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"Constitutions are meant to endure, providing both stability and adaptability. Their public legitimacy depends on the ability of the courts and other interpreters to get this balance right. Why, then, has Canada’s constitution--only four decades old--produced so many surprises? Canada's Surprising Constitution investigates unexpected interpretations of the Constitution Act, 1982 by the courts. In this illuminating collection of essays, leading scholars reflect on these surprising interpretations, focusing on fundamental freedoms; equality, Aboriginal, and language rights; structural features of the Charter; as well as the courts’ approach to the interpretation of the Constitution. The public legitimacy of the Constitution requires that it be seen as both relevant, as circumstances change, but also true to the values it embodies. The responsibility for getting this balance right lies not only with judges but also with legislatures, executives, scholars, advocates, and public interest organizations. The thoughtful work of this volume is crucial in identifying, accounting for, and--looking ahead--anticipating potential surprises. Its thorough analysis also offers a view of the Constitution in action."-- Provided by publisher

"In The Life and Death of Freedom of Expression, Richard Moon argues that freedom of expression is valuable because human agency and identity emerge in discourse--in the joint activity of creating meaning. Moon recognizes that the social character of individual agency and identity is crucial to understanding not only the value of expression but also its potential for harm. The book considers a range of issues, including the regulation of advertising, hate speech, pornography, blasphemy, and public protest. The book also considers the shift to social media as the principal platform for public engagement, which has added to the ways in which speech can be harmful, while undermining the effectiveness of traditional legal responses to harmful speech. The Life and Death of Freedom of Expression makes the case that the principal threat to public discourse may no longer be censorship, but rather the spread of disinformation, which undermines public trust in traditional sources of information and makes engagement between different positions and groups increasingly difficult."-- Provided by publisher

Noel Semple - The Inaccessibility of Justice in Ontario’s Adjudicative Tribunals: Symptoms and Diagnosis

This chapter is about the distance between law and justice, particularly for people labelled with intellectual disabilities. It calls for a disability-inclusive approach to understanding access to justice that shifts from a procedural justice paradigm to one that considers substantive conceptions of disability justice. The chapter also examines the critical perspectives of disability rights and disability justice, highlighting the gaps between idealized notions of rights and everyday experiences of rights violations. The chapter proposes that procedural reforms, alone, are insufficient and distract from the need for transformative change. In particular, the chapter discusses clear language judgments as a strategy to improve the comprehensibility of legal information. While clear language judgments have been praised, there are concerns that they may oversimplify complex legal concepts and fail to address underlying biases and injustices. This chapter warns against uncritical adoption and calls for broader transformative change toward collective liberation and elimination of disability injustice.

This chapter considers the distinctive nature of clinical legal education in North America. Both the USA and Canada have rich heritages of influential and inspirational clinical legal education. Clinicians from the USA have been leaders in the development of clinical pedagogy and scholarship. The scale and strength of US CLE means that clinical faculty are better embedded in their law schools than in other countries. Canadian clinical programs developed in the 1970s and forged distinctive connections to community legal aid agencies. The future trajectory of Canadian clinics is unclear with changes afoot for legal education and the regulation of the legal profession.

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'