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Guest Post: Marc-Antoine Gervais
It is my pleasure to announce a guest post today by Marc-Antoine Gervais, on the subject of declarations of invalidity as in rem judgments. The post is a response to Paul Daly’s recent post on declarations of invalidity in the aftermath of the Sullivan decision. Marc-Antoine has a larger paper coming out in the McGill…
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Textualism for Hedgehogs
Why substantive canons belong in textualist interpretation, and what this tells us about neutral interpretive principles
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Neutrality in Legal Interpretation
Nowadays, it is unfashionable to say that legal rules, particularly rules of interpretation, should be “neutral.” Quite the opposite: now it is more fashionable to say that results in cases depend on the “politics” of a court on a particular day. Against this modern trend, not so long ago, it was Herbert Wechsler in his…
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Still Keeping It Complicated
The Supreme Court tries to bring more rigour to constitutional interpretation and takes a step towards textualism, but won’t admit it
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You Read It Here First
The Supreme Court holds that the Charter does not protect corporations against cruel and unusual punishment
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Activism v Constitution
The federal court rightly holds that the judiciary cannot control Canada’s climate policy
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Linguistic Nihilism
One common line of attack against textualism—the idea that “the words of a governing text are of paramount concern, and what they convey, in their context, is what the text means (Scalia & Garner, at 56)—is that language is never clear, or put differently, hopelessly vague or ambiguous. Put this way, the task of interpretation…
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Let Us Reason Together
A call for dialogue on constitutional interpretation, free from anti-originalist myths
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A Proclivity for Plunder
The left and the right are united in wanting to regulate the internet by taking from their enemies and giving to their friends
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Missing the Forest for the Living Tree
What Lord Sankey actually meant with his living tree metaphor
Double Aspect 