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The Good of Religion
Yesterday I attended a discussion with Robert P. George, the Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton (which of course does not have a law school!) and one of the leading religious conservative public intellectuals in the United States. The topic was “Religious Liberty and the Human Good.” David Blankenhorn – perhaps best known recently as a…
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Gun-Registry Litigation News
I know, I know, you are as I excited as I am to read about the progress of Québec’s lawsuit to get its hands on the gun-registry data the federal government wants to destroy. So here goes. (If, for reasons beyond my comprehension, you are not breathlessly excited about this, rest assured that I have…
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The Pursuit of Difference
I promised my post earlier today, to say more about the belief that the alleged national slogans of Canada and the United States – respectively “peace, order, and good government,” and “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” – tell us something about the two countries generally and their constitutions specifically. Here goes. Those who…
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It’s Not a POGGrom!
Canada’s “newspaper of record” has published an ignorant rant by Neil Reynolds, savaging alleged abuses, rhetorical, legislative, and jurisprudential, of the “Peace, Order, and Good government” (a.k.a. POGG) clause of s. 91 of the Constitution Act, 1867, which sets out the powers of the federal Parliament. While the words “peace, order, and good good government”…
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A Pull Towards Goodness?
WARNING: This post is an adapted version of a passage in my “candidacy paper,” which is meant eventually to be part of the first chapter of my dissertation. Caveat lector. *** Explaining their decisions is an important part of the judges’ work. It is valuable for all sorts of reasons. It forces judges to be…
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More about Election Law
There are two things to mention today, both related to election law, and more specifically to restrictions on “third-party” speech in the pre-electoral context. First, Radio-Canada reports that Québec’s Chief Electoral Officer has been in touch with the leaders of the student organizations who are protesting the tuition fee hikes announced by the provincial government. The…
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Is There Voice after Exit?
First of all, an apology for the overextended silence. I couldn’t find anything interesting to blog on, I’m afraid. Fortunately the CBC has rescued me by reporting on a challenge to the provision of the Canada Elections Act, S.C. 2000 c. 9 (CEA) which prohibits Canadians who have resided abroad for more than five consecutive…
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Rights and Disagreement
Charles Krauthammer has an interesting op-ed in the Washington Post discussing President Obama’s endorsement of same-sex marriage, and accusing him of taking an intellectually incoherent approach to this matter. Mr. Obama has said that marriage – including of the same-sex variety – is a right; he has also said that the issue of allowing same-sex…
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Can Canada Ban Books?
The New Yorker has published an interesting, albeit tendentious, as The Volokh Conspiracy’s Jonathan Adler explains, account by Jeffrey Toobin of the notorious Citizens United decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, which struck down limits on corporations’ spending on pre-electoral advertising. According to Mr. Toobin, the key to Supreme Court’s engagement with the case was a question asked by…
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So, so, so! So… what?
Yale Law School will be hosting a second annual Doctoral Scholarship Conference in December. Its topic will be “the relationship between law and the creation or destruction of social, political and economic solidarity.” I would like to go, so I got thinking about what I might write on this topic (which is not naturally congenial…
Double Aspect 