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A Fourth Cheer
My thanks to my readers on the blog’s fourth birthday Yesterday, this blog turned four. Its fourth year has, I am afraid, been marked by occasional periods of extended silence, as was trying to finish my dissertation. Still, I have managed to come back every time, and to keep going. I have also got some…
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Events Next Week
I’ll be visiting McGill and Yale next week. Come say hello! Next Tuesday, the 29th, I’ll be taking part in a discussion on “Conscience and the Constitution in Canada” at the McGill Faculty of Law (specifically, in NCDH 101). I will be speaking on the conflict between freedom of conscience and state authority, in particular as…
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Permanent Problems
The law’s ideals and problems have not changed too much in 400 years I have only now read Francis Bacon’s essay “Of Judicature.” Bacon seems not to enjoy anything like the reputation of his rival Coke, in the law schools anyway ― I suspect that they haven’t heard much of Coke in the science faculties,…
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Originalism in Canada
A couple of papers about originalism, and a call for comments As promised in my last post, I have something to show for my silence in the last few weeks. Benjamin Oliphant and I have been working very intensively on a study of originalism in Canadian constitutional law. In a nutshell, we argue that, contrary…
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Marriage Drama
A row about civil and religious marriage in Québec is quite unnecessary In early February, Québec’s Superior Court delivered what should have been a fairly routine judgment dismissing a weak constitutional challenge to provisions of the province’s Civil Code that have usually ― although not always ― been regarded as requiring a person celebrating a…
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Ideologies in the Marketplace of Ideas
The “marketplace of ideologies” is neither new nor quite disastrous In a post over at Concurring Opinions, Ronald K.L. Collins laments what he regards as the rise, in the place of the good old marketplace of ideas, of a “marketplace of ideologies.” Prof. Collins writes that in this new marketplace, ideas, facts, “the constitutional process of governing,” and…
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No Solution
The reasons people don’t vote suggest a mandatory voting law would be futile Statistics Canada has released the results of a survey, conducted in conjunction with the November 2015 Labour Force Survey, to inquire into Canadians’ “Reasons for not voting in the federal election, October 19, 2015.” These results are interesting, albeit not quite accurate. To my mind…
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De la formation du gouvernement
Juste avant les élections fédérales en Octobre, j’avais participé (en compagnie de Hoi Kong) à une mini-conférence à l’Université de Montréal, intitulée « Gouvernements minoritaires et/ou de coalition : Legality and/or Legitimacy ». La chose m’avait échappé à l’époque, mais ma présentation est disponible en ligne. Évidemment, elle ne s’est pas avérée très pertinente vu…
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(La) Doctrine
What do legal doctrine and la doctrine have to do with each other? I was at the colloquium that McGill’s Crépeau Centre held on Friday for its 40th anniversary on the topic of “The Responsibility of Doctrine.” It was quite interesting, if a little uncanny for someone who, despite my McGill professors’ best efforts, never found the…
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R.I.P., Antonin Scalia
How I will remember him I don’t know if Justice Antonin Scalia, of the U.S. Supreme Court, read, or liked, Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita ― it was, no doubt, much too unorthodox for him, although he would at least have agreed with its insistence that we at least believe that the devil exists. But as…
Double Aspect 