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"This classic, well-respected casebook provides a comprehensive overview of the foundational concepts, principles, sources, and institutions of the international legal system. It has been cited as an authority in the Supreme Court of Canada and lower courts for decades."-- Provided by publisher.

Ontario’s two income support social assistance programs disentitle beneficiaries if they enter into spousal relationships with people with more resources than them. By undertaking a survey of the jurisprudence of the Social Benefits Tribunal, the article presents the two main ways in which poor people’s choices about their family lives are constrained through the operation of Ontario’s social assistance regime. The article elucidates how social assistance law, policy and adjudication act as a form of family law for poor people using welfare, and how the constraints it imposes interfere with the autonomy of society’s poorest.

Two very general ideas have shaped my thinking about constitutional law. The first is that most of the rights in the Charter protect or advance different aspects of our relationship or connection with others. We are social beings. Who we are – our identity, our agency – is shaped by our interactions with others. Rights such as freedom of expression, religious freedom, and the right to equality, do not simply protect individual autonomy, but instead protect different aspects of human flourishing within community. The second theme is narrower and more legal and has to do with what we can expect from the courts in the protection of rights or the advancement of the public good. Courts are adjudicative bodies. Their role is to interpret and apply the law – existing law - to the cases that come before them. Because courts are insulated from political pressure, they are well suited to the role of adjudicator – to resolving disputes based on the law. At the same time, because they are independent in this way, courts are poorly suited to the task of general policymaking, or the redistribution of resources. In my writing I have explored both these themes, and the tension between them. In this lecture, I will discuss three Charter rights – freedom of expression, the right to equality, and religious freedom – to illustrate what I mean by the social character of rights and the tension between this understanding of rights and the structure of constitutional adjudication.  

"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…

A case comment on a recent Ontario Court of Appeal decision on the tort of family violence.

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.

This article outlines the concept of “critical race equality” in Canadian constitutional law and critiques the Supreme Court of Canada’s jurisprudential silence on systemic racism under section 15 of the Charter. First, the article discusses the theory of critical race equality. It describes six principles that animate a critical race perspective, which understands equality as ambitious, contextual, ideological, comparative, systemic, and positive. Second, the article discusses the practice of critical race equality. It traces a genealogy from the Supreme Court’s first equality decision (Andrews) to its latest (Fraser), both of which reflect the principles of critical race equality. This genealogy demonstrates that critical race equality has been consistently affirmed by the Supreme Court, yet has never been applied by the Court to ubiquitous systemic inequality confronting Black and Indigenous communities in Canada. This article concludes that systemic racial justice advocacy under section 15 of the Charter is doctrinally viable. Consequently, it calls upon a coalition of scholars, lawyers, and organizers to recognize that viability as one of many tools for challenging unconstitutional state neglect and advancing systemic racial justice.

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.

<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