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On Canadian Statutory Interpretation and Recent Trends
I have had the pleasure of reading (for the first time front-to-back) the legal interpretation classic, Reading Law by Justice Scalia and Bryan Garner. For Canadian courts struggling with how to source and use purpose when interpreting statutes, Reading Law provides valuable assistance. It does so by outlining two schools of thought on how to…
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The Mirror and the Light
Thoughts on finally finishing the last part of Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy
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Keeping Faith
A master class in public meaning originalism, delivered by the US Supreme Court’s Justice Elena Kagan
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Happy Canada Day!
The anniversary of an imperfect constitution drafted by imperfect men is well worth celebrating
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The Ivory Tower Prisoner’s Dilemma
Why law journals are useless, and why we can’t do without them
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Results-Oriented Conservatism: A Defence of Bostock
Should textualism lead to more “conservative” outcomes as a matter of course? No. Those who wish to transform textualism—a methodology of interpretation—into a vessel for conservative policy outcomes are in the wrong business. Instead of being in the business of law, they are in the business of politics. For years, a small group of Canadian…
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Immuring Dicey’s Ghost
Introducing a new article on the Senate Reform Reference, constitutional conventions, and originalism ― and some thoughts on publishing heterodox scholarship
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ESA II: The Standard of Review and Rogers
In Entertainment Software Association, Stratas JA for the Court set out a number of important comments about statutory interpretation and international law. I dealt with those comments in a previous post. I write again about this case to highlight Stratas JA’s comments on the standard of review. Particularly, Stratas JA was faced with the propriety…
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The Continued Relevance of “Jurisdiction”
This post is co-written with Leonid Sirota One of the innovations of Vavilov was its dispatch of so-called “jurisdictional questions” from the standard of review analysis. A long-time feature of Canadian administrative law, jurisdictional questions were said to arise “where the tribunal must explicitly determine whether its statutory grant of power gives it authority to…
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Entertainment Assoc, 2020 FCA 100: A New Canadian Textualism
In Entertainment Software Assoc v Society of Composers, 2020 FCA 100, Stratas JA (for the Court) made a number of interesting comments about statutory interpretation in the administrative state and the role of international law in the interpretive activity. In this post, I review these comments, and agree with them wholeheartedly. This case is an…
Double Aspect 