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Our Pythic Judges: SNC-Lavalin
In Ancient Greece, travelers from far and wide descended upon the Oracle at Delphi. Known collectively as the Pythia, these priestesses or women of Delphi, over generations, provided advice and counsel to anyone wishing to seek it. The Pythia were thought to channel the god Apollo. As the mythology of the Pythia grew, with kings…
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Climb Out!
The Québec Court of Appeal errs in holding that corporations are protected against cruel and unusual punishment
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Our Government
Some implications from Jody Wilson-Raybould’s testimony
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Such a Person
A recent biography highlights (some of) Thomas Cromwell’s influence on the constitution
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Justice Beetz’s Unity of Public Law
What an old SCC case tells us about the unity of public law
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Sentencing Judgment Found Inside a Chinese Fortune Cookie
The sentencing judgment in the Québec City mosque shooter’s case is badly flawed
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The Statement of Principles
Thus far, I have stayed out of the controversy surrounding the Statement of Principles [SOP] because I have nothing new to add. Leonid has, in a series of posts, outlined the in-principle objections to the SOP, while others have suggested that the SOP is a modest, necessary remedy for a difficult problem. But as the…
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A Small Win on Admin Law Expertise
I’ve written before how the Supreme Court’s approach to expertise is wrongheaded in a number of ways. Practically, by saying that expertise “inheres in a tribunal as an institution,” (Edmonton East, at para 33), the Court has simply asserted a fact that is unlikely to be empirically true across the mass of varied decision-makers. Rather,…
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Textual Judicial Supremacy
The Canadian constitution’s text makes it clear that judges must have the last word on its interpretation
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The Diceyan Trope
Metaphors, labels, and particular phrases seem to be a constant theme running through Canadian law. In virtually every area of public law, the Supreme Court deploys clever labels and metaphors to convey ideas that are bundled with certain inferences or assumptions about the ideas themselves. The most famous, perhaps, is the living tree model of…
