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Show ‘Em
Earlier this week, an American court issued a decision on a topic that is all but certain to come up for discussion in the weeks after October 19: the ballot selfie, and the attempts ban it. Judge Barbadoro of the U.S. District Court in New Hampshire declared unconstitutional that state’s law that made it an offence to
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Persuasion and Voting from Abroad
When Norman Spector and I debated the disenfranchisement of Canadians abroad on the CBC’s The 180 a couple of weeks ago, he pointed to the fact that some expatriates ― such as Americans he met in Israel while he was Canada’s ambassador there ― vote on the sole basis of the candidates’ policies towards their current
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False Friends
The elevation of Justice Brown to the Supreme Court has provoked an outpouring of anguish and anger about the system of judicial appointments in Canada. The critics of the current arrangements, whereby judges of superior, federal, and appellate courts are in effect appointed by the federal government, with relatively little ex-ante and no ex-post control by
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Stare decisis stricto sensu c. Strickland (c. Canada): connaissons-nous bien la portée des jugements de la Cour fédérale?
Dans l’arrêt Strickland c. Canada (Procureur général) du 9 juillet dernier, arrêt que mon hôte a brillamment commenté sous d’autres aspects, le juge Cromwell, dans des motifs majoritaires non contredits sur cette question par les motifs concordants des juges Abella et Wagner, a soutenu «qu’aucune cour supérieure provinciale ne serait liée» (par. 53) par un jugement
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Uber and Civil Disobedience
I have a new post over at the National Magazine’s Blog, arguing that to the extent that Uber and other firms of the sharing economy breach the laws that prevent them from offering their services to the public, we should assess their claims that such laws are unjust on their merits, instead of rejecting them
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Law and Innovation, Again
In my July post for the National Magazine’s blog I wrote that the decision of Ontario’s Superior Court rejecting the attempt by the city of Toronto to stop Uber operating there without a “taxicab broker” license was a reminder of the fact that technological innovation often challenges the law not directly, but by enabling innovative business
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Living with Imperfect Judges
The arguments about limiting appointments to the Supreme Court to bilingual candidates are rather tired, not to mention more or less moot. But they keep coming back, over and over again. I actually wrote about the topic a while ago, but since it is in the news again, following the appointment of (the apparently bilingual)
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Who Are These People?
I wrote yesterday that the “conservative judicial appointments” narrative that the Globe and Mail’s Sean Fine has spent the last several months developing was essentially unsupported by the evidence. A few hours after I published my post, there was a new judicial appointment ― that of Justice Russell Brown to the Supreme Court ― and Mr.
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What’s the Big Deal?
The Globe and Mail’s Sean Fine has for months been pushing a “conservative judicial appointments” narrative, and he was back at it this weekend, with a lengthy piece on “Stephen Harper’s Courts.” We are, I take it, supposed to be worried about a “judiciary [that] has been remade” by ideologically shaped appointments. Mr. Fine quotes quite a
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Making Sense of Constitutional Crises
Not surprisingly, my suggestion that the Governor General dismiss Stephen Harper as Prime Minister for his (Mr. Harper’s, that is) unconstitutional policy of not appointing Senators turned out to not to be any more popular than my earlier suggestion that the Governor General just appoint Senators on his own, without the Prime Minister’s blessing. That idea was
Double Aspect 