorandière, (1957) 12 DLR (2d) 796. Like many of the “implied bill of rights decisions” it concerned the religious freedom of Jehovah’s Witnesses ― in this instance, in the context of a school system organized along religious lines.

The applicant’s children were attending a Catholic public school ― the only kind there was in their rural municipality. After the family joined the Witnesses, the parents wrote to the school to request that the children not be required to take part in the daily prayers and to study religion-related content. What we would now call a “reasonable accommodation” seems to have worked well enough for a while, but eventually ― perhaps after some trivial misbehaviour by the children, though many of the judges seem quite skeptical of this ― the arrangement broke down. The children were expelled, and the school authorities made it clear that they would only re-admit them on condition that they take part in the full programme of religious activities. The father sought a writ of mandamus to compel the school to admit his children with the condition that they be exempted from religious exercises.

At the Court of Appeal, the case was heard by a bench of seven judges ― testament, I take it, to its special importance. Six sided with the father. Justice Rinfret, as he then was (Édouard Rinfret, that is, not to be confused with his father Thibodeau Rinfret, the Chief Justice of Canada), dissented, protesting that

no one wants to place any obstacles in the way of the religious liberty of the appellant or his children, no one aspires to force him to send his children to the school of the commissioners; if he does it, it is of his own volition, because he wanted to; but if it is his wish and if he insists on sending them there, he is obliged to … follow the regulations [as to religious exercises and studies] established by competent authority. (826)

The law, after all, allowed religious “dissentients” to establish their own schools. If the Chabot family was one of the few or even the only one in its small town, that was not Catholic, the law paid no heed to that; they should still set up their own school, or comply with the rules of the Catholic majority.

But the court’s majority did not see it this way. For them, the issue was one of religious liberty ― and indeed of natural rights. On its face, to be sure, the case was about interpreting the applicable legislation and regulations, and deciding whether they were ultra vires the province, notably in light of some of the already-decided “implied bill of rights” cases. Justice Casey, for instance, starts by putting the case before the court in this context:

During the past few years our Courts have been called upon to consider those fundamental rights commonly called freedoms of speech and of religion, and while differences have arisen in solving specific problems, never has the existence of these rights been put in doubt. (805)

But, more than in those cases, the judges who decided Chabot were explicit in their references to implicit rights prior to positive law, which guided their interpretation and application of that law. Thus Justice Pratte says that “it appears useful to recall that the right to give one’s children the religious education of one’s choice, like freedom of conscience, is anterior to positive law”. (802) Having quoted a couple of English decisions to this effect, and a passage from Aquinas cited in one of them, Justice Pratte writes that

if one considers natural law, first of all our laws, it is necessary to conclude that children who attend a school are not obliged to follow a religious teaching to which their father is opposed. (802)

Similarly, Justice Casey was of the view that “[w]hat concerns us now is the denial of appellant’s right of inviolability of conscience [and] interference with his right to control the religious education of his children”, which rights “find their source in natural law”. (807). Justice Hyde (with whom Justice Martineau agreed), also took the position that the school authorities’ position amounted to an assertion that they could

force upon [non-Catholic children attending Catholic schools] the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church and oblige them to go through forms of worship in accordance with that faith. It requires no text of law to demonstrate that this cannot be so. (813; paragraph break removed.)

Justice Taschereau (that is André Taschereau, not to be confused with his cousin Robert Taschereau, then judge on the Supreme Court and later Chief Justice of Canada), sounded a perhaps slightly more Dworkinian note:

It would … be contrary to natural law as well as to the most elementary principles of our democratic institutions that a father could not exercise the right or fulfil his obligation to instruct his children without renouncing his religious faith (834; emphasis added.)

Of the majority judges, only Justice Owen was more cautious, saying that “[t]here are differences of opinion as to the nature of [religious freedom], whether it is a civil right or a political or public right”, although he too had no difficulty in concluding that it “is a right which is recognized and protected in Canada”, while pointing to limited legislative, and no constitutional, authority.

Now, it is not entirely clear quite what relationship between positive and natural law the judges envisioned. Certainly they were prepared to let natural law guide their choice between plausible interpretations of ambiguous legislative provisions, and either to read down or to declare ultra vires regulatory provisions inconsistent with their chosen interpretation and thus with natural law. But would they go further and actually invalidate positive law for inconsistency with natural law? None of them finds it necessary to do so, but there is at least a hint that they might. Justice Hyde seems to suggest that compliance with natural law might be a constitutional requirement, saying that the school authorities’ power to determine the curriculum

cannot be construed to override [a] basic principle of natural law. It would require very specific provisions in the Act to that effect to justify any such interpretation and then, of course, the constitutionality of such provisions would be a matter for consideration. (813)

Justice Casey might be going further still, stating that rights which

find their existence in the very nature of man … cannot be taken away and they must prevail should they conflict with the provisions of positive law. Consequently if the regulations under which, rightly or wrongly, this school is being operated make it mandatory that non-Catholic pupils submit to the religious instructions and practices enacted by the Catholic Committee then these regulations are ultra vires … and invalid. (807; emphasis added)

That said, the same Justice Casey cautions that

while in principle no one should be coerced into the practice of a religion, or subjected to compulsion in following outwardly the dictates of conscience, or prevented from practising as he sees fit the religion of his own choice, this immunity disappears if what he does or omits is harmful or opposed to the common good or in direct violation of the equal rights of others. (805)

Meanwhile, Justice Pratte suggests that Québec’s education system was designed so as to “take into account the rights of the family in the matter of education.” (800) His and his colleagues’ decision, then, might only rely on natural law the better to advance the positive legislator’s objectives, as well as to protect natural rights.

The majority’s overt invocation of natural law reads like something of a curiosity sixty years later. The rights it sought to uphold have, more or less, been subsumed in the positive protections of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms ― and, perhaps even more so, in Québec’s Charter of Human Rights and Liberties. Nevertheless, the questions the Court addresses are also very modern. The issue as stated by Justice Taschereau ― whether a parent “[c]an … be obliged to renounce his religious beliefs as a condition to the admission of his children to a public school of the school municipality where he lives?” (832) ― is exactly the same as that which faced the Supreme Court in Multani v Commission scolaire Marguerite-Bourgeoys, 2006 SCC 6, [2006] 1 SCR 256, the kirpan case. The answer the Supreme Court gave was not as novel as its critics keep on pretending it was, nor did it have to hinge on constitutional provisions which some of them affect to find illegitimate. Half a century before Multani, Québec’s highest court came to similar conclusions, on the basis of what it ― rightly in my view ― saw as truths antecedent to, and more permanent than, any constitution.

A Pile of Problems

A critique of Steven Penney’s take on the Supreme Court’s distinction between criminal and administrative penalties

Steven Penney has recently posted to SSRN an interesting article, published last year in the Supreme Court Law Review, criticizing the Supreme Court of Canada’s jurisprudence distinguishing the imposition of “administrative” and “criminal” penalties. People (and corporations) who risk the latter kind of penalties ― “true penal consequences” as the Court calls them ― benefit from a variety of procedural protections which section 11 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms grants to “[a]ny person charged with an offence”. Those facing only “administrative” penalties ― which can include suspensions of licenses (to drive or to practice a profession) and fines, even fines ranging in the hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars ― are not protected by the Charter.

Prof. Penney traces the intellectual roots of this distinction to the Canadian rejection of the “Lochner era” in American constitutional jurisprudence, which is generally thought to have involved judicial subversion of valuable economic regulation intended to protect society’s less powerful members. Prof. Penney shares the concern that motivated this rejection, but argues that it has been taken too far. The “shadow of Lochner“, as his article’s title has it, has dimmed the guiding lights of the Charter, even as

[l]egislatures have increasingly relied on administrative and civil enforcement regimes to address forms of wrongdoing previously left to the criminal law. In many instances, the sanctions accompanying these regimes are harsh, the targets are ordinary people, and the rules protecting adjudicative fairness are weak. (309)

Prof. Penney argues that section 11 of the Charter should be interpreted more broadly, to provide procedural protections to persons involved in administrative as well as criminal proceedings. The government’s ability to justify restrictions to or departures from these protections under section 1 should be enough to prevent them from standing in the way of truly important economic regulation ― but the necessity of these restrictions or departures would have to be justified.

This is an intriguing argument. I have written here about Thibault c. Da Costa, 2014 QCCA 2347, a case in which the distinction between administrative and criminal penalties was used to uphold the imposition, on a financial advisor who had swindled some of his clients, of fines that were higher than those authorized by the applicable legislation as it stood at the time of the acts. In the criminal context, paragraph 11(i) of the Charter, which entitles persons charged with an offence “if found guilty of the offence and if the punishment for the offence has been varied between the time of commission and the time of sentencing, to the benefit of the lesser punishment”, prohibits this. But the Québec Court of Appeal took the view that the proceedings here were not really criminal, because the fines imposed were not “true penal consequences”, and so their retrospective increase was upheld. I wrote that the decision, although legally correct, was disturbing. Prof. Penney discusses two decisions of the Supreme Court that also apply this distinction to disturbing effect (as he, persuasively in my view, argues): Guindon v Canada, 2015 SCC 41, [2015] 3 SCR 3 and Goodwin v. British Columbia (Superintendent of Motor Vehicles), 2015 SCC 46, [2015] 3 S.C.R. 250.

At the same time, however, Prof. Penney’s article suffers from a some flaws that are, sadly, characteristic of Canadian constitutional thought. One issue I have with Prof. Penney’s argument is that it mostly does not question the conventional wisdom on the “Lochner era” in which it finds the roots of the problem it tries to push back against. According to this conventional wisdom, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Lochner v New York, 198 US 45 (1905), held up, in prof. Penney’s words, “a rigid and formalist interpretation of the Bill of Rights to limit state efforts to enact and enforce progressive economic legislation”. (308) This is questionable; indeed, recent scholarship argues that it is simply wrong. David Bernstein, whose book prof. Penney cites but does not engage with, has shown that, far from being intended to protect the vulnerable and the disadvantaged, the legislation invalidated in Lochner served to protect (relatively) big ― and unionized ― established businesses against smaller, family-owned competitors. Many other laws invalidated in the “Lochner era” ― which were never as numerous as subsequent criticism made them out to be ― were similarly objectionable. Meanwhile, this reviled jurisprudential era has served as the foundation for the subsequent expansion in the enforcement of constitutional rights in the non-economic realm.

This history matters. Rectifying the record is useful for its own sake of course. Prof. Penney says that “[t]he story of Lochner is well known” (310) ― and, in the next sentence, misstates the year in which it was decided; an accident, no doubt, but an ironic one. Prof. Penney quotes a passage from Justice Cory’s reasons in R v Wholesale Travel Group Inc, [1991] 3 SCR 154 describing the “so-called ‘Lochner era'” as the period of time when “courts struck down important components of the program of regulatory legislation known as ‘the New Deal'”. But of course the “Lochner era” began well before Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal, and most of the laws struck down during this period had nothing to do with it. In short, “the story of Lochner” is rather less well known than one might be tempted to suppose; what people think they know about it may be ideological myth more than reality. More importantly, however, recovering Lochner‘s philosophy ― an opposition not to any and all economic regulation, but to the sort of regulation that privileges some groups in society above others ― might also make us rightly more suspicious than we tend to be of the regulatory schemes that the courts end up protecting by invoking the administrative-criminal distinction. In my post on Thibault I suggested that courts should be wary of “the specious claims professional organizations, and governments which choose to delegate their regulatory powers to them, make about their role” when they ask themselves whether the penalties at issue are administrative or penal in nature. Remembering Lochner‘s lesson ― that economic regulation is not always as benign and protective as it seems ― might help here.

My other, and more important, objection to prof. Penney’s argument concerns his approach to constitutional interpretation. He “claim[s] … that the Supreme Court’s construal of ‘charged with an offence'” in section 11 of the Charter as excluding administrative proceedings “is too restrictive”. (323) It is too restrictive, prof. Penney argues, because of the bad consequences it produces ― in the sense that individual rights to “adjudicative fairness in contesting substantial state-imposed penalties” (324) are under-protected. As I suggest above, I think that prof. Penney is right to decry the under-protection of these rights. But it is not enough to say that, because interpreting a constitutional provision in a certain way produces unpleasant consequences, a different interpretation can and ought to be adopted.

The jurisprudence that prof. Penney criticizes arguably illustrates the perils of this approach. In prof. Penney’s telling, the Supreme Court is concerned about the costs of enforcing the Charter‘s procedural protections for the state’s ability to impose economic regulations, more than it is about the consequences of not enforcing these protections when “true penal consequences” such as imprisonment are not at stake. A consequentialist approach to constitutional interpretation can go either way; there is no guarantee that it will always be right-protecting. Consequentialism, in turn, is one possible way of implementing the “living tree” interpretive methodology that the Supreme Court and Canadian academia loudly insist is the only appropriate one. It’s not the only way ― one might be a living-treeist without being a consequentialist. But saying “living tree” is not enough to decide cases. Once one accepts that constitutional meaning can change, one has to figure out what it should change to, and this is where consequentialism comes in. If one wants to foreclose, or at least to limit, its influence in constitutional interpretation, one should, I suspect, abandon living-treeism, at least in the radically unspecified form in which it is practised in Canada.

Now, it is not clear that doing so will lead to results that prof. Penney or I would find pleasant in this particular case. The main alternatives to living-tree constitutional interpretation are the different versions of originalism. (For a primer, see Benjamin Oliphant’s and my paper recently published in the Queen’s Law Journal.) An originalist approach to section 11 of the Charter would consist in asking whether (depending on the version of originalism one subscribes to) “charged with an offence” would have been understood in 1982 as applying to administrative proceedings or was intended to apply to them by the Charter‘s authors. And I don’t know the answer to these questions. What I do know is that, insofar as these questions do have an ascertainable answer (they might not; perhaps the phrase “charged with an offence” is irreducibly vague, forcing an originalist interpreter into the “construction zone” that is, on some views, not very different from living tree interpretation), this answer does not turn on competing, and potentially variable, cost-benefit analyses, which will inevitably be influenced by personal preferences, of judges or scholars. Originalism is not necessarily more rights-protective than living-treeism ― though as prof. Penney shows, living-treeism isn’t always very rights-protective either. But originalism does hold out a promise of a constitutional law that is actually law-like, in that it is independent of the individuals who apply it. In the long run, this is not only valuable in itself, but arguably also more likely to protect individual rights in situations where doing so is likely to be seen as undermining important social objectives ― which after all is the whole point of constitutional rights protection.

Prof. Penney’s article is valuable because it attracts our attention to a number of serious problems affecting our constitutional law. On the one hand, there is problem of insufficient constraints on the imposition of “administrative” penalties, which the article decries. On the other, there are the twin problems of reliance on a blinkered version of history and on open-ended “living tree” constitutional interpretation that opens the door to consequentialist reasoning unconstrained by anything other than personal preferences, which the article exemplifies. Proponents of prof. Penney’s interpretive approach might say that my argument is contradictory, since it suggests that the constitution might not give us the resources to address the problem prof. Penney identifies. But if that is so, the solution is not to surreptitiously re-write the constitution under the guise of an interpretation that will only be adhered to by those who share the interpreter’s beliefs, but to amend it in a way that will be binding on all future interpreters, whatever their personal views.

Was Scalia Spooky?

Antonin Scalia’s views on snooping, in the 1970s and later

The Globe and Mail‘s Sean Fine is as good a reporter as he is a bad analyst. Both of his qualities ― an impressive ability to find and tell a great story, and an unthinking belief in simplistic ideological classification of judges ― are on full display in his latest article, a fascinating story of how Antonin Scalia, then a professor at the University of Chicago, was commissioned to produce a report on “United States Intelligence Law” for the McDonald Commission, which investigated the RCMP’s espionage activities and whose eventual recommendations led to the creation of CSIS. Mr. Fine contrasts “[t]he report’s scrupulously impartial (for the most part) author” with the judge that he would become; the former, sensitive to privacy rights if also keen to ensure that intelligence agencies can operate effectively; the latter, in Mr. Fine’s telling, brazenly unconcerned with them, and condoning “torture in some circumstances”. But things are more complicated than Mr. Fine lets on.

Before I get to that, I’ll note little anecdote that Mr. Fine passes over, perhaps because this is a bit too inside-baseball for the Globe‘s readers. Mr. Fine explains that it was Peter Russel, who was the director of research for the McDonald Commission, who recommended then-professor Scalia’s hiring ― on the advice of Edward Levi (Scalia’s boss as Attorney-General in Gerald Ford’s administration) and Herbert Wechsler (a distinguished scholar, notably of the “neutral principles” fame). What Mr. Fine does not mention is that prof. Russel’s recommendation (a scan of which is included in the article) noted that Levi and Wechsler ranked Scalia ahead of none other than Robert Bork. (Prof. Russell, by the way, seems to have had a bit of an issue with names in that memo, referring to “Anthony” Scalia and “Richard” Bork.) Ironically, the Reagan administration would later rank Scalia and Bork in the same order when it came to making their appointments to the Supreme Court. Scalia was nominated in 1986, and confirmed by the Senate on a 98-0 vote; Bork was nominated in 1987 and rejected by the Senate after hearings so bitter that his name became a verb, in which his views and record were arguably distorted out of all recognition by Ted Kennedy and the latest recipient of the Medal of Freedom.

And, to get back to my point, this is a bit what Mr. Fine tries to do with the late Justice Scalia, albeit on a much smaller scale. He makes a point of noting that prof. Russell

would … later be appalled by the justice’s support of originalism – a judicial philosophy in which constitutional rights do not evolve over time, but stay rooted in the vision of the Founding Fathers of the United States. “Originalism is absolute nonsense”,

he quotes prof. Russell as saying. And he refers repeatedly to a “2007 speech” Scalia gave in Ottawa, in which “he was more the suspicious-of-too-many-legal-protections conservative”. But Justice Scalia’s originalism was neither “nonsense” nor all bad for the protection of privacy rights against over-curious governments.

Prof. Russell, Mr. Fine, and those who think like them ― admittedly, a large contingent in Canada ― might just learn a thing or two from the expanding scholarship documenting the presence of originalism in Canada, and in some cases advocating the expansion of this presence. This scholarship includes (but is not limited to) recent articles by Sébastien Grammond and J. Gareth Morley focusing on the Supreme Court’s opinions on the appointment of Justice Nadon and Senate reform; an as-yet-unpublished paper by Asher Honickman, on federalism; Kerri Froc’s work on women’s rights; and the pair of articles that Benjamin Oliphant and I wrote last year. The first of these, which should come out any day now in the Queen’s Law Journal, shows that contrary to popular belief, the Supreme Court has not squarely rejected originalism, least of all what is arguably the dominant form of originalism now, one focused on the original meaning of constitutional texts (rather than their framers’ intentions or expectations). The second, due to come out in the UBC Law Review later this year, shows that, in fact, the Supreme Court resorts to originalist reasoning in a surprising variety of cases. If Prof. Russell is right that “originalism is absolute nonsense”, then not only has the Supreme Court never renounced it, but in fact large swathes of its jurisprudence (and of that of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council), are nonsensical too.

But more directly relevant to my present topic is our discussion, in the first paper, of the contrast between Justice Scalia’s reasons, for a 5-4 majority of the Supreme Court of the United States, in Kyllo v United States, 533 U.S. 27 (2001), and Justice Binnie’s reasons for the unanimous Supreme Court of Canada in R v Tessling, 2004 SCC 67, [2004] 3 SCR 432. As we explain (actually, the credit here goes to Mr. Oliphant):

The issue, in both cases, was whether the use of a thermal imaging device by the police amounted to a “search” within the meaning, respectively, of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and section 8 of the Charter. In Kyllo, Justice Scalia … found that because information about what went on within the home ― however collected ― would have been secure from search and seizure at the time the Fourth Amendment was passed, the state cannot now invade that sphere of privacy through the use of new technology.

Justice Binnie, writing for a unanimous Supreme Court, disagreed… Justice Binnie rejected the relevance of Kyllo on the basis that it was “predicated on the ‘originalism’ philosophy of Scalia J.,” [61] and because it is not “helpful in the Canadian context to compare the state of technology in 2004 with that which existed at Confederation in 1867, or in 1982 when s. 8 of the Charter was adopted.” [62]

Tessling is an odd hill upon which to make a stand against originalism. Kyllo, which the Court in Tessling refused to follow, did not restrict constitutional meaning to those realities foreseen by the framers, as originalism does according to the “frozen rights” or “dead” constitution caricature frequently encountered in the Canadian literature. It did precisely the opposite. … Indeed, it is not clear to us just what Justice Binnie is actually rejecting in refusing to follow the “originalist” philosophy underlying Kyllo, or in stating that it is unhelpful “to compare the state of technology” in 2004 with what which existed in 1982. The logic of Kyllo was to deny that changes in technology can diminish the scope of constitutional protection over time; there was no “comparison” of technologies, because changes in technology were irrelevant to the interpretive question of what was protected. (25-26; a paragraph break and a reference removed)

We conclude that

In the ultimate result, and despite frequent and nebulous assertions that the Charter must be read in a “large,” “liberal,” and “generous,” manner, Justice Scalia’s originalist philosophy unquestionably resulted in a more general and robust protection for personal privacy than Justice Binnie’s “purposive” approach to interpreting section 8 of the Charter. (27)

Of course, this is not to say that Justice Scalia was always right, on privacy issues or on anything else. Indeed, this does not even prove that originalism is the better approach to constitutional interpretation than whatever it is that the Supreme Court of Canada is doing. But both originalism and Justice Scalia’s legacy are more complex than many Canadians, including Mr. Fine, tend to assume. We owe Mr. Fine for telling us a story that shed more light on the late Justice’s oeuvre. It’s too bad he tried to shoehorn that story into a simplistic ideological framework that is as misleading as it is useless.

Sub Lege

I often criticize judges, on this blog and elsewhere. I think it is very important that people who exercise power over citizens be subject to criticism whenever they exercise it unwisely or, worse, recklessly, and still more when they abuse or overstep the powers given them. While the media can, more or less, be counted on to criticize legislators and bureaucrats, from time to time anyway, criticizing judges is difficult, because this criticism has to be informed by technical knowledge and skills, which few journalists possess (though there are worthy exceptions). This means that it is especially important for lawyers, including academic lawyers such as myself, to be the judiciary’s critics. And precisely because I am an unabashed critic of the judiciary that I think I need to do so something that might be outside the scope of my normal blogging.

I want to express my dismay, my horror even, at the way in which judges have been treated in much of the British Press in response to the High Court’s ruling that legislation is necessary before the United Kingdom’s government can formally initiate the process of withdrawing the UK from the European Union. The Guardian has collected the front-page reactions: “Who do you think you are?” “The judges versus the people” “ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE“. A paper “helpfully” noted that one of the (very distinguished) members of the panel that heard that case is gay. Another is apparently just as suspicious by virtue of his wealth. This is shocking, vile stuff.

I do not feel confident enough to comment on the merits of the High Court’s ruling, but there appears to be quite a strong case ― made for instance by John Finnis and other experts for the Judicial Power Project, as well as by Adam Tomkins ― for the proposition that the Court erred. That’s beside the point ― except insofar as these arguments, some of them quite forceful, remind us that it is possible to criticize judicial decisions without resorting to taunts, insults, and sloganeering. Whether or not the High Court rendered the right decision, it decided the case before it in accordance with its understanding of the law and of its own constitutional role. The argument implicit in the tabloids’ headlines is that the court had to decide otherwise ― having no regard to the law, but only to the supposed will of the people. But that would be a culpable dereliction of duty; that would make judges act like politicians in robes; that would make their unelected, unaccountable status grounds for criticism.

But perhaps trying to discern an argument amidst that fury is already too generous. Look at the words they use. Enemies of the people! In modern history, the phrase was apparently first popularized by Robespierre. In case anyone is wondering what life under the Jacobins was like, they should read Dame Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety, which succeeds remarkably at creating an atmosphere of all-encompassing, pervasive fear. That same atmosphere was also characteristic of the other period in history where “enemy of the people” was a label used by power to justify mass murder ― Stalin’s purges. This is the heritage which the English press now claims. Land of hope and glory, mother of the free!

Criticizing courts is necessary if we are to hold on to the inevitably precarious proposition that there is a law apart from what the courts say the law is; that there can be a Rule of Law and not merely a rule of judges. If we are to have, in John Adams’s celebrated phrase, a government of laws not of men, judges, like legislators and ministers of the Crown, must obey the law ― and be called out when they fail to do so. It is for this reason that I am wary of, and do my best to contradict, those who would shut down criticism of the judiciary on the pretense that it risks undermining the Rule of Law. But if we are to have a government of laws not of men, then even the most revered men and women ― which in a democracy means the voters ― cannot stand above the law.

A final historical parallel, perhaps more exact although of greater antiquity, is in order. When in 1607 the King of England thought that he could substitute his own judgment for that of the law, his Chief Justice would not let him:

His Majesty was not learned in the laws of his realm of England, and causes which concern the life, or inheritance, or goods, or fortunes of his subjects, are not to be decided by natural reason but by the artificial reason and judgment of law, which law is an act which requires long study and experience, before that a man can attain to the cognizance of it: that the law was the golden met-wand and measure to try the causes of the subjects; and which protected His Majesty in safety and peace: with which the King was greatly offended, and said, that then he should be under the law, which was treason to affirm, as he said; to which I said, that Bracton saith, quod Rex non debet esse sub homine, sed sub Deo et lege [that the King ought not to be under any man but under God and the law].

Like once their king, the people of England ― or at least the demagogues who would speak for them ― may be offended by being “under the law”. But ― as the examples of the Jacobins and the Bolsheviks remind us ― it is the law that protects them in safety and peace. One has every right to insist that judges too keep to the law. But it is lunacy ― suicidal lunacy ― to wish to with to throw off the law’s protection under the pretense of throwing off its shackles.

A Voice of Moderation?

Thoughts on the Chief Justice’s Speech on “Democracy and the Judiciary”

Her court might not be very busy ― it had decided only 19 cases this year through May 31, the lowest number this century ― but Chief Justice McLachlin certainly is. Another Friday, another speech. After the one she gave at the Université de Montréal‘s symposium on Supreme Courts and the Common Law, there was one given on June 3 at the Empire Club of Canada. I criticized the Chief Justice’s remarks at the Université de Montréal over at the CBA National Magazine’s blog, because to me they suggested a misunderstanding of and a lack of belief in the common law, and indeed the Rule of Law itself. The Empire Club speech, in which the Chief Justice outlined her views of the history, current role, and future challenges of what she called “the third branch of Canadian governance [sic] – the judiciary” at times struck a different tone. Yet it too contained its share of historical mistakes, and ultimately was less of a statement of judicial moderation than it was perhaps supposed to be.

One interesting, and arguably telling, historical inaccuracy occurred in the Chief Justice’s description of the history of judicial independence. The Chief Justice traced this constitutional principle to the thought of

jurists like Lord Coke, who maintained that the task of judges was to apply the law as they saw it, not to do the King’s bidding. These jurists took the view that to do justice between the parties in the cases that came before them, judges must not only be impartial, but be seen to be impartial. And for impartiality, actual and perceived, they must have guarantees of independence, notably, fixed terms of appointment, fixed salary and security of tenure.

There is some truth here. Coke did value adjudicative impartiality ― indeed, as Fabien Gélinas has pointed out (at 12), it was Coke who popularized, and perhaps even coined, the maxim “nemo iudex in causa sua.” And, in Prohibitions del Roy, Coke took the position that judges had to decide cases according to law, and that the King, not being learned in the law, could not adjudicate. But it would have come as news ― though perhaps welcome news ― to Coke that judges must have guaranteed tenure. He was, after all, dismissed from judicial office after one run-in too many with James I, and that king’s son and grandchildren were also quite adept at dismissing recalcitrant judges. Judicial independence and security of tenure did not become part of the English constitution until the Act of Settlement, 1701. Importantly, as Peter Cane explained at the Supreme Courts and the Common Law symposium, it was part of a bargain of sorts whereby courts, as well as the Crown, submitted to Parliament and acknowledged its sovereignty. It may well be that the Chief Justice is just a little unclear about 17th-century constitutional history ― but it is still noteworthy that she is unclear in a way that elevates the role of jurists and judges, and obscures that of Parliament.

The Chief Justice’s take on Canadian legal history is also curious. She claims, for instance, that “[f]or eighty years after Confederation, Canada’s legal system functioned as a shadow replica of England’s legal system,” in that “England’s laws became Canada’s laws.” This is an exaggeration. The Canadian judicial system was never quite a replica of the English one (there being no distinct courts of equity, for instance) (UPDATE: See Jan Jakob’s comments below), and the Colonial Laws Validity Act, 1865 made clear that British legislation did not apply in Canada and in other colonies unless it was specifically intended to. The Chief Justice also seems to suggest that the Supreme Court was an afterthought for the fathers of confederation, saying that “befitting its secondary status, [it] wasn’t created until 1875.” Yet the majority opinion in l’Affaire Nadon, which the Chief Justce co-signed, points out that the issue was in fact considered, although “[a]t the time of Confederation, Quebec was reluctant to accede to the creation of a Supreme Court because of its concern that the Court would be incapable of adequately dealing with questions of the Quebec civil law,” [50] and that Sir John A. Macdonald “introduced bills for the establishment of the Supreme Court in 1869 and again in 1870 in the House of Commons.” [79] The Chief Justice seems to take a rather dismissive view of the early days of Canada’s early legal system in order to extol the modern Supreme Court. This rhetorical move is similar to the one she made in her Université de Montréal speech, in which she contrasted the supposed reasoning styles of pre-20th-century and modern common law judges. Yet in both cases, the contrasts are less stark, and the continuity between old and new is more important, than the Chief Justice lets on.

Another statement of the Chief Justice that is worth discussing is her assertion that the fact that “[i]n the lead-up to 1982, the government of the day took as its goal the creation of a ‘just society'” was a “major change[] to the Canadian legal system.” For one thing, the Chief Justice’s chronology might be a bit off again ― Pierre Trudeau first ran on the “just society” slogan in 1968. (In 1972, a heckler asked him where it was. Trudeau retorted that he should ask Jesus Christ, who’d promised it first.) More importantly though, I do not understand how a political statement by the government of the day can amount to a “major change to the … legal system.” The Chief Justice seems to be saying that Trudeau’s articulation of the just society is some sort of benchmark by which to assess the progress of our polity, but even assuming that that is true ― and a great many people would disagree ― I still don’t see how benchmark is a legal one. Of course, to some extent Trudeau’s ideas are reflected in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms ― but the Charter was never meant to provide a complete code of social justice, and the courts’ duty is to apply the Charter as it has been enacted, and not to expand it forever until the day the just society arrives.

It also seems to me quite inappropriate for a judge to take up what was, for better or for worse, a partisan slogan and try to make it into a constitutional ideal. By doing so, the Chief Justice only gives grist for the mill of those who already think that the Charter, and the courts that enforce it, are essentially Liberal self-entrenchment devices. As I wrote in a Policy Options Perspectives post a few months ago, it is dangerous to associate a part of our constitution with a political party ― and that party’s changing fortunes. When these fortunes sag, the constitution must retain its exalted position as the protection of our rights. I urged impartial observers to keep that in mind and avoid associating the Charter with the Liberal party. I had no idea that the Chief Justice of Canada, of all people, would need the same reminder.

While the Chief Justice’s take on Canadian legal history stresses the Supreme Court’s independence and importance, and perhaps stakes out for it a role as an engine of social progress, her other comments seem intended to show that the Court is actually a modest institution aware of its place in the constitutional structure. Along with other institutions, says the Chief Justice, the Court must strive “to maintain the proper constitutional balance between the judiciary and the legislative and executive branches of governance.” It is “Parliament and the provincial legislatures,” not the courts it seems, that “are pre-eminently suited to” “make law” ― quite a contrast to the Chief Justice’s enthusiasm, in the Université de Montréal speech, for judicial development of the law. Moreover, when reviewing the constitutionality of legislation,

courts … must approach the laws adopted by Parliament and the legislatures with due deference for their preeminent law-making role and their ability to arrive at optimal solutions through debate and research. Such deference is particularly important on complex social and economic issues.

Similarly, when reviewing administrative decisions, “the courts show appropriate deference for the expertise and mandate of administrative actors and agencies.”

What to make of this description of a modest judicial role, which seems to stand in tension with the Chief Justice’s claims regarding the exalted standing of the courts ― and her rather ambitious remarks made a week previously? Perhaps the modesty is a sham, or a sop to the particular sensitivities of last week’s audience (though I don’t know what these sensitivities are). But it seems to me that there is more to it than that. The Supreme Court really does believe in and practice deference to both legislatures and the executive when reviewing their decisions ― although it does so inconsistently.

Sometimes it is bold, as when it strikes down laws that try to limit the government’s expenditures on courts on the basis of little more than constitutional principles. Sometimes it is meek, as when it insists that it will not require administrative decision-makers to apply the law correctly, never mind the facts. And it is not always easy to anticipate which it is going to be in a given case ― or even to tell which it is in an already-issued opinion. (I’m thinking, for instance, of Canada (Prime Minister) v. Khadr, 2010 SCC 3, [2010] 1 S.C.R. 44, of which I could never tell whether it was a capitulation disguised as a threat, or a threat disguised as a capitulation.)

Perhaps the Chief Justice believes in a sort of departmentalism-lite, whereby each branch of government is presumptively entitled to make its own legal and constitutional determinations but, unlike with real departmentalism, the courts keep the last word if they think that the other branches are really wrong. Such a doctrine might reconcile the exaltation of the Supreme Court, and a belief in the judges’ right to do as they please with judicially-articulated doctrines, with the insistence on deference to the other branches of government. (It would also fill the empty cell in the little table of attitudes to judicil review that I offered here, to sit alongside “conservative” or Diceyan, “progressive,” and “classical liberal” or “libertarian” approaches.) Never mind whether such a doctrine is good or justified. (I don’t think it is.) The Supreme Court is, again, too inconsistent to claim its mantle.

Maybe there is some other way to make sense of the Chief Justice’s speeches. In any case, it is worth saying that the seeming inconsistency of her positions is in itself a source of discretionary if not arbitrary power. Benjamin Oliphant and I have described the same phenomenon in the realm of constitutional interpretation in our work on originalism: the Supreme Court fails to adhere to any interpretive methodology with much consistency, and thereby maintains a roster of alternative approaches on which it can draw at its convenience, while avoiding scrutiny and criticism for deviating from previously-articulated principles. Whether or not they are intended to achieve this, the Chief Justice’s speeches present a number of different conceptions of the Supreme Court and its role, which allows it to strike whatever pose it deems appropriate in any given case. This may be to the advantage ― the short-term advantage, anyway ― of the institution that Chief Justice McLachlin leads, but this advantage is gained at the expense of principle, transparency, and ultimately the Rule of Law itself.

Churchill on Prison

Winston Churchill’s thoughts on his time as a prisoner (of war)

I’m not sure, and am too lazy to verify, whether if Winston Churchill is the only head of a Commonwealth government to have been a prisoner; but there cannot have been many. (UPDATE: As my friend Malcolm Lavoie points out to me, Nelson Mandela is another example. It is rather stupid of me to have forgotten that and, as you will presently see, quite ironic.) Churchill did not long stay in captivity ― he escaped the converted school where he (a war correspondent at the time) and British officers taken prisoner during the early days of the Boer war were held ― but the experience still marked him, and he wrote about it in his memoir My Early Life, written in 1930:

[T]he whole atmosphere of prison, even the most easy and best regulated prison, is odious. Companions in this kind of misfortune quarrel about trifles and get the least possible pleasure from each other’s society. If you have never been under restraint before and never known what it was to be a captive, you feel a sense of constant humiliation in being confined to a narrow space, fenced in by railings and wire, watched by armed men, and webbed about with a tangle of regulations and restrictions. I certainly hated every minute of my captivity more than I have ever hated any other period in my whole life. (273)

In My Early Life, Churchill says relatively little about his philosophy, and almost nothing about his political career in the 1910s and ’20s, focusing mostly on telling the story as he lived it at the time of the events. However the topic of imprisonment prompts a rare digression:

Looking back on those days, I have always felt the keenest pity for prisoners and captives. What it must mean for any man, especially an educated man, to be confined for years in a modern convict prison strains my imagination. Each day exactly like the one before, with the barren ashes of wasted life behind, and all the long years of bondage stretching out ahead. There in after years, when I was Home Secretary and had all the prisons of England in my charge, I did my utmost consistent with public policy to introduce some sort of variety and indulgence into the life of their inmates, to give to educated minds books to feed on, to give to all periodical entertainments of some sort to look forward to and to look back upon, and to mitigate as far as is reasonable the hard lot which, if they have deserved, they must none the less endure. (273-74)

This is, I think, something that those in charge of prison policy at various levels would do well to consider ― all the more since they, unlike Churchill, will typically lack the experience, however short, of the shoe being on the other foot.

And speaking of books for a mind to feed on, whether or not the body that houses it is in prison or at large, one can find worse than My Early Life. Though it is, no doubt, somewhat politically incorrect by our standards, the events it tells are fascinating; the author’s philosophical observations, though infrequent, are sharp; there is a somewhat wicked pleasure in reading it while knowing what Churchill did not know when it wrote it ― the events that would made him one of history’s great heroes, instead of a minor footnote; and last but not least, it is brilliantly written and thus simply a joy to read.