statutory interpretation
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Canadian Sausage
What the flaws in the Pharmacare Bill tells us about the indignity of legislation Continue reading
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If It’s Broke, You’re Not the One to Fix It
The Québec Court of Appeal takes it upon itself to update obsolete election legislation. That’s not its job. Continue reading
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Some Major Questions About Major Questions
In West Virginia v EPA, the Supreme Court of the United States, wielding the “major questions doctrine” found that the EPA did not have the statutory authority to adopt regulations implementing the Clean Power Plan, initially proposed by the Obama administration in 2015. In this post, I describe why I think this decision was ultimately Continue reading
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On Law and Music
What is the relationship, if any, between law and music? As a musician myself, I notice many commonalities between law and music. As a jazz musician, improvisation is what I spend a lot of time thinking about. To improvise over a tune, it helps to know the notes in the tune, the chords underneath it, Continue reading
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Alexion: No Blank Cheques Here
In Alexion Pharmaceuticals Inc v Canada (Attorney General), 2021 FCA 157, the Federal Court of Appeal clarified the law of judicial review post-Vavilov (particularly as it applies to reasonableness review) and set out an important reminder: administrators are not a law unto themselves. In order to make sure that this is the case, particularly in Continue reading
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The Politics of Law
Is law truly just a function of politics? Should it be? Continue reading
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Interpretation and the Value of Law II
This post is written by Leonid Sirota and Mark Mancini. We read with interest Stéphane Sérafin, Kerry Sun, and Xavier Foccroulle Ménard’s reply to our earlier post on legal interpretation. In a nutshell, we argued that those who interpret legal texts such as constitutions or statutes should apply established legal techniques without regard for the Continue reading
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Against Pure Pragmatism in Statutory Interpretation III: A Way Forward and Walsh (ONCA)
About a month ago, I wrote two posts attacking the concept of “pragmatism” in Canadian statutory interpretation. So my argument goes, the seminal Rizzo case, while commonly said to herald a “purposive” approach to interpretation, is actually methodologically pragmatic This is because the famous paragraph from Rizzo, which contains a list of things an interpret Continue reading
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Against Pure Pragmatism in Statutory Interpretation II: Evaluating Rizzo
Part II in a 3 part Double Aspect series Continue reading
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Against Pure Pragmatism in Statutory Interpretation I
The first post in a three-part Double Aspect series. Continue reading
Double Aspect 