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Cities’ international relations are under a spotlight following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

Scholars and practitioners have long called for a sentencing methodology that incorporates the social realities of Black Canadians and thereby takes seriously the ameliorative impacts that judicial recognition of systemic anti-Black racism could have on sentencing outcomes — including quantitative impacts on the length of individual criminal sentences and qualitative impacts on the mode of criminal sentence. In Ontario, the criminal jurisprudence around the sentencing of Black offenders has dramatically increased in the past few years, culminating in the Court of Appeal for Ontario’s (”the ONCA”) decision in R. v. Morris. However, while the ONCA has long acknowledged the plights of Black Canadians at the hands of the criminal justice system, until Morris, the ONCA has not explicitly discussed what, if any, role that acknowledgement should play in crafting a proportionate sentence for a Black offender. Through its sustained analysis of this urgent question, Morris may represent a watershed moment in the criminal jurisprudence relating to the sentencing of Black offenders.

In Actavis v Eli Lilly, the UK Supreme Court overturned its previous Kirin-Amgen decision, ushered in a new U.K. doctrine of ‘extended protection’, and in so doing, proclaimed that it had finally brought U.K. patent jurisprudence in line with the objectives of Article 69 of the European Patent Convention [EPC]. A considerable amount of commentary leading up to Actavis, as well as the Actavis judgment itself, highlighted how U.K. patent jurisprudence of the post-Article 69 era suffered from a flawed, U.K.-centric tunnel vision, instinctively presuming that Article 69 was simply a reflection of existing U.K. patent practice and, as such, U.K. patent law was already in compliance with EPC obligations. The weight of opinion was that Article 69 was meant to stake out a middle ground of claim scope, between literalistic, peripheral-style claiming, exemplified by traditional U.K. patent jurisprudence, and the non-literalistic, central-style claiming, exemplified by traditional German patent jurisprudence. In extending protection beyond literal claim infringement to cover non-literal equivalents, the UKSC declared that it had finally moved U.K. patent doctrine to the desired middle ground of the Article 69. However, what these commentaries overlook is that movement away from literalism was not the only shift in U.K. patent practice that Article 69 intended to achieve. Rather, a historical and comparative analysis demonstrates that in the lead-up to Article 69, commentators and EPC negotiators held similar apprehensions regarding the U.K. ‘colourable evasion’ doctrine. To these commentators, ‘colourable evasion’ embodied many of the concerns surrounding both literalistic, peripheral claiming and non-literal, central claiming. Similarly to literalism, ‘colourable evasion’ relied almost entirely on judicial interpretation, as opposed to the more fact-based and infringement-focused claim scope doctrines of Continental patent practice. Furthermore, like the non-literalistic approach of central claiming, such as the German ‘general inventive concept’, ‘colourable evasion’ could undermine the notice function of claims by permitting the judicial vitiation of claim elements based entirely on a generalized ‘inventive concept’. Post-Actavis jurisprudence demonstrates that the Actavis test, with its reliance on the inventive concept as the point of departure for non-literal infringement, has re-introduced many of the same concerns associated with both the U.K. ‘colourable evasion’ doctrine and the German ‘general inventive concept’. Accordingly, the Actavis test, in many ways, may be a return of ‘colourable evasion’ and the ‘general inventive concept’ rather than the doctrine of ‘pith and marrow’. The irony is that in pursuit of harmonization, German patent practice abandoned the ‘general inventive concept’ only now to see its return in the form of the U.K.’s Actavis test. In this sense, while Actavis took a critical view of preceding jurisprudence’s narrow, U.K.-centric reluctance to embrace the trans-European harmonization goals of Article 69, Actavis may end up undermining its own objectives of finally breaking free from the cycle of U.K.-centric patent practice.

In Canada, Indigenous populations have an increased prevalence of psychiatric disorders and distress. Mental health mobile applications can provide effective, easy-to-access, and low-cost support. Examining grey literature and academic sources, this review found three mobile apps that support mental health for Indigenous communities in Canada. Implications and future directions are discussed.

The Federation of Law Societies of Canada’s Model Code of Professional Conduct recognizes the commitment of the legal profession to protect the public interest and respect the requirements of human rights laws. Following in the wake of the Statement of Principles controversy at the Law Society of Ontario, this article argues that the standard conception of lawyers’ professional role morality in Canada—the neutral partisan—takes a thin and “bleached out” view of legal ethics. In making this case, the article reads the limited body of professional discipline caselaw through the lens of critical theory to show that current practices of lawyer regulation pertaining to human rights and equality are underinclusive. Next, the article argues that lawyers have a positive obligation to promote substantive equality in their professional life and work. This obligation should be reflected by revisions to the Model Code and other professional regulatory measures to ensure that law societies take a comprehensive and systematic approach to promoting substantive equality within their mandate. As such, the purpose of the article is to shift the terms of professional debate about what protecting the public interest and respecting the requirements of human rights laws mean.

Abstract The ‘question of labour’ and its exploitation in the Third World has not been given ample consideration by contemporary international legal scholars in their historical examinations of the making of the international order. This article revisits the history of the interwar institutions of the League of Nations, particularly the International Labour Organization (ILO), to argue that international law reformulated imperialism through its re-articulation of labour relations, beginning with its quest to suppress slavery and ultimately regulate forced labour in Africa. International institutions contributed to the valorization of ‘free wage labour’ in Africa and the Third World through its international ‘native labour’ policies, the development of international labour standards, and especially the passing of the 1930 Forced Labour Convention. The article argues that international institutions safeguarded the processes of capitalist racial/colonial accumulation and labour exploitation by ideologically dis-embedding the violence of slavery and forced labour from ‘free wage labour’, veiling the structural unity and totality of the international legal order with racial capitalism. Drawing on the ‘Black radical/internationalist tradition’, I propose an expansive critique of the international order as a form of ‘enslavement’ to the structures of capitalism, so as to adequately expose international law’s structural embeddedness with labour exploitation, white supremacy, and racial capitalism.

"This book delves into the legal and labour history of Hashemite Iraq to explore the role international law and its institutions played in Iraq's state formation. Focusing on this specific time and place in international legal history, it shows how Iraq was a laboratory for experimentation with the concept of sovereignty. One direct result of this was the development of the doctrine of semi-peripheral sovereignty. This study traces how this doctrine impact on everyday life of working class Iraqis by looking at its impact on imperial law, land law, the transnational law of oil concessions and pipeline agreements, criminal law and emergency law. It takes case studies including the production and trade of the oil fields in Kirkuk, railways in Baghdad and Basra, looking at how workers organized themselves. This unique approach shows in a very real way how international law was the force for key employment practice developments in an emerging nation state."-- Provided by publisher

Laverne Jacobs, Sule Tomkinson, 2022 CanLIIDocs 1196