courts
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Nurturing Conventions?
The idea of constitutional conventions, familiar in the Commonwealth since the times of A.V. Dicey, has recently been attracting some attention from American scholars. Gerard Magliocca is apparently using it in a forthcoming article. And, most recently, it appears in an intriguing guest-post by Miguel Schor at Balkinization. Prof. Schor argues that conventions are important Continue reading
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A Chance for Justice
I have written a good deal about access to justice and the related issue of self-represented litigants. These problems are very difficult; I doubt that any quick solutions can be found for them, and it doesn’t help that, as I wrote here, the complexities that must be dealt with are often forgotten. These problems are Continue reading
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Difference in Deference
After the sad distraction of the repressive “Québec Values Charter” on which I spent the last week, it is time to return to my more customary business of constitutional law and theory. It will no doubt be very bad for the blog’s traffic, but very good for my mood. There is a good occasion for Continue reading
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Says Who?
Exposing the secrets of the powerful is all the rage. And there are different ways of doing that, not all of them involving spending weeks in the transit zone of the Sheremetyevo Airport. As a fascinating recent paper shows, one of these more comfortable ways involves analyzing the language of judicial opinions in order to Continue reading
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What They Said
It is usually understood that judges must give reasons for their decisions. But does it matter if the reasons a judge gives are largely lifted from the submissions of one of the parties? That was the question that the Supreme Court of Canada confronted in Cojocaru v. British Columbia Women’s Hospital and Health Centre, 2013 SCC 30, delivered on Continue reading
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What Will They Be Thinking?
Jack Balkin has an interesting post on Balkinization, discussing what he calls “arguments from the future” in constitutional law―arguments to the effect that a constitutional issue has to be resolved a certain way because of what people will think about it at some point in the future, say in 20 years. “If,” he writes, like Martin Continue reading
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What Judges Do
First of all, my most abject apologies for the silence of the last couple of weeks. I was swamped (and then trying to recover from being swamped). I have a lot to catch up on, if I can, not least the Supreme Court’s hate speech decision, Saskatchewan (Human Rights Commission) v. Whatcott, 2013 SCC 11. But I want to Continue reading
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Independence Be With You
The application of the principle of judicial independence, as the Supreme Court has developed it, to ordinary judges of provincial, federal, and superior courts is clear enough. But the extension of its protections to other judicial officials, such as deputy judges, masters, or prothonotaries still causes friction between the judiciary and the “political branches.” A Continue reading
Double Aspect 