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Faith and Acts
Is it permissible for an undercover police officer to pose as a religious adviser to induce a suspect to disclose information about a crime the officer is investigating? Not always, but sometimes it is, says the Court of Appeal for Ontario in a decision released last week, R. v. Welsh, 2013 ONCA 190. In that…
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Happy Birthday, Double Aspect!
My blog is a year old! (A year and a day actually.) As I wrote in my 100th post, “[o]n the whole, I would rate this blogging adventure as a time-consuming success.” Despite occasional periods of delinquency, I’ve produced just over 200 posts during that time. If I worked on my dissertation at this pace,…
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L’Occasion de se taire
J’ai écrit, l’an dernier, que le Directeur Général des Élections du Québec envisage[ait] … de poursuivre Yves Michaud pour avoir fait publier dans le Devoir une publicité appelant les électeurs à défaire certains députés, de tous les principaux partis. Il leur en veut d’avoir voté, il y a douze ans, en faveur d’une motion de…
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The End of Supremacy
This just in from DOJ: OTTAWA, April 1, 2013 – The Honourable Rob Nicholson, P.C., Q.C., M.P. for Niagara Falls, Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, today announced important changes in the organization of the Canadian Judiciary. The Harper government will immediately introduce legislation to restore appeals to the Judicial Committee of the Privy…
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Law, Art, and Interpretation
The idea that interpretation in law is similar to interpretation in music is not exactly new. For example Joseph Raz, in “Authority, Law, and Morality,” first published in 1985, wrote that “Judicial interpretation can be as creative as a Glenn Gould interpretation of a Beethoven piano sonata.” But Jack Balkin, in a wonderful paper, “Verdi’s…
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Judicial Independence as Free Speech
I wrote last fall about some implications of the metaphor of the “marketplace of ideas,” much used (especially in the United States) in the realm of free speech law. What prompted my reflection was a presentation by Robert Post, the Dean of Yale Law School, who argued that institutions engaged in the production of specialized…
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Chilling Effect
I wrote a while ago about the case of Matthieu Bonin, a Québec blogger who was accused of incitement to hatred, after making some admittedly tasteless and idiotic statements which, nevertheless, didn’t amount to anything like hate propaganda. Fortunately, as La Presse reports, the charges against him have now been dropped. Yet they should never have…
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Sauter sans parachute
Les députés québécois qui quittent l’Assemblée nationale, que ce soit par une démission, suite à une défaite électorale ou en ne se représentant pas à une élection, ont droit à ce qu’on appelle, dans le monde des affaires, un parachute doré ― une « allocation de transition » équivalant à deux mois de salaire par…
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What Will They Be Thinking?
Jack Balkin has an interesting post on Balkinization, discussing what he calls “arguments from the future” in constitutional law―arguments to the effect that a constitutional issue has to be resolved a certain way because of what people will think about it at some point in the future, say in 20 years. “If,” he writes, like Martin…
Double Aspect 