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The Canadian Legal Mandarinate
Why we ran the 12 Days of Christmas symposium
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Day Twelve: Leonid Sirota
It’s easy enough to make a list of very bad Supreme Court decisions ― there is no shortage of material. The challenge, rather, is to reduce the list to some fixed number. Anyway, here’s my attempt, influenced in part by a wish to present cases from a variety of areas and to highlight some that have…
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Day Eleven: Geoff Sigalet
Post-doctoral Fellow at the Queen’s Faculty of Law and Research Fellow at Stanford Law School’s Constitutional Law Center Thanks very much to Leonid Sirota and Mark Mancini for kindly inviting me to contribute to this symposium. I thought about which cases to include in my list of the “worst” Supreme Court cases of the 1967-2017…
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Day Ten: Mark Mancini
We at Double Aspect are very excited to host this important symposium. As I’ve written before, I think it is necessary for observers to turn a critical eye to the Supreme Court’s cases. Those of us interested in doing so should not shirk behind the ceremony of the bench. Here is my list of the…
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Day Nine: Maxime St-Hilaire
Associate Professor, Université de Sherbrooke and visiting scholar at SciencePo Paris Law School Dupond v City of Montreal, [1978] 2 SCR 770 In this case, provisions of a Montreal bylaw (still in force: see Villeneuve c Ville de Montréal, 2018 QCCA 321) allowing the city to temporarily ban an assembly, parade, or other gathering due to public…
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Day Eight: Andrew Bernstein
Partner in Torys LLP litigation group specializing in public law, IP, and appellate practice I was delighted to be invited [1] to participate in Double Aspect’s Twelve Days of Christmas “Worst Supreme Court of Canada cases 1967-2017,” with a group of knowledgeable scholars, pundits and practitioners.[2] I was even more delighted to be able to submit…
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Day Seven: Kerri Froc
Assistant Professor, University of New Brunswick Gosselin v Quebec (Attorney General), 2002 SCC 84, [2002] 4 SCR 429 A truly god-awful section 15 Charter decision penned by McLachlin CJ (as she then was), commonly regarded as the “high watermark” of formalism under the previous “human dignity” test. The majority found it “dignity affirming,” for under…
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Day Six: Dwight Newman
Professor of Law and Canada Research Chair, University of Saskatchewan My identification of the five worst Supreme Court of Canada cases stems from cases that both manifest particularly problematic judicial methodology and whose influence has pervaded other cases. The judgment is not about policy/political result but about legal method and legal consequences. In chronological order,…
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Day Five: Gerard Kennedy
Visiting Doctoral Researcher, NYU School of Law When asked to write about what I considered the Supreme Court of Canada’s “worst” decisions of the past several decades, I was somewhat reluctant. One must always tread a fine line between criticizing flawed reasoning and the rule of law that the Court symbolizes. But hey… it’s Christmas…
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Day Four: Michael Plaxton
Professor of Law, University of Saskatchewan Many thanks to Leonid for inviting me to participate. I have focused on a few cases drawn from the substantive criminal law canon, picking out those which I think raise special concerns about the relationship between the courts and Parliament. Fa-la-la-la-la…. R v Jobidon, [1991] 2 SCR 714 Strictly speaking,…
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