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Short and Tweet
OTTAWA, April 1, 2014 ― The honourable Andrew Scheer, MP, Speaker of the House of Commons has announced new rules which will henceforth limit the speeches of the members in the House to the length of a tweet ― 140 characters or less. In contrast to much recent legislation, the new rules have received an…
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Lies, Damned Lies, and Judicial Review
As the federal government considers its response to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Canada (Attorney General) v. Bedford, 2013 SCC 72, which invalidated the prostitution-related provisions of the Criminal Code, one can be forgiven for wondering whether its response will be guided by facts and research, or by ideology. Unfortunately, as a depressing but important guest post by Maggie…
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Searching Freedom
I have already blogged (here and here) about the debate on whether the output of search engines such as Google should be protected by constitutional guarantees of freedom of expression, summarizing arguments by Eugene Volokh and Josh Blakcman. These arguments are no longer merely the stuff of academic debate. As both prof. Volokh and prof. Blackman report,…
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Ce que l’on sème
Depuis au moins les années 70, les penseurs et les politiciens « progressistes » se sont beaucoup préoccupés du rôle de l’argent en politique. Ils ont également cherché à donner aux partis politiques une place centrale dans le cadre du débat pré-électoral, comme je le soulignais ici. L’idée était que les riches, par leurs contributions…
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Petty Punishment, SCC Edition
Rather lost in all the noise generated by the Supreme Court’s decision in l’Affaire Nadon is the Court’s decision, delivered last Thursday, in Canada (Attorney General) v. Whaling, 2014 SCC 20, which considered, and found unconstitutional, the retroactive application of the abolition of accelerated parole review by one of the recent “tough on crime” laws. I would like to…
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What You Wish For
As promised, here are some thoughts on the Supreme Court’s opinion in l’affaire Nadon, Reference re Supreme Court Act, ss. 5 and 6, 2014 SCC 21. As I mentioned in my last post, which summarized the majority opinion and Justice Moldaver’s dissent, I think that the majority opinion is a weak one. I should note that my views here seem to be very…
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No-don
Yesterday, the Supreme Court has delivered its opinion concerning the legality and constitutionality of the appointment (and swearing in by the Court!) of Justice Nadon, Reference re Supreme Court Act, ss. 5 and 6, 2014 SCC 21. By a 6-1 majority, it finds that Justice Nadon’s appointment was not authorized by s. 6 of the Supreme Court Act, and that the enactment by Parliament…
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Written by a Human (For Now)
Just a quick follow-up to my last post, discussing the possible consequences for constitutional law of the increasing role of algorithms in the (re-)creation of information. While that post, and Josh Blackman’s essay on which it was based,focused on search engines, a post on The Guardian’s website this weekend discusses the “writing” of actual news…
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Charter, Meet Google
Josh Blackman has just published a fascinating new essay, “What Happens if Data Is Speech?” in the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law Online, asking some important questions about how courts should treat ― and how we should think about ― attempts to regulate the (re)creation and arrangement of information by “algorithms parsing data” (25).…
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Reticence and Power
The Supreme Court of Canada is in the habit of “suspending” its declarations of unconstitutionality of legislation, especially controversial or important legislation, ostensibly in order to give the legislature which enacted the statute at issue time to re-write it so as to remove the constitutional defect while preserving as much of the substance of the…
Double Aspect 