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This work explores the question of how professionalization of patent agency along with its accompanying discourse has affected the direction of international patent institutions and networks. Professionalization of patent agency is defined as the government regulation of who may provide patent agent services to the public through the form of professional licensing requirements. To the extent that professionalization of patent agency has created a unique discourse of patent agency, to what degree and in what respects has this discourse transformed global patent institutions? In particular, has this discourse created a form of ‘epistemic’ or ‘cultural’ capture that has the effect of delegitimizing other valid forms of discourse? Through the application of several methodologies, namely, historical analyses, doctrinal analyses and qualitative empirical work, this study attempts to create what epistemic capture theorists refer to as a capture story, which is a story of how cultural influences of a regulated industry – here, professional patent agents – come to dominate the regulatory discourse to the exclusion of other viable, competing conceptions of what constitutes the public interest. This work concludes that professionalization of agency within the patent system is interconnected with enablement as an organizing principle of the patent system as a social institution. Prior to professionalization, when agency was democratized throughout the patent system, so too was democratized enablement a guiding principle of the patent system. The formation of a unique, legitimized professional patent agent epistemic community has resulted in diminishing the democratization of enablement across the patent system as a social institution. This work discusses several of the practical and normative implications of the diminishing value of democratized enablement. Finally, this work concludes with a discussion of the future prospects of agency within the patent system.

This review essay considers the universality of dilemmas and tensions that arise in class action litigation, wherever practised. It does so by exploring the evolution of the Australian class action in its doctrinal, political and historical dimensions, as recounted in Michael Legg and James Metzger’s edited collection of papers, The Australian Class Action: A 30-Year Perspective. While the book is rooted in the Australian experience, it lays bare common themes across jurisdictions, such as the unique role of the judge in a class action, the challenges to effective representation, and concerns about the commodification of litigation.

In Canada, access to post-secondary education is guaranteed by a number of domestic instruments. These instruments are: statutory human rights legislation, constitutional law, and accessibility legislation. These guarantees are further bolstered by Article 24 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). Statutory human rights legislation (or anti-discrimination law) plays the most extensive role in controlling the discretionary power that colleges and universities exercise with respect to the admission of prospective students and the reasonable accommodation of matriculated students with disabilities. This article presents the findings of a review of decisions by human rights tribunals in Canada over the 7-year period of 2014–2021. With respect to both admissions cases and in-program reasonable accommodations cases, it identifies the main types of barriers experienced by persons with disabilities. It also examines the ways in which accessibility legislation, a proactive standard-setting form of legislation in Canada, has sought to improve access to post-secondary students with disabilities, focusing on Ontario’s post-secondary education accessibility standards as an example. Finally, it argues that changes to policies and practices on the ground that draw more inspiration from Article 24 of the CRPD will help to ensure that the equality right to post-secondary education for students with disabilities is fulfilled in letter and spirit.

At both the policy development stage and the point of implementing administrative processes, more attention must be paid to the hidden challenges faced by disabled women of lower income in securing and using income support benefits. Many of these gendered barriers figure within the administrative processes subsumed in the design and delivery of disability income support programs, and in governmental regimes connected (directly and indirectly) to them. As the Canada Disability Benefit Act progressed through the House of Commons, it was modified to include a guarantee that the application process be “without barriers, as defined in section 2 of the Accessible Canada Act”. The Canada Disability Benefit Act therefore presents an excellent opportunity to examine the ways in which statutory administrative regimes designed to further disability equality rights may result in barriers leading to administrative violence how to avoid that consequence. By drawing on the theoretical frameworks of bureaucratic disentitlement, administrative violence and disability equality, this article examines the lived realities of women with disabilities in order to suggest ways that income support systems can be more responsively and ethically designed. Administrative justice requires that users of income support programs obtain substantive equality-based service at first instance. This should be the experience of all users and would also avoid the time, energy and emotional investment of further appeals and/or judicial review. Moreover, both disability equality and administrative justice call for heightened attention to the lived experiences of disabled women with intersecting backgrounds in order to create equality-based and effective systems of disability income support.

The recent deaths of migrants trying to cross the Canada-U.S. border through Indigenous territory highlight the history of colonial dispossession that the border represents.

Each year, over 100,000 Ontarians seek justice from Tribunals Ontario. This group of people —the size of a small city— includes tenants, landlords, motor vehicle accident victims seeking insurance benefits, people denied disability benefits, and those who believe that their fundamental human rights have been infringed. This group of 100,000 is significantly larger than the […]

Those determining bail must reflect on their own beliefs and show restraint as they determine risk to avoid relying on false racist narratives. So should those calling for bail reform.

In a global era marked by surging racial nationalism and penal populism , anti-racist and decolonial research, education, and training has been under increasing threat in academia across the world. Popular use of the universalizing language of liberal internationalism as the dominant frame in discussing these developments leaves gaps in our understanding as to what areas of academic freedom are under the greatest threat, why they are under threat, what levers of sanction and discipline are used to suppress certain areas, and for what ends. Such a frame risks contributing to overly abstracted conceptualizations of academic freedom (and unfreedom) that are unmoored from the realities of how power operates in educational institutions and attendant maldistributions of who can in fact claim and be protected by academic freedom and who cannot.In this article, I put into conversation three very different jurisdictional contexts where nationalist backlash to, and suppression of, anti-racist and decolonial education and scholarship is occurring. Specifically, it examines American anti-Critical Race Theory (CRT) campaigns, Chinese suppression of scholarship critical of its ongoing colonial suppression of non-Han native peoples in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), and Israeli suppression of scholarship critical of its ongoing occupation of Palestinian territories through the case study of the ‘Spiro scandal’ at the University of Toronto (UofT) Faculty of Law. No good politics of academic freedom can emerge without centering an analysis of broader societal power and subordination. This is particularly true in the areas of national security and anti-racism, which form both distinct grounds for legal and political intervention in academic freedom. A national security threat engages certain types of legal grounds, particularly domestically (e.g. carceral responses to perceived counterterrorism, separatism, and extremism threats) while anti-racism justifies other types of intervention (e.g. civil rights complaints, removing of curriculum, firings, cutting funding) and can operate powerfully on a transnational level as well. I highlight three common elements in a transnational blueprint that can be observed in the creation, justification, and operation of selective nationalist attacks on academic freedom in anti-racist and decolonial education. My highlighting of these common elements are not meant to suggest any sort of equivalence between their operation, historical context, and/or relative severity, but rather to advance our collective understanding of the distributive nature of academic freedom politics and its relationship to power, race, and colonialism. Unpacking these campaigns transnationally complicates and unsettles the dichotomy between authoritarian and liberal populist censorship, giving us a more nuanced foundation by which to protect academic freedom and knowledge production in the service of racial justice and collective liberation.

For the Encouragement of Learning addresses the contested history of copyright law in Canada, where the economic and reputational interests of authors and th...