Search

This article examines the judicial treatment of complaints of discrimination from workers with mental health issues. Equality protections promise full inclusion in social, work and community life. The principle of inclusion is understood in three inter-related parts: inclusion in the workforce, inclusion in decision-making and, in the most broad and prospective sense, inclusion in Canadian society. The current framework of equality protections has not effectively addressed these core values of inclusion for workers with mental health issues. The workplace continues to be a site of discrimination and harassment. Barriers prevent workers with mental health issues from getting or keeping employment, discourage their participation in decision-making, and entrench the devaluation, isolation and exclusion of persons with mental health issues. Accommodative measures must be alive.

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."

This paper explores Canadian law societies’ involvement in human rights protection and promotion abroad. The authors identify strategies for provincial law societies to contribute overseas, and point out the challenges with adopting such an international focus.

The Special Court for Sierra Leone has been noted for becoming the first international court to convict accused of the crimes of sexual slavery, the use of child soldiers, 'forced marriage', and intentionally directing attacks against peacekeepers. This article analyzes how prosecutions of some of these supposedly 'new' crimes were found not to be in violation of the principle of legality, nullum crimen sine lege. In particular, this article will focus on the crimes of 'forced marriage', intentionally directing attacks against peacekeepers, and sexual slavery: the judgments in the RUF case (Prosecutor v. Sesay, Kallon and Gbao) and the AFRC case (Prosecutor v. Brima, Kamara and Kanu) together reveal two different processes through which the law has proven able to evolve and adapt to accommodate so-called 'new' crimes without violating the principle of legality.

Copyright laws throughout the world are copyright holder centric and present a very fragmented source to comprehend the rights of users, and in particular of consumers owning copies of copyrighted works. Although in recent years, a growing number of commentators have worked towards defining the place of users in copyright law, little attention has been devoted to the nature and justifications of copy ownership of copyrighted works. This paper applies property and copyright theory to define and justify the existence of copy ownership of copyrighted works. It seeks to carve out in clearer terms the place of copy ownership legally and normatively, to offer a counterbalance to a predominant copyright holder centric approach to copyright law. Part One of this paper lays the theoretical framework of property and copyright theory. Part Two applies the theoretical framework to define the nature of the copy of a copyrighted works as well as its justifications. It explores the ramifications of copyright acting as a property-limitation rule to copy ownership, and how copy ownership can also act as a property-limitation rule of copyright.

This paper was written on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Annual Workshop on Commercial and Consumer Law and as a contribution to a collection of retrospective essays in the 50th volume of the Canadian Business Law Journal. In the paper, I reflect briefly on the impact of collective action on consumer access to courts, and the promised guarantee of effective justice. In the first part of the paper, I summarize the results of an empirical study which asked class action lawyers to identify the categories of cases being litigated, including those that come within the rubric of "consumer protection actions." I then examine two of the more significant advances in consumer rights litigation, namely, the development of the waiver of tort doctrine and the widespread rejection of mandatory arbitration clauses in consumer contracts. In the final part of the paper, I discuss two challenges to achieving substantive justice for consumers that have recently become more pronounced: increasing reliance on cy près distribution of settlements, and the effect of adverse costs awards on representative plaintiffs.

The Internal Inquiry into the Actions of Canadian officials in relation to Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad Abou-Elmatti and Muayyed Nureddin is a particularly pronounced example of the use of secrecy that has defined Canada in the wake of 9/11. Despite having the authority to hold some portions of the Inquiry in public, the Iacobucci Inquiry was conducted almost exclusively in camera and ex parte. The result was an inquiry that was unlike previous commissions called under the federal Inquiries Act.

Law can be the site through which women's dignity and equality can be expressed and pursued. Speaking the language of rights translates one's needs from private interests to public claims through words and concepts that the community – local, national and/or international – have already validated. Law can therefore offer a medium to confront the injustices and unfairness built into other systems of political, social and economic ordering. Women's rights advocates have won significant victories through law and have generated gains for women's dignity and equality. However, law can also be a place where women's rights are not only silenced but where social, economic and political power structures are replicated and work against women's rights.

The remedies that administrative tribunals can administer is an under studied area. Often, empowering legislation simply extoils an administrative tribunal to do what is ''fair and just''. In this paper, I argue that when confronted with open-textured remedial provisions, tribunals may often benefit from drawing by analogy from developed common law principles used to quantify monetary and non-monetary relief.

With this brief introduction to a special issue of the Osgoode Hall Law School Comparative Law and Political Economy Research Paper Series, we hope to evoke some of the discussions and background preparation that invigorated the 2010 Osgoode Graduate Law Students' Association conference.

On May 25 - 26, 2010, Université Laval, the University of Windsor Faculty of Law and the University of Louisville Brandeis School of Law, hosted the Sixth Administrative Law Discussion Forum. These discussion fora, which have become an international academic success, have been held in a variety of venues in North America and Europe since the early 1990s. They are an initiative of Russell Weaver, Professor of Law & Distinguished University Scholar at the University of Louisville. The fora provide an opportunity for thoughtful exchange among administrative law academics on contemporary issues that cut across national borders.

Victor Kattan's “From Coexistence to Conquest: International Law and the Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1891–1949” is an archival excavation of the Israeli-Palestinian (Arab-Israeli) conflict and its origins. This review will examine the contours of Kattan's book followed by a brief examination of objectivity in academic scholarship often enunciated through the concept of ‘balance’ as it relates to those scholars (like Kattan) working on the conflict. Finally, this review will explore some of the weakness of the arguments that Kattan advances.

This volume of essays is the end product of the Second International Symposium on the Law of Remedies, a joint undertaking of the Faculties of Law at the Universities of Windsor, Canada, and Auckland (Research Centre for Business Law), New Zealand. The symposium brought together scholars drawn from four continents, representing the major Commonwealth common law jurisdictions, as well as the United States and Ireland. Collectively, the essays illustrate the breadth and depth of attention that is now accorded to the study of remedies throughout the common law world. The collection also demonstrates the value of fruitful exchanges across common law jurisdictions that have much to gain from learning of one another's experiences, thereby enriching the body of knowledge for a system that is inherently built upon discrete and incremental case law.

As part of an international group of scholars who came together in December 2007 to discuss and debate the use of class actions worldwide, the authors prepared a report on the role of class proceedings in Canada. The original report followed a format designed by the conference organizers and traced the procedural particularities and historical pedigree of class actions in Canada, as well as the general policy rationales and arguments that continue to attend them. Condensed versions of the country reports, including this Canadian report, were published in March 2009.