-
The Moneyed Interests
Restrictions on pre-electoral spending by citizens and groups other than political parties and their candidates (known in the jargon as “third-party spending”) have gained a rather unlikely supporter: Tom Flanagan. Prof. Flanagan, arguably Canada’s most prominent conservative thinker, has come out in support of such restrictions in an op-ed in the Globe and Mail. This…
-
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…
-
Plus on est de monde…
Il y aura, dit-on, bientôt des élections au Québec. Et qui dit élections, dit débat des chefs. Et qui dit débat des chefs, dit controverse sur la question de qui inviter et qui laisser de côté. Gilbert Lavoie pose la question en vue de la prochaine campagne électorale dans un billet sur son blogue pour…
-
Operation Dismantle at the Olympics
Citizens concerned that the deployment of a weapons system in their place of residence will expose them to an increased risk of a devastating attack turn to the courts to try to block the deployment. They fail. To a Canadian constitutional law junkie, that’s the short story of Operation Dismantle v. The Queen, [1985] 1 S.C.R.…
-
Googling Justice
Law review articles don’t make newspapers very often. But they do sometimes, as I noted in a post discussing the use of a certain four-letter word by Supreme Courts in the U.S. and Canada. Another example is a very interesting forthcoming paper by Allison Orr Larsen, of the William & Mary School of Law, called…
-
Arguing with Death, Again
I wrote, three months ago now, about the sorts of arguments people make for and against the death penalty. Contrary perhaps to our intuitions, from at least the times of Thucydides, death penalty’s opponents have tended to resort to consequentialist arguments, while its supporters have relied on appeals to justice. A couple of interviews the…
Double Aspect 