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This article seeks to define procedural disproportionality and understand its causes, using Ontario as a case study.  The essential problem is that too many resources are spent on civil disputes that do not merit the expenditure.  The first Part of this paper introduces ID Inc v Toronto Wholesale Produce Association, an Ontario civil action which illustrates the problem, and then offers a definition of procedural disproportionality. Part 2 identifies two distinct aspects to the problem: systemic disproportionality and internal disproportionality. Part 3 follows a standard civil action in the Canadian province of Ontario from beginning to end, finding sources of disproportionality in nine phases of the procedure. Part 4 concludes, arguing that a lack of evidence-based design and management has led to a pervasive lack of proportionality in Ontario’s civil justice system. For students and reformers of civil procedure worldwide, the case study of Ontario’s disproportionality problem may provide a diagnosis that resonates, or contrasts, with local conditions elsewhere.

Civil procedure should be "just, speedy, and inexpensive," according to the purposive rules found at the outset of many procedural codes. However, this formula creates as many questions as it answers. What does it mean for procedure to be "just?" What sorts of costs are relevant when considering how "inexpensive" procedure is? How should rule-makers and adjudicators compromise between justice, speediness, and inexpensiveness when these goals are in tension and resources are scarce? This article offers a normative account of civil procedure's purpose. The goal is to identify the warrant for"just, speedy, and inexpensive," and then to explain and refine it. I argue that welfarism, a general normative theory of public policy, is implicit in modern civil procedure. Welfarism is the idea that public policy decisions should always seek to optimize welfare for all affected individuals. I defend welfarism as a theoretical basis for reforming civil procedure and resolving its hard cases, and propose three refinements to civil procedure's purposive rules to give better effect to it.

Following in the wake of the "Hockey Canada trial" in 2025, this article begins from the recognition that sexual harm is a complex social problem of gender inequality in Canada that requires a transformative approach to remediate effectively. Restorative justice is one such transformative approach. In Ontario, however, where the Hockey Canada trial took place, Crown prosecution policy states that individuals charged with sexual offences are categorically ineligible to be diverted to restorative programs at pre-trial stage. In other provinces, there are similar policies and other moratoriums in place that limit the use of restorative justice to varying degrees. Building on insights from the criminal law, feminist legal theory, and penal abolition fields, this article argues that these policies should be revised and moratoriums should be lifted to enable restorative justice to be more widely available in sexual harm cases.

The separateness of the Copyright Act from the common law has been somewhat taken for granted by the legislator and the judiciary. This book chapter applies the statutory interpretation principles that mediate the relationship between legislation and the common law as a principled approach to better situate the Copyright Act in relation to the common law and by the same token, copyright law in relation to private law. This chapter challenges the assertion that the Copyright Act is an exhaustive code, and points to the over-reliance on copyright’s distinctiveness from the common law, both at the legislative stage, and by the judiciary. It does so with specific examples from the Copyright Act, including statutory remedies, technological protection measures (TPMs), and the right to repair. Statutory interpretation principles guide both the legislator and courts on how the balance of powers should be exercised between the legislative arm and the judiciary. This balance of powers needs to be exercised carefully in the realm of copyright law. Its scope looms large in the regulation of the information society and digital marketplace, and its construction away from general principles of private law has led to unfortunate consequences. The chapter concludes by reaffirming the nature of copyright law as private law. The authoritative power conferred on judges in constructing the Copyright Act should set aside any tendency to treat copyright law, or other statutory law governing relationships between private parties, differently than spheres of private law derived primarily from judge-made law.

In 2001, the Supreme Court of Canada released a decision (<i>Mitchell v MNR</i> 2001 SCC 33) that for the first time set out a brief but coheren

This article explores the relationship between legal ethics and restorative justice. It is commonly observed that there exists a "decline" in professionalism among Canadian lawyers today. One of the persistent concerns is that legal ethics rules and the "standard conception" of professional role morality that underpins them, the neutral partisan, fail to strike the correct balance between client interests and the public interest. Building on this idea, this article argues that the legal profession should be reoriented around restorative justice as the moral foundation of a more progressive approach to legal ethics and professional responsibility. It translates concepts from restorative justice into ethical terms, grounding ideas about interdependence, community involvement, and public accountability into a list of restorative principles that can be readily applied by lawyers, firms, and other kinds of law practices. The article concludes by recommending a series of lawyering practices and professional regulatory measures that are consistent with taking a restorative principles-based approach. Ultimately, the article shows that restorative justice offers more than an alternative path for lawyers in criminal law settings. It constitutes a distinct set of obligations that, once implemented as legal ethics, has the potential to raise the moral consciousness of lawyers, facilitate collaboration within communities and across systems, and redefine the role of lawyers in the administration of justice, transforming conditions of law and society in a more equitable direction.

The introductory chapter to Critical Conversations in Canadian Public Law situates the book "in the midst of some of the most significant social, economic, and political struggles of the past decade", from the COVID-19 pandemic to the Gaza genocide. The introduction describes how the book "seeks to reflect and ignite critical conversations about the centrality of public law and its institutions, broadly defined and deeply contested, to the (re)production of current inequities." It outlines two ways in which the collection is "critical": first, the critical legal methods employed by the contributors (e.g., acknowledging law's political operation, understanding law's relationship with power, and looking beyond descriptive accounts of law to consider its materiality and normativity); and second, "in terms of the importance, urgency, and necessity of deepening our understandings of the relationship between public law and contemporary inequities." Finally, the introduction identifies "five cascading themes reflected across the chapters in this collection—and across our varied experiences with the law—that are pivotal to the law's consistent mobilization to reify extant power disparities in society [...] exceptionalism, capitalism, segmentation, incrementalism, and formalism."

Critical Conversations in Canadian Public Law is a groundbreaking. open-access collection of peer-reviewed chapters exploring pressing issues at the intersection of public law and critical theory. Contributors examine claims about citizenship, rights. and the role of the state in addressing historic and ongoing injustices. The collection foregrounds critical perspectives such as Indigenous legal orders. critical race theory, feminisms. queer theory, and disability theory, offering an interdisciplinary and contextual understanding of public law. By bridging traditional l egal scholarship and critical approaches. Critical Conversations in Canadian Public Law reimagines public law as a discipline responsive to the diverse realities and urgent demands shaping Canada's legal and social landscape today.

<div> <p><span>The boundaries of the substantive (criminal law purpose) prong of the criminal law power test under 91(27) of the <i>Constitution Act, 1867</i>

This submission, made to the Canadian Competition Bureau's public consultation on algorithmic pricing, focuses on algorithmic personalized pricing (APP): the use of algorithms to set individualized prices based on consumers’ maximum willingness to pay. The authors argue APP represents a transformative shift in market dynamics. They analyze APP’s potential to facilitate first-degree price discrimination, and contend that the pursuit of this goal by firms, even if not fully achieved, raises significant concerns for consumer welfare, market transparency, and the normative foundations of competition law. The authors examine how well potential strategies used by firms to implement APP (collusion/coordinated competitor conduct, abuse of dominance, and deceptive marketing practices) are likely to fit within the ambit of Canada's Competition Act, particularly as recent amendments made important changes to the applicable legal frameworks. Noting that the precise ambit of the amended Act is not yet fixed, the authors argue that responding effectively to APP will require both creative interpretations of the new rules, and refined enforcement strategies and tools as competition law is adapted to a world where the incidence of algorithmic coordination and data-driven market distortions continues to increase, and with it, the erosion of consumer surplus. The submission concludes by advocating for public education, tailored enforcement guidance, and the development of consumer-side AI tools to counterbalance APP’s adverse effects on consumers and the proper functioning of competitive markets.

This chapter provides an overview of equality rights under s. 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, including notes and questions to guide reflection on trends and tensions in the jurisprudence. First, the chapter excerpts the text of s. 15 and notes that s. 28 is an additional—though underutilized—equality provision in the Charter. Second, the chapter considers key concepts underlying s. 15, including equality, discrimination, and the justification of infringement under s. 1, with reference to the Court's first s. 15 decision in Andrews. Third, the chapter explores adverse effects discrimination, with excerpts from distinct settings of social hierarchy analyzed by the Court, "e.g., disability (Eldridge), sexuality (Vriend), gender (Fraser), and race/Indigeneity (Sharma)." Fourth, the chapter discusses analogous grounds of discrimination and the Court's leading decision on such grounds (Corbiere). Lastly, the chapter outlines affirmative action under s. 15(2) of the Charter, with reference to the Court's leading decision in Kapp.

The Supreme Court of Canada is set to decide whether methods of medical treatment constitute patentable subject matter. The concerns surrounding extension of patent protection to methods of medical treatment, argued almost entirely on the grounds of patentable subject matter, assumes that a physician carrying out such treatment is patent infringer. Canadian jurisprudence has largely taken this assumption to be true. Interrogating the historical jurisprudence supporting the prohibition on patentability of methods of medical treatment, this article demonstrates that this jurisprudence is far from clear as to whether the issue is, or should be, approached as a question of patentability or infringement. An analysis of the case law on both patentability of methods of medical treatment, and what constitutes infringing ‘use’ of an invention, demonstrates that both lines of jurisprudence share similar concepts and underlying concerns. This has generated uncertainty as to whether the issue of extending patent protection to methods of medical treatment has ever clearly been a question of patentability. Rather, examining both lines of jurisprudence side-by-side, this piece demonstrates that concerns underlying extension of patent protection to cover methods of medical treatment have historically been categorized as scope of protection concerns, rather than patentability concerns. As such, the debate surrounding patent protection and methods of medical treatment is best characterized as an infringement issue.

This paper examines historical and contemporary trends in Canadian international student policy through the lens of racial capitalism, arguing that current policy facilitates a significant neocolonial wealth transfer from Global South families to Canada through processes of expropriation, exploitation, and expulsion. It argues that discriminatory tuition fees effectively function as “education head taxes”, which extract billions of dollars annually from international students. Meanwhile, “gauntlets” to permanent residency have emerged in an immigration landscape where working class migrants have narrower options to regularize, creating a system of labour exploitation where student-labourers face precarious conditions and structural indebtedness. Finally, the constant threat of expulsion through loss of status and deportation is used to discipline labour and enforce nationalist segregation of labour and education markets. Within all three of these processes, race-making and neocolonial relations play a central role in justifying differential treatment, curtailing solidarity, and limiting potential policy changes to curtail abuses.

Supervision has been described as the "beating heart" and the "core" of clinical legal education. Yet lawyers who supervise law students in clinical programs have challenging and poorly understood roles within Canadian legal education. This article analyzes interviews with lawyers who supervise students in Canadian law-school affiliated legal clinics. Supervising lawyers describe the tensions between their roles as lawyers, supervisors and mentors, university and/or non-profit employees, social justice advocates, members of law societies, and clinic team members. These tensions often exist within an environment of lower pay, poor job security, substandard treatment by colleagues, inadequate training, and other aspects that paint a bleak picture. Despite these challenges, supervising lawyers describe intense satisfaction and inspiration derived from their work with students, clients, and the community. This article sheds light on the pedagogies employed by clinicians, their conditions of employment, and their roles in legal education more broadly. We conclude the article with our reflections about how law schools, clinics, and the legal profession can respond to the need to better support the vital work of supervision in clinical legal education.

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.

In a moment when restorative justice stands poised to mainstream in U.S. and Canadian legal education, this essay recalls some intellectual history of ADR as

<p><span>Research in clinical law, critical legal studies, and therapeutic jurisprudence has spotlighted serious challenges that clients face whe

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.

A case comment on a recent Ontario Court of Appeal decision on the tort of family violence.

This article outlines the concept of “critical race equality” in Canadian constitutional law and critiques the Supreme Court of Canada’s jurisprudential silence on systemic racism under section 15 of the Charter. First, the article discusses the theory of critical race equality. It describes six principles that animate a critical race perspective, which understands equality as ambitious, contextual, ideological, comparative, systemic, and positive. Second, the article discusses the practice of critical race equality. It traces a genealogy from the Supreme Court’s first equality decision (Andrews) to its latest (Fraser), both of which reflect the principles of critical race equality. This genealogy demonstrates that critical race equality has been consistently affirmed by the Supreme Court, yet has never been applied by the Court to ubiquitous systemic inequality confronting Black and Indigenous communities in Canada. This article concludes that systemic racial justice advocacy under section 15 of the Charter is doctrinally viable. Consequently, it calls upon a coalition of scholars, lawyers, and organizers to recognize that viability as one of many tools for challenging unconstitutional state neglect and advancing systemic racial justice.