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In a global era marked by surging racial nationalism and penal populism , anti-racist and decolonial research, education, and training has been under increasing threat in academia across the world. Popular use of the universalizing language of liberal internationalism as the dominant frame in discussing these developments leaves gaps in our understanding as to what areas of academic freedom are under the greatest threat, why they are under threat, what levers of sanction and discipline are used to suppress certain areas, and for what ends. Such a frame risks contributing to overly abstracted conceptualizations of academic freedom (and unfreedom) that are unmoored from the realities of how power operates in educational institutions and attendant maldistributions of who can in fact claim and be protected by academic freedom and who cannot.In this article, I put into conversation three very different jurisdictional contexts where nationalist backlash to, and suppression of, anti-racist and decolonial education and scholarship is occurring. Specifically, it examines American anti-Critical Race Theory (CRT) campaigns, Chinese suppression of scholarship critical of its ongoing colonial suppression of non-Han native peoples in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), and Israeli suppression of scholarship critical of its ongoing occupation of Palestinian territories through the case study of the ‘Spiro scandal’ at the University of Toronto (UofT) Faculty of Law. No good politics of academic freedom can emerge without centering an analysis of broader societal power and subordination. This is particularly true in the areas of national security and anti-racism, which form both distinct grounds for legal and political intervention in academic freedom. A national security threat engages certain types of legal grounds, particularly domestically (e.g. carceral responses to perceived counterterrorism, separatism, and extremism threats) while anti-racism justifies other types of intervention (e.g. civil rights complaints, removing of curriculum, firings, cutting funding) and can operate powerfully on a transnational level as well. I highlight three common elements in a transnational blueprint that can be observed in the creation, justification, and operation of selective nationalist attacks on academic freedom in anti-racist and decolonial education. My highlighting of these common elements are not meant to suggest any sort of equivalence between their operation, historical context, and/or relative severity, but rather to advance our collective understanding of the distributive nature of academic freedom politics and its relationship to power, race, and colonialism. Unpacking these campaigns transnationally complicates and unsettles the dichotomy between authoritarian and liberal populist censorship, giving us a more nuanced foundation by which to protect academic freedom and knowledge production in the service of racial justice and collective liberation.

The first volume of the Canadian Bar Review (CBR) was published in 1923. In commemoration of the centenary of the CBR, this article briefly reflects on the journal’s history. In doing so, we highlight the CBR’s seminal role as a meeting place for scholarship, practice and legal traditions in Canada.

Drawing on elements of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy as a case study, this chapter on Indigenous international law interrogates the widely held and long-standing premise that international law is the sole purview of Europe. This chapter contends European-centred international law arose out of Europe, for European-based legal systems—namely common and civil legal traditions, now practised in many countries beyond Europe, such as Canada. Indigenous international law, conversely, continues to be engaged with today by many Indigenous nations around the world, arose from Indigenous world views. The chapter also examines some of the ways in which Indigenous international laws continue today in spite of colonial disruption.

Michael Trebilcock's superb new book was published on March 8th, 2022. Just the week before, something happened that shows just how important this monograph is. Just across the street from Trebilcock's office at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law is Queen's Park, the seat of the Ontario Legislature. On February 28th, the Government introduced Bill 88 there. The Bill was entitled The Working for Workers Act, and mostly pertained to employment standards for digital workers. However, tucked at the end of the Bill was legislation on a completely different topic. Schedule 5 would have abolished the College of Traditional Chinese Medicine Practitioners of Ontario. Since 2006, this entity had regulated practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine and acupuncture in the province. No consultation or warning preceded the surprising move to eliminate the College. Practitioners of Chinese Medicine, and the College itself, apparently learned about this plan on the same day as the rest of the province. It took the press and the Opposition a few days to notice what had been proposed. Questioned in the Legislature a few days later, Minister of Health Christine Elliot stated that abolishing the regulator would "allow more individuals to get back into the business of practising traditional Chinese medicine." The College's examinations and disciplinary proceedings would be replaced by an optional registration regime, under a regulator also charged with overseeing personal support workers. The licenses issued by the College to people who had passed the exams would henceforth have no legal significance. Premier Doug Ford, in a press conference later that day, blamed the College’s decision to administer licensing exams in English or French only, given that many aspiring practitioners were only fluent in Mandarin or Cantonese.

Sri Lanka’s recent tumultuous economic crisis has generated grave uncertainty in the global financial ecosystem. Sri Lanka’s fiscal demise, described as the “canary in the coalmine”, has served as a glaring cautionary tale for financial regulators. The International Financial Institutions continue to warn of subsequent economic fallouts as global debt issues simmer to the surface. Sri Lanka’s economic fallout serves as a story besieged by colonial, political and current geopolitical conditions, which are further compounded by the end of the brutal civil war, foreign debt and post Covid-19 consequences. This paper, however, explores the cracks in the economic foundation using historical moments that paved the legal framework for the emergence of a centralized banking institution. This historical inquiry includes the origins of the financial inclusion discourse in Sri Lanka, which encompasses both colonial and post-colonial temporalities. As a result of Sri Lanka’s fiscal collapse, the Central Bank of Sri Lanka’s role has been under scrutiny. The economic crisis began in 2019, yet the financial regulator’s failure to engage in mitigating tactics to combat the rapid decrease in foreign reserves, rise in sovereign debt, financial mismanagement and political interference is underexplored. In order to further understand how the CBSL, the country’s first financial steward and custodian of fiscal stability, became ineffective, a closer examination of its genesis is made. This paper serves to examine the formation of centralized banking through a particular conceptual goal of ‘financial inclusion’, which catalyzed the establishment of the current central bank structure in Sri Lanka. As such, the financial policies designed and developed crafted by the financial regulator are explored through the lens of financial inclusion.

Four of Ontario’s highest-volume adjudicative tribunals became seriously dysfunctional in late 2018. Systemic delays of months or years arose, basic procedural rights were abandoned, and substantive miscarriages of justice became common in the fields of residential tenancy, human rights, and entitlement to benefits. This article describes these symptoms, before seeking to diagnose the underlying problem. The proximate cause of the dysfunction was the approach to tribunal appointments taken by the executive branch of Ontario’s government. Members appointed by the previous government were “de-appointed” en masse, and meritorious replacements were not found promptly. Some of these problems began prior to 2018. Shortcomings in the other two branches of Ontario’s government also contributed to the dysfunctionality. The Ontario Legislature’s statute governing adjudicative tribunals, and its committee overseeing appointments, lacked the powers and resources that would be necessary to safeguard them from executive neglect. Meanwhile, Ontario’s courts are not an accessible and proportionate forum to backstop adjudicative tribunals. Moreover, a review of the case law shows that they lack doctrinal tools to hold the Government responsible for systemic delay and counterproductive appointment practices.

Guest column: Canada must respond with sanctions to Azerbaijan’s 'ethnic cleansing'

While AI has been touted by industry as an innovative tool that will yield benefits for the public, examining the impact of AI from a substantive equality perspective reveals profound harms. As a leading national organization with a mandate to advance substantive gender equality, LEAF urges the government to centre substantive equality and human rights as the guiding principles when regulating the growing use of AI. With this goal in mind, LEAF submits that the scope of AIDA must - at least - be substantially expanded in order to enable regulations that can protect against all present and emerging harms from AI. Overview of Recommendations:1. Government institutions must be included in the scope of AIDA (remove s. 3) 2. The statutory definitions of “harm” and “biased output” must be expanded (amend s. 5) 3. Harm mitigation measures must not be restricted to “high-impact” systems (remove s. 7 and remove “high-impact” from ss. 8, 9, 11, 12; amend s. 36(b) so that different obligations for different types of systems can be developed in regulations)4. “Persons responsible” for AI-systems must explicitly include those involved in system training and testing (amend s. 5) 5. “Persons responsible” should be required to perform an equity and privacy audit to evaluate the possibility and likelihood of harm and biased outputs in advance of using, selling, or making available an AI-system. This audit must also be published and made available to the public (amend ss. 8 and 11; amend s. 36 to allow the Governor in Council to outline the requirements for an equity and privacy audit).6. Substantive equality and public consultation must inform the development of regulations (amend preamble and s. 35(1)).

This article centers on the profound discrepancy between efforts by First Nations to obtain injunctions against industry and the state versus the far more successful record of corporations and governments seeking to obtain injunctions against First Nations. We examine how the common law test for injunctions in struggles over lands and resources leads to these results. We begin by tracking the history of injunctions in the Aboriginal law context, especially the development of s 35(1) jurisprudence, which ironically deprived First Nations of access to injunctions, despite an earlier period of successful defence of Indigenous land rights using this legal tool. We then focus on the doctrinal and political function of the “public interest” consideration in injunction cases, positioning this concept within a broader political economy framework. Finally, we turn to the origins of the injunction as an equitable remedy and argue that the current imbalance in injunction success rates ought to be understood through a re-examination of equity within a broader historical trajectory of settler-colonial legality. We conclude that the heavy lifting done by notions of ‘public interest’ both relies on and obscures the circumvention and exclusion of Aboriginal treaty and constitutional rights from the law of injunctions and constitutes a de facto resolution of Aboriginal land rights in Canada. Finally, we ask what place, if any, exists in injunction jurisprudence for Indigenous law and governance.

This work explores the question of how professionalization of patent agency along with its accompanying discourse has affected the direction of international patent institutions and networks. Professionalization of patent agency is defined as the government regulation of who may provide patent agent services to the public through the form of professional licensing requirements. To the extent that professionalization of patent agency has created a unique discourse of patent agency, to what degree and in what respects has this discourse transformed global patent institutions? In particular, has this discourse created a form of ‘epistemic’ or ‘cultural’ capture that has the effect of delegitimizing other valid forms of discourse? Through the application of several methodologies, namely, historical analyses, doctrinal analyses and qualitative empirical work, this study attempts to create what epistemic capture theorists refer to as a capture story, which is a story of how cultural influences of a regulated industry – here, professional patent agents – come to dominate the regulatory discourse to the exclusion of other viable, competing conceptions of what constitutes the public interest. This work concludes that professionalization of agency within the patent system is interconnected with enablement as an organizing principle of the patent system as a social institution. Prior to professionalization, when agency was democratized throughout the patent system, so too was democratized enablement a guiding principle of the patent system. The formation of a unique, legitimized professional patent agent epistemic community has resulted in diminishing the democratization of enablement across the patent system as a social institution. This work discusses several of the practical and normative implications of the diminishing value of democratized enablement. Finally, this work concludes with a discussion of the future prospects of agency within the patent system.

This review essay considers the universality of dilemmas and tensions that arise in class action litigation, wherever practised. It does so by exploring the evolution of the Australian class action in its doctrinal, political and historical dimensions, as recounted in Michael Legg and James Metzger’s edited collection of papers, The Australian Class Action: A 30-Year Perspective. While the book is rooted in the Australian experience, it lays bare common themes across jurisdictions, such as the unique role of the judge in a class action, the challenges to effective representation, and concerns about the commodification of litigation.

In Canada, access to post-secondary education is guaranteed by a number of domestic instruments. These instruments are: statutory human rights legislation, constitutional law, and accessibility legislation. These guarantees are further bolstered by Article 24 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). Statutory human rights legislation (or anti-discrimination law) plays the most extensive role in controlling the discretionary power that colleges and universities exercise with respect to the admission of prospective students and the reasonable accommodation of matriculated students with disabilities. This article presents the findings of a review of decisions by human rights tribunals in Canada over the 7-year period of 2014–2021. With respect to both admissions cases and in-program reasonable accommodations cases, it identifies the main types of barriers experienced by persons with disabilities. It also examines the ways in which accessibility legislation, a proactive standard-setting form of legislation in Canada, has sought to improve access to post-secondary students with disabilities, focusing on Ontario’s post-secondary education accessibility standards as an example. Finally, it argues that changes to policies and practices on the ground that draw more inspiration from Article 24 of the CRPD will help to ensure that the equality right to post-secondary education for students with disabilities is fulfilled in letter and spirit.