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"Evidence: Principles and Problems, now in its thirteenth edition, is a leading casebook on Canadian evidence law. This text is renowned for its clear, critical analysis of fundamental concepts and principles, insightful commentary, and thought-provoking problem scenarios. It also includes texts and excerpts from leading cases, making it a comprehensive resource for both law students and practitioners."--store.thomsonreuters.ca

This book brings together Indigenous, Third World and Settler perspectives on the theory and practice of decolonizing law. Colonialism, imperialism, and settler colonialism continue to affect the lives of racialized communities and Indigenous Peoples around the world. Law, in its many iterations, has played an active role in the dispossession and disenfranchisement of colonized peoples. Law and its various institutions are the means by which colonial, imperial, and settler colonial programs and policies continue to be reinforced and sustained. There are, however, recent and historical examples in which law has played a significant role in dismantling colonial and imperial structures set up during the process of colonization. This book combines usually distinct Indigenous, Third World and Settler perspectives in order to take up the effort of decolonizing law: both in practice and in the concern to distance and to liberate the foundational theories of legal knowledge and academic engagement from the manifestations of colonialism, imperialism and settler colonialism. Including work by scholars from the Global South and North, this book will be of interest to academics, students and others interested in the legacy of colonial and settler law, and its overcoming.

This book brings together Indigenous, Third World and Settler perspectives on the theory and practice of decolonizing law. Colonialism, imperialism, and settler colonialism continue to affect the lives of racialized communities and Indigenous Peoples around the world. Law, in its many iterations, has played an active role in the dispossession and disenfranchisement of colonized peoples. Law and its various institutions are the means by which colonial, imperial, and settler colonial programs and policies continue to be reinforced and sustained. There are, however, recent and historical examples in which law has played a significant role in dismantling colonial and imperial structures set up during the process of colonization. This book combines usually distinct Indigenous, Third World and Settler perspectives in order to take up the effort of decolonizing law: both in practice and in the concern to distance and to liberate the foundational theories of legal knowledge and academic engagement from the manifestations of colonialism, imperialism and settler colonialism. Including work by scholars from the Global South and North, this book will be of interest to academics, students and others interested in the legacy of colonial and settler law, and its overcoming.

Jochen von Bernstorff and Philipp Dann’s ‘The Battle for International Law: South-North Perspectives on the Decolonization Era’ (Battle for International Law) is an ambitious undertaking. The editors along with their gathered authors explore ‘the battle’ waged by the newly formed independent states, as they arrived on the international scene from prolonged periods of colonization. What […]

This chapter examines the role of the judiciary, the Registry, and defence counsel at the International Criminal Court with a view to assessing whether defendants’ rights are adequately protected at the Court. Part I examines the critical role played by the judges of the Court as those ultimately responsible for safeguarding the fairness of all judicial proceedings. Part II considers the role of the Registry in protecting defendants’ rights. While potentially less apparent to those unfamiliar with the Court, the Registry plays an integral role in this task by, inter alia, facilitating the appointment of legal representation, managing the Court’s legal aid program, and managing the Court’s detention centre. Part III then reviews the structure and provision of defence counsel of the Court, including the guaranteed right to counsel, competency requirements for counsel, ethical obligations of defence counsel, the unique Office of the Public Counsel for Defence, and the Court’s legal aid regime. Finally, section IV assesses whether defendants’ rights are adequately protected. The Rome Statute, Rules of Procedure and Evidence, Regulations of the Court and the Registry, the Chambers Practice Manual, Code of Judicial Ethics, and Code of Professional Conduct for Counsel together define a comprehensive regime for protection of the rights of defendants at the Court. Many have lauded this as an improvement over prior courts and tribunals. Nonetheless, many critiques have been levied regarding insufficient resources for defence counsel and inadequate legal aid funding as well as institutional inequality between the defence and prosecution. Actual, robust implementation of this regime is critical for true equality of arms and full guarantee of defendants’ rights.

This short commentary examines the impacts of having "no numerical grades" during the Covid-19 pandemic. The author explores how this disruptive moment may open opportunities for competency-based assessment in legal education.

Ontario’s recent order-in-council adopting the IHRA’s definition of antisemitism has been lauded by some. However, critics fear that it could be used to curtail criticism of the Israeli government.

Semi-colonialism is a perplexing concept in international legal scholarship that has more often than not been conflated with colonialism proper. To remedy this analytic confusion, I propose a shift from a focus on the ideological aspects of the imperialism of international law to the semi colonial practices of informal domination on the ground. To do this, I revisit the understudied concept of the ‘protectorate’ in international law, and analyze its geopolitical uses. The geopolitical dimensions of protection illustrate the importance of geopolitics in the history of international law. After examining the connections between geopolitics and international law, the second part of the article looks into the origins of the strategic region of the ‘Middle East,’ focusing on the history of the protected states of the Trucial treaty system in the Persian Gulf. Finally, I turn to the ‘Question of Oman’ at the United Nations (1957-1965) to illustrate how the practices of informal domination operated through semi-colonial techniques of veiling imperial domination, the legal obfuscation of power relations, the legitimization of unilateral treaty breaking and geopolitical maneuvering with international legal arguments.

The deadly fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the landlocked region could spiral into broader war – and Canada has a role to play in intervening

A vast literature has considered the proactive use of law as a tool by progressive social movements, but far less attention has been paid to the way activists respond to involuntary engagement with law as a result of repression and criminalization. This dissertation explores the legal support infrastructure of grassroots protest movements in Canada and the US by tracing the evolution of contemporary activist legal support through two periods. The tactic of jail solidarity and an emerging legal collective model are highlighted as the key features of the global justice organizing era (1999-2005) while in the second age of austerity era (2008-2018), I discuss evolving approaches to law collective work in various protest movements and highlight a renewed focus on anti-repression as a framing praxis of both organizing and legal support. Grounded in my own activist legal support work over more than two decades, this research rests on data arising from detailed interviews and analysis of more than 125 archival documents. I develop two areas of inquiry. First, I trace critiques of movement lawyering in the legal literature to demonstrate that those critiques are often shared by legal support organizers. Divergent opinions on the appropriate role of lawyers and norms of professional ethics in law collective practice reflect long-standing contradictions in progressive lawyering practice. Accordingly, I argue that the legal work of non-lawyer activists ought to be understood as a complementary if also sometimes disruptive model of movement lawyering. Second, I demonstrate that an analysis of radical legal support speaks to the post-arrest experiences of protesters and the impact of such repression on mobilization phenomena largely absent from the literature on state repression of social movements. I consider this dynamic through the lens of legal mobilization, arguing that the pedagogical work of law collectives, understood as a site of social movement knowledge production, plays a significant role in mediating the complex relationship between repression and mobilization. I conclude by exploring the legal consciousness of activist legal support organizers and argue that the education and organizing praxes of law collectives are evidence of a form of prefigurative, counter-hegemonic legality.