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The Civil Rules Review (CRR) has proposed a thorough rewrite of Ontario's Rules of Civil Procedure. The goal is to make civil litigation speedier, more affordable, and less complex. The CRR's April 2025 Consultation Paper makes dozens of reform proposals, affecting every major phase of the litigation process.   This short paper argues that the leaders of Ontario's civil justice system should take the time to look before they leap. To implement changes by the end of 2025, as proposed by the original Terms of Reference for the Civil Rules Review, would be dangerously and unnecessarily premature. The consultation phase (currently just 10 weeks) should be extended, and a methodologically rigorous empirical evaluation should be conducted. This evaluation should be informed by a solid theoretical understanding of civil litigation’s benefits and costs; the middle section of this paper briefly sketches such a theory.

On the anniversary of the Nakba, Asians in Canada must reaffirm solidarity with Palestinian brethren

In a new push for ‘lawfare’, pro-Israel groups are weaponizing the courts to silence criticism of Israel

The impact of drones on women's privacy has garnered sensational media attention, headlining stories about drones spying on sunbathing women and girls, or being used to stalk or harass women in public spaces. Despite this popular attention, questions about how the drone might differentially enhance or undermine privacy have received relatively little academic and regulatory reflection. This chapter examines how drone technology can be especially apt to impact women's privacy. Furthermore, examining some of the differential impacts of the technology helps to reveal broader inequities that can go unattended when technology is regulated without considering social context. Drone regulators cannot continue to treat the technology as though it is value-neutral, impacting all individuals in the same manner. The social context in which drone technology is used must inform both drone-specific regulations, and privacy law more generally.

Trump’s executive order and Pierre Poilievre’s stance on trans rights fuel a divide on gender equality. Trans rights and feminism are linked and both must be defended together.

Transphobia is rising, threatening student safety on campus. Universities must act now to protect queer and trans students from harm.

Some universities’ non-discrimination and gender-based violence policies have been criticized on equality grounds, and this needs to change.

As the world rapidly urbanizes, cities are expanding to provide space for growing populations. The predominant growth pattern for the last several decades - continued outward expansion, or “urban sprawl” - is helping to lock in carbon expenditure for generations. By contrast, and perhaps counterintuitively, densification of cities can contribute both to CO2 emissions reductions and biodiversity protection. This chapter argues that environmental law should go beyond addressing negative externalities of activities within the city, to engage with the built form of the city. Legal and land use planning tools such as greenbelts and planning/zoning reform, and practices such as city building, placemaking, and nature-based urban solutions provide avenues for building cities in a way that promises climate mitigation and biodiversity protection in their very structure.

Feminist judgment projects have proliferated in recent years, with contributors in over twelve countries rewriting judgments to bring the relationship between law, gender, and equality to light. The requirements of feminist judgments vary between projects, but many of them require contributors to replicate the generic conventions of judgments and limit their reference to legal precedents and other materials available at the time of the original decision. This article reflects on the politics of feminist judgments, challenging the premises of the conventional methodology in contexts where the law cannot be redeemed through liberal legal methods. One such area is HIV non-disclosure. Canadian courts have repeatedly found that the criminal law has jurisdiction over a person's failure to disclose their HIV-positive status in sexual relations. The article argues that the law in this area should not be rewritten using the conventional methodology because the law should be abolished. In contexts like this, feminists should have recourse to an expanded referential universe, including creative tools, strategies, and forms of literary and artistic expression to represent gender and sexuality differently. The article concludes by constructing a "found poem" from the words of R. v Aziga, a 2023 decision of the Ontario Court of Appeal, to suggest a more progressive path forward in HIV nondisclosure cases.

Feminist judgment projects have proliferated in recent years, with contributors in over twelve countries rewriting judgments to bring the relationship between law, gender, and equality to light. The requirements of feminist judgments vary between projects, but many of them require contributors to replicate the generic conventions of judgments and limit their reference to legal precedents and other materials available at the time of the original decision. This article reflects on the politics of feminist judgments, challenging the premises of the conventional methodology in contexts where the law cannot be redeemed through liberal legal methods. One such area is HIV non-disclosure. Canadian courts have repeatedly found that the criminal law has jurisdiction over a person’s failure to disclose their HIV-positive status in sexual relations. The article argues that the law in this area should not be rewritten using the conventional methodology because the law should be abolished. In contexts like this, feminists should have recourse to an expanded referential universe, including creative tools, strategies, and forms of literary and artistic expression to represent gender and sexuality differently. The article concludes by constructing a “found poem” from the words of R. v Aziga, a 2023 decision of the Ontario Court of Appeal, to suggest a more progressive path forward in HIV non-disclosure cases.

Assessment is the practice of documenting, evaluating, and measuring students’ learning or achievement. Assessments can be formative (that is, occurring throughout a course) or summative (occurring at the culmination of a course). Legal education, and therefore assessment practices, are influenced by many factors including the regulation of higher education, socioeconomic conditions, colonialism, corruption, privatisation, and other local conditions. Assessment methods in legal education tend to be summative, typically focusing on legal knowledge, and often occur in the form of a formal written or oral examination. Assessment is often norm-referenced rather than criterion-referenced. Over the past several decades, teaching methods in law have diversified significantly and new forms of assessment have been introduced. AI, globalisation, online education, economic conditions, and other phenomenon will undoubtedly impact the role and types of assessment in legal education.

Every May 18, mourners gather near the sandy beaches of Mullivaikkal, a small strip between Chundikulam and Mulltaitivu in the Northern province of Sri Lanka, to commemorate the 2009 genocide against the Tamils. Mullivaikkal is where approximately three hundred thousand Tamil civilians found refuge as they fled the military bombardment between January and May 2009.1 Starting in 2010, the remembrance day commemoration attracts thousands of locals, coming together near the beach to reflect and remember. Increasingly, the commemoration also attracts transitional justice experts, along with diplomats and international governmental organization workers. In my contribution, I reflect on the work of the local and diaspora Tamil transitional justice experts as they begin to gather evidence from the families of victims for the newly created 2024 Commission for Truth, Unity and Reconciliation. Drawing on Homer's The Odyssey and the story of the “lotus eaters,” I frame these experts as “truth eaters,” preoccupied with collecting victim narratives for the purpose of personal gratification. As they engage in the repeated collection of particular elements of the victims’ truth—elements predicated on the demands of the field of transitional justice—the truth eaters are oblivious to the root causes of the war. I explain how attention to root causes through a Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) lens can avoid the effects of the dominant liberal modes of truth seeking reflected in the work of these truth eaters.

As the personalization of e-commerce transactions continues to intensify, the law and policy implications of algorithmic personalized pricing (APP) should be top of mind for regulators. Price is often the single most important term of consumer transactions. APP is a form of online discriminatory pricing practice whereby suppliers set prices based on consumers’ personal information with the objective of getting as close as possible to their maximum willingness to pay. As such, APP raises issues of competition, privacy, personal data protection, contract, consumer protection, and anti-discrimination law.This book chapter looks at the legality of APP from a Canadian perspective in competition, commercial consumer law, and personal data protection law.

Annette Demers, Yemisi Dina, Gian Medves, 2025 CanLIIDocs 1371