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Law students are the future of the legal profession. How well prepared are they when they leave law school to assume the professional and ethical obligations that they owe themselves, the profession and the public? This question has led to a growing interest in Canada in the teaching of legal ethics. It is also led to a greater emphasis on the development of clinical and experiential learning as exemplified in the scholarship and teaching of Professor Rose Voyvodic. Less attention, however, has been placed on identifying the general ethical responsibilities of law students when not working in a clinic or other legal context. This can be seen in the presence of very few Canadian articles exploring the issue, and more significantly, in the paucity of law school discipline policies or codes of conduct that set out the professional obligations owed by law students. This article develops an idea that Professor Voyvodic and I talked about on a number of occasions. It argues that all law schools should have a code of conduct which is separate and distinct from their general University code and which resembles, with appropriate modifications, the relevant set of rules of professional responsibility law students will be bound by when called to the Bar. A student code of conduct which educates law students about their professional obligations is an important step in deterring such conduct while in law school and preparing students for ethical practice. The idea of a law school code of professional responsibility raises a number of questions. Why is it necessary for law schools to have their own student code of conduct? The article provides a threefold response. First, law students are members of the legal profession and a code of conduct should reflect this. Second, it must be relevant and comprehensive in order to ensure that it can inspire students to be ethical lawyers. And, third, as a practical matter, the last few years have witnessed a number of incidents at law schools that raise serious issues about the professionalism of law students. They include, for example, the UofT marks scandal, the Windsor first year blog and the proliferation of blogs with gratuitous, defamatory and offensive entries. It is not clear that all of this conduct would be caught by University codes of conduct which often limit their reach to on campus behaviour or University sanctioned events. What should a law school code of professional responsibility look like and what ethical responsibilities should it identify? For example, should there be a mandatory pro bono obligation on students or a duty to report misconduct. The last part of the article addresses this question by setting out a model code of professional responsibility for law students.

Notwithstanding Pierre Trudeau's famous quote from 1967 that the "state has no business in the bedrooms of our nation", adults in Canada who engage in certain kinds of consensual sexual activity in private continue to face the stigma of criminalization and, in some cases, the very real possibility of imprisonment.This comment examines two such situations: (i) section 159 of the Criminal Code and anal intercourse; and (ii) the judicial nullification of consent in cases involving S/M and other sexual practices, like erotic asphyxiation, as evidenced most recently in the case of R. v. A.(J.) which is currently before the Supreme Court of Canada.

The law of entrapment has received very little scholarly attention in Canada despite the fact that its reliance on branding neighbourhoods and other locations as "high crime areas" and its low visibility encounters serve to engender discriminatory policing. This article relies on recent Charter decisions in other contexts to argue that an anti-racist lens is now required as part of the assessment of the bona fides of the investigation branch of the entrapment test from R v Barnes.

In the early morning hours of September 6, 2008, S.B., a twenty-seven-year old African Canadian, experienced the depths of depravity at the hands of five officers with the Ottawa Police Service. She was arrested unlawfully for effectively questioning why she had been stopped by the police, taken to the police station where she was assaulted and strip searched in the presence of a number of male officers, one of whom cut off her shirt and bra with a pair of scissors, and then left half-naked in a cell for over three hours. When she left the police station, she found herself charged with assaulting a police officer. The case was reviewed on a number of occasions by senior prosecutors who believed that the prosecution of S.B. was in the public interest. Two years after the incident, a trial judge stayed the charge concluding that it was a "travesty" and that what happened to her was an "indignity to a human being."

There has been very little critical and feminist commentary in Canada on the admissibility of prior sexual misconduct evidence as similar fact evidence in sexual assault cases. The lack of critical attention to this area of evidence law is surprising given that the similar fact evidence rule, like other rules of evidence, serves as a site for gender, race, and sexual orientation bias.

One consistent and disturbing trend since the birth of the Charter in 1982 is that race has been and continues to be, with a few notable exceptions, erased from the factual narratives presented to the Supreme Court of Canada and from the constitutional legal rules established by the Court in criminal procedure cases. Understanding the etiology of this erasing is not easy. In earlier pieces, the author has explored the role of trial and appellate lawyers. This paper focuses on principles of judicial review and the failure of the Supreme Court to consistently consider the impact of the constitutional rules it creates or interprets on Aboriginal and racialized communities. What makes the silence so problematic is that the Supreme Court gave itself the tool in 2001 to address part of the identified problem when it established an anti-racism principle of Charter interpretation in R. v. Golden, [2001] 3 S.C.R. 369. This paper seeks to address a number of questions focused on the legacy of Golden. What is the origin and content of the Golden principle of judicial review? What is the evidence from subsequent cases and academic commentary that this is indeed an accepted principle of constitutional interpretation? What cases from the 2007 Supreme Court term would have benefited from a critical race analysis? And, in particular, how would factoring in Golden have impacted the Court's analysis in R. v. Clayton, 2007 SCC 32? And finally, how should the Golden principle be applied in future cases?

This article examines the impact of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms on systemic racism in the criminal justice system in Canada. The article's thesis is that while there is reason to be optimistic about the possibilities of future reform, the Charter has, to date, had very little impact on racial injustice in Canada. We continue to incarcerate Aboriginals and African Canadians at alarming rates, racial profiling at our borders and in our streets continues to flourish, and the federal government continues to pass legislation that will further entrench the problem. Of course, some might say that it is simply naive to think that a constitutional document can make a difference and so Part II (Part I is the Introduction) briefly addresses this larger philosophical question. In Part III, the article explores why it is not the Charter that is the problem, but rather those who apply and interpret it. Racial justice has not had a chance to grow over the last 25 years because there has been a significant failure of trial and appellate lawyers to engage in race talk in the courts and a failure of the judiciary to adopt appropriate critical race standards when invited to do so.