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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.

The skill set required of lawyers is evolving, and the ability to creatively and expeditiously resolve client concerns through effective negotiation is increasingly important. In this chapter, we argue that negotiation competitions are an excellent method to nurture the knowledge, skills, attitudes, judgment, and values—or competencies—that are vital to law students’ success in legal practice. Such competencies include knowing key negotiation concepts; managing information and process; communicating and relationship-building; advocating for client interests in a problem-solving environment; being aware of and managing one’s own biases; internalizing ethical decision-making in negotiation, and engaging in reflective practice. These competencies are not the focus of certain other kinds of law student competitions, such as appellate and trial moots, which are designed to sharpen legal analysis and rights-based advocacy in an adversarial model. The Canadian National Negotiation Competition (CNNC) departs from that model. It gives law students the opportunity to engage in negotiations like those that lawyers experience in practice and to receive feedback from experts, in either English or French streams. It also invites students to wrestle with complex scenarios that feature both business and broader social policy tensions and objectives. In this chapter, the authors recount their experience with developing, running and growing the CNNC for nine years and highlight some of the key pedagogical lessons learned.

"The past few decades have been witness to a number of important developments with respect to the global intellectual property (IP) system, which defined broadly encompasses the network of international and regional treaties, constitutional documents, national laws, court decisions, and local practices that make up the substantive and procedural body of IP law worldwide. These developments include the movement away from multilateralism towards bilateralism/regionalism; growing recognition of the various ways in which IP intersects with and impacts areas including human rights, development, trade, and social justice; broad acknowledgement of the economic worth of many IP rights; and important theoretical interventions that have challenged the principles and values underlying the global IP system, including through critical IP theory and the theory of new constitutionalism. These developments have occurred alongside a number of other events, changes, and crises that have changed the landscape of our global communities. Chief among them are climate change; armed conflicts; the COVID-19 pandemic; economic changes to work; and technological shifts including those relating to the internet and artificial intelligence, and their role in society. These economic, environmental, and technological changes have occurred alongside a growing recognition of the inequities that exist within and between societies as well as the ways in which these inequities are reinforced and maintained through systemic discrimination and ongoing colonialism. Given these developments, events, changes, and crises, what is the future of the global IP system? To what extent will the enactment of new treaties (or the reform or implementation of existing treaties) shape IP law over the coming years? What role, if any, will constitutional documents (including bills of rights) play in the context of the global IP system? Will today’s transformations lead to substantive reform of areas of IP law including copyright, trademark, and patents, and if so, which reforms will be given priority? What principles and values will animate the global IP system moving forward? This book is grounded in the belief that there are many possible futures for the global IP system. Countless pathways lay ahead of us, that can be followed or pursued, leading to a multiplicity of outcomes. These futures can materialize in many different ways. Social movements can reach into and through IP to effect change and to embed new values and perspectives. An idea can emerge (sometimes in multiple places at the same time) and, through the hard work of individuals and collectives, both change the way in which individuals perceive a body of law and reshape the law itself. Technological change can create a set of futures that otherwise might not have been available or even imagined."-- Provided by publisher

(2025) 6 TWAIL Review 188–221ISSN 2563-6693Published under a Creative Commons licence.  Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are increasingly promoted as having magical properties, evoking illusory…

Class counsel fees and their relationship to class member compensation are among the most important—and most controversial—statistics used to evaluate the normative outcomes of the class action mechanism. The perception that class attorneys reap windfall rewards while the class ‘gets nothing’ is persistent among class action critics. The ratio of legal fees to settlement funds captures the critical trade-off between counsels’ entrepreneurial incentives to pursue lucrative claims and the agency challenges endemic to these proceedings. In the most comprehensive analysis of Canadian class actions to date, the authors use new data and novel econometric methods to explore the nature of class action fee ratios in Ontario for both economics and legal audiences. To start, we calculate “all-in” fee ratios—lawyer fees plus disbursements divided by settlement amounts in Ontario—of 25.0% on average and at the median. Next, we show that judges are sensitive to windfall gains and sweetheart deals, problems associated with large awards, and adjust fees based on settlement size. These data and estimates contribute to a better understanding of judicial economy and access to justice in practice, the principal arguments in favour of class proceedings.

This article delves into the recent efforts of Asian migrant massage and sex workers in the Town of Newmarket, Ontario, and their struggle against a recently amended Personal Wellness Establishments (PWE) By-law. It starts with a historical overview of municipal licensing schemes and legislated migration controls in Canada, used to justify increased surveillance, control movement, and deny Asian women entry into Canada, before illustrating the enduring impacts on Asian migrant workers today. It concludes by emphasizing that migrant sex workers, often depicted as voiceless and nonconsenting victims, take leadership and have agency in defining their own struggles and authoring possibilities to resist.

Welfarism is the idea that government should always try to make individuals’ lives go better, for them, than they otherwise would, overall. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate welfarism’s compatibility with, and potential to support, the ambitions of person-centred justice. Welfarism is a normative theory applicable to public policy generally, but one which has distinct consequences in the realm of law and legal systems. They are considered just to the extent that they generate the best possible expected welfare consequences for all of the individuals who are affected by them. Welfarism is radically person-centred because it requires lawmakers to treat each individual affected by their work as a distinct locus of value, including those who have been subordinated or ignored., RésuméLe welfarisme est l’idée selon laquelle le gouvernement devrait toujours essayer d’améliorer la vie des individus, et ce, d’une manière à ce que la qualité de vie des individus soit supérieure à ce qu’elle l’aurait été sans ladite intervention gouvernementale. Dans cette voie, l’objectif de cet article est de démontrer la compatibilité du welfarisme avec les ambitions d’une justice centrée sur la personne et son potentiel pour soutenir cette forme de justice. Le welfarisme est une théorie normative applicable aux politiques publiques en général, mais qui entraîne toutefois des conséquences distinctes dans le domaine du droit et des systèmes juridiques. Les lois sont alors considérées comme justes si elles génèrent les meilleures conséquences possibles en termes de bien-être pour tous les individus qui sont affectés par celles-ci. Le welfarisme est radicalement centré sur la personne, car il exige que les législateurs traitent chaque individu affecté par leur travail comme un lieu de valeur distinct, y compris celles et ceux qui ont été subordonnés ou ignorés.