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The Harm Is Not in Hate Speech
I wanted to come back to the sad events of last weekend, when a mosque in Saguenay, in Québec, was smeared with, purportedly, pig blood, and angry letters were sent both to the mosque and to the local Radio-Canada station, demanding that Muslims “assimilate or go home.” As Radio-Canda reported, police are considering charges, both…
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R.I.P. Ronald Coase
Not exactly news anymore, but I wanted to note the death of Ronald Coase. Smarter and more knowledgeable people have written and will write about the significance of his work. I will only speak to my own feelings. “The Nature of the Firm” ― a paper Coase mostly wrote as an undergraduate and published at…
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Sociétés Anonymes?
I have posted a number of times about the problem of (unwanted) publicity which the appearance of one’s name in judicial decisions might bring (my posts on this topic are collected here). Because judicial decisions are widely and freely available on the internet, being identified as a party to a lawsuit can damage one employment…
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Hercules and the Umpire
Readers may have already come across it, but I hadn’t until a few days ago, and in case others haven’t yet, I wanted to recommend a wonderful blog by Richard Kopf, an American federal district court judge, called Hercules and the Umpire. As judge Kopf explains, I hope the title evokes an image of two…
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Follow Me
Apologies for the lack of blogging in last couple of weeks. I was swamped, among other things by my contribution to co-writing, on short notice, a paper on the federal government’s Senate reform plans. (The paper isn’t quite ready yet, but should be soon enough, so I hope to have more to say about it…
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Challenging Succession
Parliament made many people unhappy when it enacted the Succession to the Throne Act, S.C. 2013 c. 6, “assent[ing] to” the British legislation allowing a woman to succeed to the Crown despite having a younger brother, or a person to succeed to the Crown despite being married to a Catholic. Among those unhappy was one…
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Water Ballast
I am rather late on this, but I want to say something about a decision that the Supreme Court delivered ten days ago in a federalism case, Marine Services International Ltd. v. Ryan Estate, 2013 SCC 44. The constitutional issue which the Court had to resolve was whether the respondents, the estates of two fishermen whose…
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All Quiet on the Western Front
The confrontation between freedom of expression and protection of individual reputation by the law of defamation is as good an example of interminable global legal trench warfare as any. (Well, except in the United States, where one battle proved largely decisive in favour of free speech.) In Canada, freedom of expression has made some gains…
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Real Intellectual Life
I have recently come across a great paper by Mark D. Walters, “Dicey on Writing the Law of the Constitution”, (2012) 32 OJLS 21. (UPDATE: The original link is no longer working, alas, and the paper is no longer freely accessible.) It’s not brand new (it was published last year), but as prof. Walters, unfortunately,…
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Risk and Reward
I wrote recently about whether scholarship (in philosophy and in other areas, such as law) can make a difference, and whether this matters. As it happens, PrawfsBlog has been running an interesting series of interviews with scholars whose work has been cited by the US Supreme Court, asking them, among other things, what they thought…
