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Price is an essential term at the heart of supplier-consumer transactions and relationships increasingly taking place in “micro-marketplace chambers,” where points of comparison with similar relevant products may be difficult to discern and time-consuming to make. This article critically reviews recent legal and economic academic literature, policy reports on algorithmic personalized pricing (i.e. setting prices according to consumers’ personal characteristics to target their willingness to pay), as well as recent developments in privacy regulation, competition law, and policy discourse, to derive the guiding norms that should inform the regulation of this practice, predominantly from a consumer protection perspective. Looking more closely at algorithmic personalized pricing through prevailing and conflicting norms of supplier freedom, competition, market efficiency, innovation, as well as equality, fairness, privacy, autonomy, and transparency, raises important concerns about certain forms of algorithmic personalized pricing. This article provides parameters to delineate when algorithmic personalized pricing should be banned as a form of unfair commercial practice. This ban would address the substantive issues that algorithmic personalized pricing raises. Resorting to mandatory disclosure requirements of algorithmic personalized pricing would address some of the concerns at a procedural level only, and for this reason is not the preferred regulatory approach. As such, our judgment on the (un)acceptability of algorithmic personalized pricing as a commercial practice is a litmus test for how we should regulate the indiscriminate extraction and use of consumer personal data in the future.

Our purpose in creating the TWAIL Review is to provide a space for critical scholars, mainly from the global South and their allies oriented to the South, to participate in the project of international law, to produce knowledge creatively through interdisciplinarity, and to push our discipline towards becoming more just, more radical, and more responsive to the collective challenges we face.

This article is about two ideologies. Welfare-consequentialism holds that government should adopt the policies that can rationally be expected to maximise aggregate welfare. Populism holds that society is divided into a pure people and a corrupt elite, and asserts that public policy should express the general will of the people. The responses of world governments to the coronavirus pandemic have clearly illustrated the contrast between these ideologies, and the danger that populist government poses to human wellbeing. The article argues that welfare-consequentialism offers a vaccine for populism. First, it rebuts populism’s claims about who government is for and what it should do. Second, the pessimism and distrust that make people crave populism can be satiated by successful welfare-consequentialist government. Finally, welfare-consequentialism’s sunny narrative of progress can be just as compelling to people as populism’s dark story has proven to be.

The novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, which causes the disease known as COVID-19, has infected people in 212 countries so far and on every continent except Antarctica.   Vast changes to our home lives, social interactions, government functioning and relations between countries have swept the world in a few months and are difficult to hold in one’s mind at one time. That is why a collaborative effort such as this edited, multidisciplinary collection is needed. This book confronts the vulnerabilities and interconnectedness made visible by the pandemic and its consequences, along with the legal, ethical and policy responses. These include vulnerabilities for people who have been harmed or will be harmed by the virus directly and those harmed by measures taken to slow its relentless march; vulnerabilities exposed in our institutions, governance and legal structures; and vulnerabilities in other countries and at the global level where persistent injustices harm us all.   Hopefully, COVID-19 will forces us to deeply reflect on how we govern and our policy priorities; to focus preparedness, precaution, and recovery to include all, not just some.  Published in English and French.

"At the time of writing, the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, which causes the disease known as COVID-19,1 has infected people in 212 countries and on every continent except Antarctica. As of May 17, 2020, 5,780 people have died in Canada, and worldwide, there are over 313,000 reported deaths. The true death toll is certainly higher, and more will die in the coming months. Vast changes to our home lives, social interactions, government functioning and relations between countries have swept the world in a few months and are difficult to hold in one's mind at one time. That is why a collaborative effort such as this edited, multidisciplinary collection is needed. This book confronts the vulnerabilities and interconnectedness made visible by the pandemic and its consequences, along with the legal, ethical and policy responses. These include vulnerabilities for people who have been harmed or will be harmed by the virus directly and those harmed by measures taken to slow its relentless march; vulnerabilities exposed in our institutions, governance and legal structures; and vulnerabilities in other countries and at the global level where persistent injustices harm us all. We conclude with the hope that COVID-19 forces us to deeply reflect on how we govern and our policy priorities; to focus preparedness, precaution, and recovery to include all, not just some."--

Pierre Trudeau’s deep personal commitment to Catholicism was largely unknown to Canadians during his tenure as Prime Minister. Indeed, his religious commitment did not play an obvious role in his political life. Trudeau’s version of Catholicism, ‘personalism’, emphasized the personal – interior – spiritual commitment of the individual and the necessity of the separation of religion and politics. He stressed the importance of individual liberty in matters of faith but also the personal responsibility of the individual to serve others and work towards a more just society. Trudeau was opposed to the recognition of an official religion, and indeed to any form of state promotion of a particular religious belief system. He rejected the assumption that political community or social solidarity required a shared (and public) commitment to a particular faith or culture. His promotion of multiculturalism stemmed from his belief that national identity or political membership should not be based on a shared ethnicity that would necessarily include some and exclude others. His championing of the Charter of Rights rested on the view that citizenship should be grounded instead on a shared commitment to the protection of individual and democratic rights. Trudeau was a committed believer and a secular politician, who sought to separate his public action and private conscience. In a sense then he embodied the separation of religion and politics – of church and state – that is central to the contemporary conception of religious freedom. In this chapter, I want to explore the challenge of separating personal or communal spiritual life from civic life which Trudeau had to navigate, throughout his political career.

Religious beliefs/practices are excluded and insulated from political contest not because they are intrinsically valuable but instead because they are aspects of a collective or cultural identity and markers of membership in the collective. If the state’s duty to accommodate religious practices is about the status of religious groups rather than the liberty of individuals (a matter of equality rather than liberty) then it may not extend to practices that are idiosyncratic and have no link to a religious or cultural group/tradition. The requirement that the state should accommodate religious beliefs or practices (and sometimes compromise its policies) is most often justified as necessary to ensure that the individual’s deepest values and commitments and more generally his/her autonomy in decision- making are respected. I argue, however, that reasonable accommodation is better understood as a form of equality right that is based on the importance of community or group membership to the individual. Understood in this way, the accommodation requirement may not extend to an individual’s deeply held non-religious practices, if they are not part of a shared belief system. The willingness of the courts to protect certain non- religious practices (to require their accommodation by the state) may rest simply on their formal similarity to familiar religious practices such as pacifism or vegetarianism – that are specific in content, peremptory in force and that diverge from mainstream practices. Yet, as a practical matter, practices of this kind are seldom sustained outside a religious or cultural community. It is not an accident then that the very few instances of non-religious, ‘conscientious’, practices that have been accommodated are similar in content and structure to familiar religious practices, and indeed may have arisen from these religious practices.