Your search

The Accessibility for Manitobans Act (AMA) was enacted in December, 2013. Manitoba is the second Canadian province to enact accessibility standards legislation. The first province was Ontario, which enacted the Ontarians with Disabilities Act in 2001, and, later, a more fortified and enforceable Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, 2005. The AMA presents a strong set of philosophical and social goals. Its philosophical goals mark accessibility as a human right, and aim to improve the health, independence and well-being of persons with disabilities. The AMA’s social goals have the potential to make a positive impact on the development of equality law norms within the context of disability discrimination. Nevertheless, the AMA would be strengthened with a more robust and explicit appreciation of how disability discrimination issues are experienced. The Act should show a greater recognition of the relevance of embodied impairment to individuals with disabilities, and there should be more significant scope for the statute to address intersectionality within disability discrimination. These two challenges replicate the two principal critiques of the social model of disability –the model of disability on which the AMA is based. Finally, for the legislation to be successful, issues of compliance and enforcement that require positive uses of discretion on the part of the civil service should be addressed early on. The findings of this article may be useful for the implementation of the AMA and for the design of future accessibility legislation in Canada and elsewhere.

Only registered Canadian patent agents may represent others before the Canadian Patent Office. To qualify as a registered Canadian patent agent, candidates must complete an apprenticeship followed by successfully passing the Canadian patent agent examination. This article analyzes the validity of the current Canadian patent agent exam. The analysis includes a comprehensive review of the development of the current exam, as well as a review of candidate solution papers from the most recent exams.

Taking Palestine as the focus of inquiry, and drawing on our experiences as co-directors of Karamah, a judicial education initiative focused on dignity, we reflect on the attributes of colonisation and the possibilities of decolonisation in Palestine through development aid. We conclude that decolonisation is possible even within development aid frameworks. We envision the current colonial condition in Palestine as a multi-faceted, complex and dynamic mesh that tightens and expands its control over the coveted colonial subject but that also contains holes that offer opportunities for resistance or refusal. We turn to Karamah to illustrate how some judges have insisted on a professional identity that merges the concepts of human dignity and self-determination and ultimately rejects the colonial condition inherent in both occupation and development aid. We conclude that in this process of professional identity (re)formation, members of the Palestinian judiciary have helped reveal the demands of decolonisation by demonstrating their commitment to realising human dignity through institutional power, and bringing occupation back into international development discourse.

This article will detail an event of revolutionary action in the historiography of anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggle in Iraq, namely al-Wathba (‘the leap’) of 1948, utilising it as an example to address the limitations of the methodology and analysis of Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) scholarship. I will argue that there is a disconnect between notions of agency and structure in TWAIL analyses and that therefore TWAIL scholars should consider studying the conjunctures that allowed certain movements ample room to struggle against the imperialism of international law in the first place. I will use the example of the Wathba to illustrate how a conjunctural analysis may be undertaken, analysing its implications for the international legal order. I will then move to highlight the significance of labour to the conjuncture in question. Finally, I will demonstrate how events like the Wathba illuminate the transient and provisional nature of the foundations of international law, while emphasising its structural constraints.

This Special Issue emerges from the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) Cairo Conference in 2015 and addresses the conference theme, ‘On Praxis and the Intellectual’, by focusing on different aspects of the intellectual as a political actor. In introducing this Issue, we provide some background to the TWAIL network, movement, event, and publications; and delineate our own understandings of scholarly praxis as editors and conference organisers. Broadly, we understand praxis as the relationship between what we say as scholars and what we do – as the inextricability of theory from lived experience. Understood in this way, praxis is central to TWAIL, as TWAIL scholars strive to reconcile international law’s promise of justice with the proliferation of injustice in the world it purports to govern. Reconciliation occurs in the realm of praxis and TWAIL scholars engage in a variety of struggles, including those for greater self-awareness, disciplinary upheaval, and institutional resistance and transformation.

Nonviolence is emerging as a topic of great interest in activist, academic and community settings. In particular, nonviolence is being recognized as a necessary component of constructive and sustainable social change. This book considers nonviolence in relationship to specific social, political, ecological and spiritual issues. Through case studies and examinations of social resistance, gender, the arts, and education, it provides specialists and non-specialists with a solid introduction to the importance and relevance of nonviolence in various contexts.Advancing Nonviolence and Social Transformation is organized into five sections. The first section is a set of essays on various historical and contemporary perspectives on nonviolence. The second section consists of essays on philosophical and theoretical explorations of the topic. The third and fourth sections expand the scope of nonviolence into the areas of thought and action, including Indigenous resistance, student protests, human trafficking, intimate partner violence and ecological issues. The final section takes nonviolence into the study of wonder, music, education and hope. The book will be useful to anyone working in the theories and practices of social change.

This article will detail an event of revolutionary action in the historiography of anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggle in Iraq, namely al-Wathba ('the leap') of 1948, utilising it as an example to address the limitations of the methodology and analysis of Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) scholarship. I will argue that there is a disconnect between notions of agency and structure in TWAIL analyses and that therefore TWAIL scholars should consider studying the conjunctures that allowed certain movements ample room to struggle against the imperialism of international law in the first place. I will use the example of the Wathba to illustrate how a conjunctural analysis may be undertaken, analysing its implications for the international legal order. I will then move to highlight the significance of labour to the conjuncture in question. Finally, I will demonstrate how events like the Wathba illuminate the transient and provisional nature of the foundations of international law, while emphasising its structural constraints.

This Special Issue emerges from the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) Cairo Conference in 2015 and addresses the conference theme, ‘On Praxis and the Intellectual’, by focusing on different aspects of the intellectual as a political actor. In introducing this Issue, we provide some background to the TWAIL network, movement, event, and publications; and delineate our own understandings of scholarly praxis as editors and conference organisers. Broadly, we understand praxis as the relationship between what we say as scholars and what we do – as the inextricability of theory from lived experience. Understood in this way, praxis is central to TWAIL, as TWAIL scholars strive to reconcile international law’s promise of justice with the proliferation of injustice in the world it purports to govern. Reconciliation occurs in the realm of praxis and TWAIL scholars engage in a variety of struggles, including those for greater self-awareness, disciplinary upheaval, and institutional resistance and transformation.

Despite international criminal law’s historically contingent doctrines and embedded biases,Third World self-determination movements continue to be enticed by international criminal justice as a potentially emancipatory project. This article seeks to peer inside the structural anatomy of the international criminal law enterprise from a vantage point oriented to the global South. It reflects broadly on discourses of international criminal law and its exponents as they relate to the global South, and explores one particularly contentious issue in the politics of international criminal law - that of operational selectivity. Redressing such selectivities as they arise from geopolitical biases is an important first step for any reconstruction of the field of international criminal justice. The article emphasizes, however, the need to also look beyond the problems of unequal enforcement, to reconceptualize the forms of violence criminalized at the design level.We ask whether, given certain colonial features, the premise and promise of international criminal justice can - for self-determination struggles or anti-imperial movements in the global South - be anything more than illusory. Drawing on the perspectives of Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), the article concludes with some thoughts on what ‘TWAILing’ the field of international criminal justice might entail.

By: Joshua Sealy-Harrington and David Rennie PDF Version: Making Sense of Aboriginal and Racialized Sentencing Cases Commented On: R v Laboucane, 2016 ABCA 176 (CanLII); R v Kreko, 2016 ONCA 367 (C…

In common law Northern Europe and in Australasia, a wave of reform has been transforming legal services regulation since roughly 1980. Old structures and approaches, based on the principles of professionalism and lawyer independence, are being replaced in these jurisdictions by new ones that prioritize competition and consumer interests. In the United States this has conspicuously not happened, leaving intact a regulatory approach whose broad outlines have changed little in the past 100 years.

By: Joshua Sealy-Harrington and Marita Zouravlioff PDF Version: Trinity Western Decision Fails to Clarify Approach to Balancing Conflicting Charter Rights Case Commented On: Trinity Western Univers…

When lawyers elect the leaders of their self-regulatory organizations, what sort of people do they vote for? How do the selection processes for elite lawyer sub-groups affect the diversity and efficacy of those groups? This article quantitatively assesses the demographic and professional diversity of leadership in the Law Society of Upper Canada.

In R v DLW, 2016 SCC 22 the Supreme Court of Canada split on whether the criminal offence of bestiality requires “penetration.” The majority judgment held that bestiality requires penetration and, on that basis, held that a dog licking a vagina is not bestiality. In contrast, the dissenting judgment held that bestiality does not require penetration and, accordingly, held that a dog licking a vagina is bestiality. In this post, we first summarize the factual and legislative background in DLW and the reasons of the majority and dissenting judgments. Second, we critique the majority judgment for: (1) its unpersuasive reliance on judicial deference; and (2) its overstated claim that “buggery” (the precursor to bestiality) had a clear meaning. Lastly, we critique both the majority and dissenting judgments for their reliance on: (1) imprecise sexual terms which fail to bring clarity to bestiality law; and (2) an unimaginative privileging of cisgender, procreative heterosexuality that perpetuates harmfully conservative understandings of human sexuality.

Taking Palestine as the focus of inquiry, and drawing on our experiences as co-directors of Karamah, a judicial education initiative focused on dignity, we reflect on the attributes of colonisation and the possibilities of decolonisation in Palestine through development aid. We conclude that decolonisation is possible even within development aid frameworks. We envision the current colonial condition in Palestine as a multi-faceted, complex and dynamic mesh that tightens and expands its control over the coveted colonial subject but that also contains holes that offer opportunities for resistance or refusal. We turn to Karamah to illustrate how some judges have insisted on a professional identity that merges the concepts of human dignity and self-determination and ultimately rejects the colonial condition inherent in both occupation and development aid. We conclude that in this process of professional identity (re)formation, members of the Palestinian judiciary have helped reveal the demands of decolonisation by demonstrating their commitment to realising human dignity through institutional power, and bringing occupation back into international development discourse.

Featured image courtesy Sydesian Transitional justice is a popular term in present day Sri Lanka. It is the means by which the various parties to the conflict have decided to bring about justice an…

This article explores whether the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) enjoys testimonial privilege before Canadian courts. The authors argue that there is strong evidence to suggest that customary international law requires that the ICRC be granted a privilege not to testify or disclose confidential information in domestic court proceedings. Such a privilege, they argue, is entailed by the ICRC’s mandate to engage in international humanitarian law protection activities using confidential means. Given that customary international law forms part of the common law in Canada, the authors argue that this privilege should be recognized by Canadian courts despite its potentially uneasy fit with traditional Canadian evidence law.

Many recent hate speech cases in Canada, Europe, and elsewhere involve religion either as the source of views that are alleged to be hateful or as the target of such views and sometimes, of course, as both the source and target of these views. This chapter explores the difference religion makes to the application of hate speech laws – when it is the target of this speech. The ‘religious’ hate speech cases are difficult for the same reason that all hate speech cases are difficult. There is significant disagreement in the community about whether, or to what extent, the restriction of hate speech can be reconciled with the public commitment to freedom of expression. There is, however, another reason why hate speech cases involving religion are so difficult, which stems from our complex conception of religious adherence or membership – as both a personal commitment and a cultural identity. The chapter focuses on anti-Muslim speech in Canada.