Tag: Justice Stratas

What Needs to Be Said

Sometimes people say things that need to be said. These things may make us uncomfortable. They may force us to look in the mirror. They may ask us to really sit and think about our conduct. We might not like to hear these things, but they might start a discussion. Or maybe they will force us to change our ways.

Enter Stratas JA in Canada v Kattenburg, 2020 FCA 164. Here, Stratas JA says what needs to be said. In the decision, Stratas JA shines a light on two increasing tendencies in Canadian law: (1) the tendency of some intervenors, contrary to governing jurisprudence, to insert international law or policy preferences in the interpretation of legislation, particularly in the discernment of legislative purpose and (2) the tendency for some judges, in extra-judicial speeches or otherwise, to weigh in on matters of public policy, typically left to the political branches. Stratas JA has launched an important conversation that we should embrace, tough as it is.

International Law and Statutory Interpretation

Let me start with the basic facts of the case. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency decided that certain wine imported to Canada from the West Bank are “products of Israel” (see the Federal Court’s decision in 2019 FC 1003 at para 3). The judicial review, among other issues, concerned whether the wine could be labelled as “products of Israel.” That’s it. Under ordinary administrative law principles, the court will assess whether the decision of the CFIA is reasonable. A typical legal task.

Here’s where it gets hairy. Sometimes, international law can enter the act of legal interpretation. If you want to know more about how this is the case, see my post on Stratas JA’s decision in Entertainment Software. The point is that international law can only be relevant to the interpretation of Canadian law where it is incorporated in domestic law explicitly, or where there is some ambiguity. Parliament remains sovereign because it controls the international law it adopts; indeed, “[s]ometimes it is clear…that the purpose of a legislative provision is to implement some or all of  an international law instrument” (Kattenburg, at para 25) (see Gib Van Ert, here, for some nuance on this). Other times, there is ambiguity that permits the consideration of international law (Kattenburg, at para 25). But other times, probably most times, international law plays no role in the interpretation of legislation, where there is no indication that the governing law explicitly or by implication incorporates international law. That was the case here.

Yet many of the intervenors in this case were motivated to bootstrap international law into the authentic interpretation of legislation. For many, the argument was that the Israeli occupation of the West Bank is illegal under international law principles. This was despite the fact that nothing in the governing law was designed “to address state occupation of territories and, in particular, Israel’s occupation of the West Bank” (Kattenburg, at para 20). To make this point, some of the interveners attempted to further bootstrap the record with “hyperlinks to find reports, opinions, news articles and informal articles to buttress their claims about the content of international law and the illegality of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank” (Kattenburg, at para 32).

There are many problems with what’s going on here, and Justice Stratas rightly rejected the efforts to make the case about the West Bank issue rather than the reasonableness of a regulatory decision. First, at the level of fundamental principle, judicial review of administrative action is about policing the boundaries of the administrative state, at the level of a particular regulatory decision. Some times these decisions can have major consequences, for the party subject to the decision or for the legal system on the whole. But the focus is not the at-large determination of major issues like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The focus is on the decision under review. And so the attempts by the moving parties to buttress the record, to force the Court’s hand into saying something, anything, about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is inappropriate, to say the least. Justice Stratas rightly, and humbly, rejected the call to enter this fraught political territory.

Another problem is the attempt to use international law to guide, where it is inappropriate to do so, the ascertainment of legislative purpose. When courts interpret statutes, they do not do so with the aims of achieving a result that the judge thinks is “just,” “right,” or even “fair.” The goal is to interpret statutes authentically, so that we can plausibly determine what the legislature meant when it used certain words in enacting a law. Contrary to fashionable legal realism, courts and decision-makers must do their best not to reverse engineer a desired outcome through interpretation (see Vavilov, at para 121, but also see the litany of Federal Court of Appeal and Supreme Court cases on this point). Here, the intervenors clearly tried to use international law to reach a desired policy outcome. But all of the intervenors, piled up together, shouldn’t be able to encourage courts to engage in this pure policy reasoning. Indeed, as Justice Stratas notes, “[s]o much of their loose policy talk, untethered to proven facts and settled doctrine, can seep into reasons for judgment, leading to inaccuracies with real-life consequences” (Kattenburg, at para 44). And to the extent that doing so is contrary to established Supreme Court precedent, Justice Stratas was right to call out this pernicious behaviour.

None of this is to suggest that intervenors do not play an important role in Canadian law. None of this is to suggest that international law cannot, in appropriate circumstances, play a role in the interpretation of legislation. But a new Canadian textualism is emerging that rebuffs policy reasoning and at-large international law arguments. All for the better.

The Role of the Courts

In Kattenburg, Justice Stratas also made a number of comments that, I think, needed to be said about the activities of some Canadian judges. Here is the gist of his comments:

[45]  As for judges, some give the impression that they decide cases based on their own personal preferences, politics and ideologies, whether they be liberal, conservative or whatever. Increasingly, they wander into the public square and give virtue signalling and populism a go. They write op-eds, deliver speeches and give interviews, extolling constitutional rights as absolutes that can never be outweighed by pressing public interest concerns and embracing people, groups and causes that line up with their personal view of what is “just”, “right” and “fair”. They do these things even though cases are under reserve and other cases are coming to them.

This comment raises the important question of the difference between the legal world and the political world. It has become increasingly common to hear that law=politics. In some sense, this is true. Law is the product of political deliberation. And because judges are only humans, there is always a risk that a judge’s experiences and personal views may guide the interpretation of legislation. No legal system can reduce this risk to zero, and perhaps it is unwise to do so.

But this is a completely different proposition from the normative question: should the political views of judges affect the interpretation of laws or judicial review of administration action? Obviously the answer is no. So, in legislative interpretation, we create a series of rules to guide legal interpretation. We ask courts and decision-makers to focus on text, context, and purpose—authentically. In other words, while law is the product of politics, that fact does not give judges the right to interpret laws as they wish.

There are a number of examples of prominent judges who have, extrajudicially, blurred the lines between law and politics. At least two judges of the Supreme Court have suggested that their job is to decide what is best for Canadians, for example (see Justice Moldaver here and then-Chief Justice McLachlin here). This is a real misapprehension of the judicial role. Judges aren’t tasked with making the best normative decisions for Canadians. That is Parliament’s job. Of course, the problem is that politics can be slow and frustrating. But that is no reason to bypass the legislature for a quick judicial resolution.

Another example, but by far not the only one, is Justice Abella. Justice Abella frequently enters the public fray to provide her views on certain legal issues. Quite separate from the content of these interjections, it is typically not the role of a Supreme Court judge to write popular columns, putting their thumbs on the scale of pressing public issues that might make their way to the Court. It is one thing to set out one’s view of the law in reasons for decision. We can agree or disagree on that reasoning, in the legal academy. It is another to take to the streets, as a judge, and participate in the political process by setting out one’s view of the law—whatever it is–in the context of popular publications. On a related note, in fact, this is not just an affliction of judges that might be considered “progressive.” As I wrote here, in the United States, conservatives are increasingly looking at the courts as an instrument of power, rather than as neutral and objective arbiters of the law.

I could go on and on. The point is that Justice Stratas is on to something in Kattenburg. The comments come as we see, increasingly, the veneration of judges as heros, who are celebrated when they enter the political fray by many in the bar. RBG on the left, with the action figures and paraphenalia. Scalia on the right, to a somewhat lesser extent. In Canada, the “stanning” of judges like Justice Abella as if they were celebrities. Judges are just “lawyers who happen to hold a judicial commission” (Kattenburg, at para 41). When put that way, it seems remarkably odd that we celebrate certain judges the way we do. We should celebrate judges for applying the law and following precedent to the best of their ability. We should refrain from celebrating the results of cases over the reasoning. And judges, themselves, should generally stay out of political debates. Indeed, lawyers are just lawyers, and law school confers no special insight on issues of moral or political weight, compared to the rest of the population.

Sad for some lawyers to hear, I am sure. But it needed to be said.

All about Administrative Law

Justice Stratas’ remarkable endeavour to improve our understanding of administrative law

Justice Stratas recently posted a most remarkable document on SSRN. Called “The Canadian Law of Judicial Review: Some Doctrine and Cases“, it is nothing less than a comprehensive overview of the concepts, principles, and rules of administrative law in an accessible format, for the reference of judges, lawyers, scholars, and students. While Justice Stratas cautions that it “is not meant to be complete” (1), and notes ― with perhaps just a little optimism ― that it “can be read from beginning to end in one short sitting” (7), the wealth of information it contains is really astonishing.

Here is how Justice Stratas himself describes what he is doing:

 It is hard to find a useful, up-to-date summary of the Canadian law of judicial review. This summary attempts in a scholarly way to fill that gap. It attempts to work at two levels: the level of basic concept and the level of detail. First, it describes the basic ordering concepts in the Canadian law of judicial review. Then it proceeds to the three analytical steps to determine an application for judicial review: preliminary and procedural concerns, the merits of the judicial review (review for substantive defects and procedural defects), and remedies. Finally, it examines appeals from applications for judicial review.

Along the way, key Canadian cases are referenced and discussed. A few are critiqued. The cases include major Supreme Court of Canada cases that strongly influence the law and cases from other courts that offer further instruction on that law. Many of these cases are from the Federal Court of Appeal, the intermediate appellate court that decides more administrative law cases in Canada than any other appellate court. Some cases from other jurisdictions are referenced and discussed for comparative purposes. Some academic commentaries and articles are also referenced and discussed. To facilitate study, all cases and articles are hyperlinked to online full-text versions (where available).

The reader is warned that this is only a summary and regard should be had to its date. It is no substitute for competent, specific legal research on a particular issue. Nevertheless, it is hoped that this summary will enrich readers’ understandings and stimulate them to consider, reflect upon and make their own valuable contributions to the doctrine.

(SSRN abstract; some paragraph breaks removed)

Justice Stratas’ work (I am not sure how to describe it ― it is neither an article nor a case- or textbook; in a way, it is perhaps a super-blog-post; more on that shortly) is of course an outstanding service to the legal profession writ large. But it is also, I think, a challenge to us, or indeed several challenges at once.

For one thing, as he did in his lecture on “The Decline of Legal Doctrine” last year, which I commented on here, Justice Stratas calls upon us to devote ourselves to shoring up this weakened edifice. As he notes in his introduction, in order to treat litigants fairly, judges must apply

ideas and concepts binding upon them, a body of doctrine. … If decisions are made because of an individual judge’s sense of fairness or justice, the appearance, if not the reality, is that the decision sprung from personal or political beliefs of an unelected person. (4)

Here, Justice Stratas now says, is a restatement of the ideas and concepts that structure administrative law. One challenge for us simply to help him with it: “contributions of case law, articles, comments and input will improve this document and are most welcome”. (9) But there is a broader challenge here too, especially to those of us in academia. If a sitting judge is able to produce such a statement in a notoriously tricky and unsettled area of the law, why haven’t we done something similar in others?

Now, of course there treatises and textbooks in many areas of the law, and part of what prompted Justice Stratas to put together his document, which is based on PowerPoint presentations he uses to speak on administrative law, is the dearth of “new, up-to-date texts on administrative law, perhaps reflecting its currently unsettled nature. Who dares write about a landscape that is shifting so much?” (6) But Justice Stratas challenges us on the form as much as on the substance. He forces us to think about the media we use to present legal doctrine, even we do write about it.

Justice Stratas points out that

[b]ack in the day of published law reports, knowledgeable editors, skilled in the area, could pick out the cases that matter. These days, however, most lawyers work online, not from the law reports, encounter the flood of cases and somehow have to separate the wheat from the chaff. Alas, most don’t have criteria in mind to do that. (5)

Meanwhile, loose-leaf services, though informative as to particular cases, might tend to “encourage us to think of administrative law as a bunch of particular rules that govern particular topics”, (6) without thinking about underlying concepts and their inter-relationships. (Justice Stratas’ concerns here echo those of Jeremy Waldron, whose work emphasizes the “systematicity” of law, and seeks to push back against treating it as just a collection of unrelated rules and commands.)

And then, of course, there is a concern about access to justice, or to law anyway. In an age in which, on the one hand, many litigants represent themselves, and on the other, those who take interest in Canadian administrative law are sometimes half a world away from a Canadian law library, and also in an area in which the resources even of many practising lawyers are likely to be limited (I’m thinking, for instance, of the immigration bar), it would arguably not be enough to point people to books even if very good ones existed. Justice Stratas writes that

[t]he law should be accessible to all: other judges, counsel, academics, law students, parties and self-represented litigants. Online publication and availability for free encourages this. Hence this document and the location where I have posted it. (6)

If we accept the doctrinal mission with which Justice Stratas wants to invest us, we must think about the form of our work as well as its content. I’m not sure that we must quite imitate Justice Stratas. His document has some advantages. It is relatively easy to access, concise, and convenient in its abundant use of hyperlinks. But I think that a website having the same content would be even easier to access than a document one must download from SSRN, and easier to navigate than a pdf through which one must scroll. Needless to say, I am not criticizing Justice Stratas. Again, we owe him greatly, and I, at least, would probably not have started thinking about this without his nudge. But if can improve on his first attempt in this regard, then we should.

Last year, I wrote about about a symposium at McGill about the “Responsibility of Doctrine”. Musing on the English/common law and French/civilian senses of the word doctrine/doctrine, I concluded that if these ongoing conversations about the law “are to flourish in the 21st century, they will need to remain open to new forms, and … it will not do to ignore these new forms simply because they are unfamiliar.” Justice Stratas makes a remarkable contribution to legal doctrine, in both of its senses, in an unfamiliar form. I hope that the legal community will pay all the more attention to it for this reason.

H/t: Patrick Baud

Taking Doctrine Seriously

Some thoughts on a most interesting lecture by Justice David Stratas

Last week, at the Canadian Constitution Foundation’s Law and Freedom 2016 conference, Justice David Stratas of the Federal Court of Appeal delivered a fascinating lecture called “The Decline of Legal Doctrine.” I highly recommend it. I won’t summarize it beyond saying that Justice Stratas’ thesis is that judges, lawyers, and academics are all guilty of a lack of interest in legal doctrine and tend to see the law as largely result oriented, which diminishes the legitimacy of judicial decision-making and risks leaving us at the mercy of dangerous prevailing opinions should crisis strike. There is simply too much there, and it is too important, for a summary to be useful. I will share a few reflections of my own below. Here it is.

Before I get to my comments, I want to say that I am, of course, very flattered at being mentioned as one of the exceptions to the general lack of interest in legal doctrine. Indeed, I am flattered that Justice Stratas should read my blog at all. I hope, however, that my gratitude for Justice Stratas’ kind words does not bias my views of his lecture.

* * *

Here they are, in a somewhat disjointed form. With one exception, they concern things that Justice Stratas did not say, and which I would love to hear him say more, at some future point, rather than things he did say with which I disagree. They are, in other words, intended not as criticisms, but as questions.

1. Let me start with the word “doctrine” itself. Maybe it’s just me, but I find it a slippery one ― it’s one of those words that lawyers love to use that can mean different things in different contexts, perhaps depending on whether we use them with a definite or an indefinite article, or no article at all, while assuming that everyone knows what we are talking about. A non-lawyer in the audience asked Justice Stratas what the difference between legal “theory” and legal “doctrine” was, but only got a definition of “theory” in response. As best I can though, legal doctrine (no article) is the set of rules and principles that can be derived or inferred from judicial decisions.

Here’s an interesting twist though: later in the Q&A, Justice Stratas spoke of the various types of judges and said that “doctrinal” judges are those who “understand the rules but want to know more about how to use them and these are perhaps reformist people that might want to tweak or modify the rules.” I think that this connection, in practice if not as a matter of definition, between an interest in the rules and their underlying principles on the one hand, and an interest in tweaking them on the other, might be, if not slightly paradoxical, then at least in tension with the need for doctrinal stability of which Justice Stratas spoke so passionately. Does doctrine bear the seeds of its own destruction?

2. Justice Stratas argues that we need stable, coherent, legal doctrine to which lawyers and judges alike are committed because we might not always live in “benign times,” and in a moment of crisis we will be better off if judges decide controversial cases on the basis of stable legal doctrine rather than of what they feel is right or fair in those ominous circumstances. Crises rarely make for clear, even-handed thinking. Legal doctrine is, in other words, a form of pre-commitment that will save us from the siren calls of rights-crushing emergency.

I would like to think that this is true. But is it? Can we think of situations where doctrine has played such a role? And indeed, why do we think that a commitment to legality will be less likely to falter in a time of crisis than a commitment to justice? That, after all, is the underlying premise of the claim that doctrine will save us even if the judges’ sense of right and wrong is swayed by momentary considerations. Again, I would like this to be true, but I wonder if we have reasons to think it is, other than our desire for it to be.

3. Justice Stratas argued that we must devote ourselves to stabilizing legal doctrine, to settling public law doctrine in a comprehensive way ― and that we must do it right away. Tomorrow will be too late. At present, public law is too unsettled ― precedents can be reversed with little apparent explanation, or simply ignored without being reversed. (An aside: one area which Justice Stratas specifically mentioned as illustrating this trend is the courts’ relationship to empirical evidence, and the rule ― which he tied to the Supreme Court’s recent assisted suicide decision, Carter v. Canada (Attorney General), 2015 SCC 5, [2015] 1 S.C.R. 331, but which actually goes a little further back, to Canada (Attorney General) v. Bedford, 2013 SCC 72, [2013] 3 S.C.R. 1101 ― that appellate courts should defer to a trial judge’s findings with respect to such evidence. Some of the points he made in criticizing this rule seem to echo ideas I have expressed on this blog, especially here, so I was very glad to learn that Justice Stratas shares these concerns.)

Here’s a question though. If we accept, as I think we should, the mission that Justice Stratas wants us to undertake, what is our departure point? Do we simply take the current state of the law as a given and stop messing with it, on the assumption that it is more important that things be settled than that they be settled right? Or should we, in order to build on solid foundations, go back to first principles to some extent ― at the risk of reversing some more precedents? Are there other potential pitfalls to deciding from first principles? Justice Stratas praised the Supreme Court of the 1980s for its “painstaking,” “scholarly,” and “balanced” approach to Charter cases, in which it had to build doctrine from the ground up ― but I wonder if that is not idealizing things somewhat.

4. Justice Stratas argues that a doctrine-focused approach to judicial decision-making, even in cases of first impression or those involving conflicting lines of authority, can be free from politics, and that the judges’ personal views matter less than people tend to suppose. That is true, as I’ve often said, if we understand politics in a partisan sense or, as Justice Stratas might have meant it, as synonymous with results-oriented reasoning. However, as I’ve also often said, I think that politics, in a much broader sense of ideas about how the state and society as a whole should be organized does matter to judicial decision-making. Justice Stratas speaks of developing legal doctrines in ways that “make sense” ― but it seems to me that legal doctrines make sense in light, among other things, of certain values that they reflect or serve, and that these values can be described as political, in a broad sense.

This is perhaps the only point on which I disagree with Justice Stratas. Though it might be a disagreement about words more than about the underlying realities, I think that the words matter. I worry that complete denials of the political aspects of adjudication come across as overdone, and as a result do not actually help the courts establish their legitimacy.

5. That said, Justice Stratas was right to criticize those ― whether academics, lawyers, students, or journalists ― who think of judicial decisions purely in terms of results and their political implications, real or supposed. (He compared such commentary to “essentially an open-line radio-show comment put in an educated way using highfalutin legal language.”) He was also right to lament judicial decisions that leave room for such interpretations, in particular through their failure to adequately explain, in terms of legal doctrine, the outcomes that they reach.

I wonder, though, what can be done about this very real problem. I’m afraid that judges focusing on the doctrine and explaining their decisions will not be enough. For instance, I don’t think that the Supreme Court’s recent jurisprudence in the area of language rights is half bad, in terms of engaging with doctrinal issues. Yet in December’s Policy Options, a couple of political scientists published a tendentious take-down of this jurisprudence looking at it entirely through the lens of results (which happened to go against language-rights claimants) and, as I have argued in a Policy Options blog post, blithely ignoring the law in the process. In other words, people are liable to misrepresent the courts’ work as results-oriented even when any fair reading of the decisions in question shows that it is not. Dan Kahan et al. wrote about this problem in a fascinating study (about which I blogged for the National Magazine) that found that while legal reasoning tends to be based on legal, rather than (narrowly) political considerations, “our system of justice lacks reliable practices for communicating courts’ neutral resolution of divisive matters.” Lawyers should, no doubt, try to push back against tendentious and uninformed criticisms of the judiciary (though as I have also argued they should do so without misrepresenting all criticism as tendentious or as endangering the Rule of Law!). But is that enough?

* * *

Well, this is more than enough for me. Again, I express my gratitude to Justice Stratas for a fascinating lecture and for his kind words, and I hope that he comes back to this topic in the future. The above questions and quibble notwithstanding, Justice Stratas is right that we need to take legal doctrine seriously, and we owe him for reminding us of this.