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As the personalization of e-commerce transactions continues to intensify, the law and policy implications of algorithmic personalized pricing (APP) should be top of mind for regulators. Price is often the single most important term of consumer transactions. APP is a form of online discriminatory pricing practice whereby suppliers set prices based on consumers’ personal information with the objective of getting as close as possible to their maximum willingness to pay. As such, APP raises issues of competition, privacy, personal data protection, contract, consumer protection, and anti-discrimination law.This book chapter looks at the legality of APP from a Canadian perspective in competition, commercial consumer law, and personal data protection law.

The skill set required of lawyers is evolving, and the ability to creatively and expeditiously resolve client concerns through effective negotiation is increasingly important. In this chapter, we argue that negotiation competitions are an excellent method to nurture the knowledge, skills, attitudes, judgment, and values—or competencies—that are vital to law students’ success in legal practice. Such competencies include knowing key negotiation concepts; managing information and process; communicating and relationship-building; advocating for client interests in a problem-solving environment; being aware of and managing one’s own biases; internalizing ethical decision-making in negotiation, and engaging in reflective practice. These competencies are not the focus of certain other kinds of law student competitions, such as appellate and trial moots, which are designed to sharpen legal analysis and rights-based advocacy in an adversarial model. The Canadian National Negotiation Competition (CNNC) departs from that model. It gives law students the opportunity to engage in negotiations like those that lawyers experience in practice and to receive feedback from experts, in either English or French streams. It also invites students to wrestle with complex scenarios that feature both business and broader social policy tensions and objectives. In this chapter, the authors recount their experience with developing, running and growing the CNNC for nine years and highlight some of the key pedagogical lessons learned.

"The past few decades have been witness to a number of important developments with respect to the global intellectual property (IP) system, which defined broadly encompasses the network of international and regional treaties, constitutional documents, national laws, court decisions, and local practices that make up the substantive and procedural body of IP law worldwide. These developments include the movement away from multilateralism towards bilateralism/regionalism; growing recognition of the various ways in which IP intersects with and impacts areas including human rights, development, trade, and social justice; broad acknowledgement of the economic worth of many IP rights; and important theoretical interventions that have challenged the principles and values underlying the global IP system, including through critical IP theory and the theory of new constitutionalism. These developments have occurred alongside a number of other events, changes, and crises that have changed the landscape of our global communities. Chief among them are climate change; armed conflicts; the COVID-19 pandemic; economic changes to work; and technological shifts including those relating to the internet and artificial intelligence, and their role in society. These economic, environmental, and technological changes have occurred alongside a growing recognition of the inequities that exist within and between societies as well as the ways in which these inequities are reinforced and maintained through systemic discrimination and ongoing colonialism. Given these developments, events, changes, and crises, what is the future of the global IP system? To what extent will the enactment of new treaties (or the reform or implementation of existing treaties) shape IP law over the coming years? What role, if any, will constitutional documents (including bills of rights) play in the context of the global IP system? Will today’s transformations lead to substantive reform of areas of IP law including copyright, trademark, and patents, and if so, which reforms will be given priority? What principles and values will animate the global IP system moving forward? This book is grounded in the belief that there are many possible futures for the global IP system. Countless pathways lay ahead of us, that can be followed or pursued, leading to a multiplicity of outcomes. These futures can materialize in many different ways. Social movements can reach into and through IP to effect change and to embed new values and perspectives. An idea can emerge (sometimes in multiple places at the same time) and, through the hard work of individuals and collectives, both change the way in which individuals perceive a body of law and reshape the law itself. Technological change can create a set of futures that otherwise might not have been available or even imagined."-- Provided by publisher

(2025) 6 TWAIL Review 188–221ISSN 2563-6693Published under a Creative Commons licence.  Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are increasingly promoted as having magical properties, evoking illusory…

Class counsel fees and their relationship to class member compensation are among the most important—and most controversial—statistics used to evaluate the normative outcomes of the class action mechanism. The perception that class attorneys reap windfall rewards while the class ‘gets nothing’ is persistent among class action critics. The ratio of legal fees to settlement funds captures the critical trade-off between counsels’ entrepreneurial incentives to pursue lucrative claims and the agency challenges endemic to these proceedings. In the most comprehensive analysis of Canadian class actions to date, the authors use new data and novel econometric methods to explore the nature of class action fee ratios in Ontario for both economics and legal audiences. To start, we calculate “all-in” fee ratios—lawyer fees plus disbursements divided by settlement amounts in Ontario—of 25.0% on average and at the median. Next, we show that judges are sensitive to windfall gains and sweetheart deals, problems associated with large awards, and adjust fees based on settlement size. These data and estimates contribute to a better understanding of judicial economy and access to justice in practice, the principal arguments in favour of class proceedings.

This article delves into the recent efforts of Asian migrant massage and sex workers in the Town of Newmarket, Ontario, and their struggle against a recently amended Personal Wellness Establishments (PWE) By-law. It starts with a historical overview of municipal licensing schemes and legislated migration controls in Canada, used to justify increased surveillance, control movement, and deny Asian women entry into Canada, before illustrating the enduring impacts on Asian migrant workers today. It concludes by emphasizing that migrant sex workers, often depicted as voiceless and nonconsenting victims, take leadership and have agency in defining their own struggles and authoring possibilities to resist.

Welfarism is the idea that government should always try to make individuals’ lives go better, for them, than they otherwise would, overall. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate welfarism’s compatibility with, and potential to support, the ambitions of person-centred justice. Welfarism is a normative theory applicable to public policy generally, but one which has distinct consequences in the realm of law and legal systems. They are considered just to the extent that they generate the best possible expected welfare consequences for all of the individuals who are affected by them. Welfarism is radically person-centred because it requires lawmakers to treat each individual affected by their work as a distinct locus of value, including those who have been subordinated or ignored., RésuméLe welfarisme est l’idée selon laquelle le gouvernement devrait toujours essayer d’améliorer la vie des individus, et ce, d’une manière à ce que la qualité de vie des individus soit supérieure à ce qu’elle l’aurait été sans ladite intervention gouvernementale. Dans cette voie, l’objectif de cet article est de démontrer la compatibilité du welfarisme avec les ambitions d’une justice centrée sur la personne et son potentiel pour soutenir cette forme de justice. Le welfarisme est une théorie normative applicable aux politiques publiques en général, mais qui entraîne toutefois des conséquences distinctes dans le domaine du droit et des systèmes juridiques. Les lois sont alors considérées comme justes si elles génèrent les meilleures conséquences possibles en termes de bien-être pour tous les individus qui sont affectés par celles-ci. Le welfarisme est radicalement centré sur la personne, car il exige que les législateurs traitent chaque individu affecté par leur travail comme un lieu de valeur distinct, y compris celles et ceux qui ont été subordonnés ou ignorés.

Guest column: Make 'The Gordie' — with cycling/ pedestrian path — a bridge to building better cycling infrastructure in the City of Windsor.

The constantly developing norm of access to justice is moving to occupy a central place in the administrative justice system,  prompting a need to rethink the values that should serve to animate the system. This article offers a framework for the administrative justice system in Canada, one that firmly and explicitly entrenches the value of access to administrative justice within it. It reflects on the requirements to achieve access for a significant population of its users – namely, equality-deserving communities. The author looks at the historical reasons why access to justice has been a concern for equality-deserving communities, and introduces the concept of social equity from the discipline of public administration as a tool to assist in addressing some of the structural and systemic access-to-administrative-justice challenges experienced. The author rearticulates the foundational values of administrative law in Canada to incorporate access to administrative justice as a distinct value, one that engages with access-to-justice barriers relating to structural and systemic inequality. In doing so, she details five core principles that underpin the new value of access to administrative justice and cites examples of recent tribunal reform projects in Canada that illustrate promising innovations in that direction. Finally, the author describes briefly the ways in which institutional design and tribunal culture can contribute to enhancing the value of access to administrative justice within the broad, on-the-ground context of different administrative actors. Overall, this article presents an analysis of the dynamic interaction between marginalized populations and the administrative state in order to move forward judicial and other contemporary discussions about access to administrative justice and how it should be defined.

<div> The constantly developing norm of access to justice is moving to occupy a central place in the administrative justice system, prompting a need to rethink

This article analyzes interview data from nine Black criminalized individuals and nine defence lawyers (five white, three Black, and one Arab) about the utility of heightened race visibility in sentencing proceedings. The data reveals a schism between these groups, reflecting different responses to what I refer to as “the paradox of visibility.” For Black people, this paradox occurs when an emphasis on race may simultaneously have a deleterious and ameliorating impact on sentencing. Defence lawyers and judges laud the ameliorative potential of race visibility, which obscures the genuine concern shared by criminalized Black individuals about how they believe their Blackness betrays them in the criminal sentencing context. In this regard, the article explores ethical concerns arising from this paradox. It also argues that race-based strategies at sentencing are not a no-cost or low-cost proposition. Indeed, from the criminalized research participants’ point of view, the cost is not only the risk that an emphasis on race may result in a higher sentence, including longer and harsher custodial sentences, but also an affront to their dignity. In contrast, the defence lawyers strongly supported increased racial visibility to combat what they saw as judicial and prosecutorial intransigence to grapple with race in sentencing proceedings. These perspectives are critical for sentencing judges tasked with sentencing Black individuals and for lawyers who are developing and deploying legal strategies to assist their Black clients.

To what extent can statements made by an applicant, intrinsic to a patent specification, be accepted as facts? Is this question context-dependent, or is there a hard-line rule that applies across the board? Should it matter what patent law issue is involved: patentable subject matter; obviousness; claim construction? Perhaps most importantly, why does this question matter? What is at stake? This piece argues that there should be a judicial apprehension towards recognizing the blanket proposition that applicant statements within a patent specification can be accepted as matter of fact supporting a determination regarding common general knowledge. Specifically, there should be a judicial apprehension towards endorsing the acceptance of statements made within a patent specification as factual determinations regarding the state of the art or common general knowledge of a hypothetical skilled artisan, when such assertions lack reference to any factual source that is extrinsic to the patent document. Broadly, this piece argues that the law/fact distinction should be drawn along the corresponding intrinsic/extrinsic distinction.

The Supreme Court has chosen to exclude from intervention the voices of those directly impacted. This exclusion rehearses Canada’s longer history of excluding sex workers.

In their early decisions under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the Canadian courts described religious freedom as a liberty that protects the individual from state coercion in religious matters. According to the courts, the individual has both the right to practice their religion without state interference and the right not to be compelled by the state to perform a particular religions practice. However, in later judgments the courts have also, or instead, described religious freedom as a form of equality right that requires the state to remain neutral in religious matters – to not favour the practices and beliefs of one religious community over those of another. Underlying the courts’ judgments is a complex conception of religious commitment in which religion is viewed as both a personal commitment to a set of beliefs about truth and right and as a cultural identity. The challenge for the courts has been to fit this complex conception of religious commitment into a constitutional framework that relies on a distinction between individual choices or commitments that should be protected as a matter of liberty, and individual or shared attributes that should be respected as a matter of equality. The constitutional framework imposes this distinction between judgment and identity on the rich and complex experience of religious commitment.