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The Supreme Court of Canada decision in R v Brown is an important precedent on the issue of privacy, dog sniffers and the role of the courts in creating new police powers. This comment explores the Court's scrutiny of using drug courier profiles to screen individuals in the "war on drugs." This is significant part of the judgment because of the historical lack of judicial scrutiny of criminal profiling evidence with a few notable exceptions, its widespread use across Canada, its unreliability and the disproportionate impact of the drug courier profile on racialized communities in Canada.

R v Campbell is one of the few cases in North America to exclude rap lyrics as evidence of guilt in criminal cases. Unlike in Canada, the issue of criminalizing rap has received considerable attention in the United States. This article begins by documenting the Canadian experience. It is a response to the call for research by two leading American scholars on the phenomenon of putting rap on trial, Professors Charis Kubrin and Erik Nielson. After documenting and discussing 36 Canadian cases, the article examines the Supreme Court of Canada decision in R v Simard and the two leading trial decisions R v Campbell and R v Williams. Generally speaking, the Canadian cases have failed to apply a culturally competent lens when assessing probative value and, to address the relevance of race and bias, when assessing prejudicial effect. The article urges our courts to put the rap back in rap by taking a culturally competent and critical race approach to admissibility.

Despite the growing reliance on the internet, electronic communications and social media evidence in adjudicative proceedings, there have been very few cases in Canada that have addressed a fundamental aspect of admissibility - authentication. This article explores the issue in the context of a case involving a photograph showing the offence and anonymously uploaded to the internet.

Until the Supreme Court of Canada decision in R v. Hart 2014 SCC 52, there was very little, if any, judicial regulation of the Mr. Big undercover investigative strategy. The Supreme Court approached the issue of admissibility using first principles to create a new exclusionary rule. By giving prominence to reliability as part of the probative value/prejudical effect analysis, the Court opened the door for assessing afresh the admissibility of other putatively unreliable evidence such as identification evidence.

Until recently, the issue of police deception in testifying has received very little attention in Canada. The issue has received significantly more attention over the last few years in light of a number of cases, almost all involving Black or racialized accused, where judges have concluded that the evidence of the police was either an outright lie, deliberately misleading or was tailored. This article chronicles the cases from 2011-2013 and offers a number of suggestions for greater judicial and prosecutorial regulation.

This paper tests the assumptions upon which the Federal Court of Appeal based its decision in Tele-Direct (Publications) Inc. v. American Business Information Inc. Specifically, the author challenges the argument raised by the court that Article 1705 of the North American Free Trade Agreement, dealing with copyright protection for compilations of data, obliged Canada to adopt a "creativity" standard of originality for copyright works akin to the U.S. position in Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service. Finally, the author canvasses the relevant copyright decisions rendered subsequent to Tele-Direct, including the controversial Federal Court trial decision in CCH Canadian Ltd. v. Law Society of Upper Canada, in order to demonstrate the distortions created by the application of this tenuous NAFTA argument to the question of the appropriate standard of "originality" for factual compilations.

The recent DRAM settlement in Canada reveals that normative confusion remains about the role of the class action lawyer, the identity of her clients, and the duties owed to them. In this paper, I describe the settlement and in particular, the distribution protocol that gave rise to a legal challenge by five objecting class members. I critique the September 2015 judgment of the court that held human rights legislation is not applicable to class action settlements, and highlight the procedural idiosyncrasies of class actions made evident by the DRAM case, and that have important ramifications for legal ethics. The settlement illustrates the challenges in identifying the content of class counsel's role morality, and may well necessitate a shift in our thinking of what constitutes ethical conduct in the class action context.

Criminalization of sexual violence against women in intimate relationships must form a central part of the human rights agenda for achieving gender equality. Failure to criminalize sexual violence perpetrated by a husband (or intimate partner) effectively facilitates and condones a private legal space within spousal relationships where sexual assault and coercion are permissible. This legal abandonment of married women’s rights to liberty, autonomy, self-determination, and bodily security creates a class of women with lesser legal rights. The state’s insulation of marital rape from criminal sanction is also incommensurate with women’s equal citizenship and equal enjoyment of all other human rights.

The Accessibility for Manitobans Act (AMA) was enacted in December, 2013. Manitoba is the second Canadian province to enact accessibility standards legislation. The first province was Ontario which enacted the Ontarians with Disabilities Act in 2001 and later a more fortified and enforceable Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, 2005. In this article, we provide an overview of the Accessibility for Manitobans Act highlighting its purpose, philosophical and social goals; the standards to be developed and the process for developing the standards; information on the compliance and enforcement of the statute (including penalties and appeal mechanisms) and statutory review of the statute and standards.

Arizona has been in the news for the past few years not only for its vituperative, anti-immigrant polices, but also for the impressive immigrant rights movement that continues to spawn new coalitions and new activisms. The large numbers of cases that were and continue to be litigated and the innovative use of law to mobilize present a paradox since it is the law that constructs the “illegality” of undocumented immigrants, providing them very limited recourse to rights claims.

This paper explores the various means by which we can overcome the universalism imbedded in international law and international institutions. It asks: How can international lawyers and international law scholars learn from the Global South? This ‘how’ question prompts another, but related question: should we learn from the Global South? There is a rich interdisciplinary body of literature that identifies the Global South, or Europe’s other, as a site of knowledge production. The eurocentrism of the social sciences can be identified by examining the various founding fathers of their respective theories (especially sociology). This paper builds on southern theory in order to learn from these diverse perspectives in theorising global governance. This paper is organised in three sections. First, it sets out the rationale for a reorientation towards the Global South by examining the current state of global governance theory. In the second section, this paper focuses on the broad theoretical foundations of the Third World Approaches to International Law [TWAIL] movement. TWAIL scholarship is a reaction against the colonial and imperial projects of international law. Its main claims are set out and then there is an examination of its proposals as a means to arrive at an answer to the second question: should we learn from the Global South? In the final section, this paper explores the question of how we can learn from the Global South. In answering this question, the author offers two insights. The first is based on the premise of international law as a field of practice. The second attempts to problematise the ethics of international legal scholarship.

Editors' introduction to Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) special issue of the Windsor Yearbook of Access to Justice (Vol. 33:3, 2016) - Conspiring in Cairo & Canada: Placing TWAIL Scholarship and Praxis.

This special collection of articles in the Windsor Yearbook of Access to Justice [WYAJ] stems from a symposium of the same name held at the Berkeley Law School at the University of California on 5 December 2014. The Berkeley Symposium is the first conference to bring together scholars and experts from both Canada and the United States to present research and exchange ideas on equality issues affecting persons with disabilities in both countries. Writing this introduction allows me to bring together my identities as a law and disability scholar, the principal organizer and convener of the Berkeley Symposium, and editor-in-chief of the WYAJ. Each academic was invited to write about an equality issue of their choice that is of contemporary concern to persons with disabilities, and to focus on Canada, the United States, or both, at their option. The result is a set of articles that is simultaneously introspective and comparative. The symposium papers fall within the emerging field of Disability Legal Studies. Disability Legal Studies asks us to think about, and critically evaluate, how law engages with and reflects the lived experiences of persons with disabilities, how the law does and should regulate the lives of persons with disabilities, and how persons with disabilities can induce change in policy and legislation. This introduction provides a brief overview of the articles, which fall into three themes: a) social and economic rights, particularly with respect to movement across borders and the definition of capacity to consent; b) the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) as a legal instrument designed to combat disability discrimination and further the socio-economic empowerment of persons with disabilities; and c) disability advocacy, its human and monetary impacts, and how social change may be effected through procedural design.

A recent report identifies that more than half of the world’s countries exempt marital rape from criminal sanctions. The human rights violations inherent in acts of violence against women have now been well recognized. Yet somehow this particular form of gendered violence has escaped both criminal law sanctions and human rights approbation in a great number of the world’s nations.

Over 20 years have elapsed since the Supreme Court of Canada adopted the English tripartite test for interlocutory injunctions: a serious issue to be tried, proof of irreparable harm and balance of convenience. This article is written in response to those who have argued that the concept of irreparable harm should not be viewed as a threshold requirement, but that it only forms a component of the balance of convenience inquiry. In contrast, the author argues that it is a central and necessary element of an applicant’s claim for interlocutory relief. Proof of irreparable harm is a necessary justification to access equitable relief and the burden placed upon the applicant to do so is a normal part of the civil litigation process. Canadian courts have not found this an unworkable approach, although the language used to describe the standard of evidential proof by some courts, namely “clear and not speculative,” may have been unwise and was not required by the Supreme Court of Canada.

The question of whether a province can require civil marriage commissioners to perform same sex marriages, over their religious objections, has been addressed by the Canadian courts in a series of cases. In each of these cases the issue is framed by the courts as a contest between religious freedom and sexual orientation equality that must be resolved through the balancing of these competing interests. And in each of these cases the court strikes the balance in favour of sexual orientation equality, determining that the equality rights of same-sex couples outweighs the religious freedom of marriage commissioners. Despite what they say, the courts in these cases do not balance or trade-off religious freedom and sexual orientation equality, but instead give complete priority to the latter. A refusal by a marriage commissioner to perform a same-sex civil marriage ceremony is viewed by the courts as the cause of harm or injury to the couple (an act of discrimination) and not simply as a competing claim. I will argue that there is no balancing in these cases because there is no freedom of religion interest to be balanced against the right to sexual orientation equality. The marriage commissioner’s freedom of religion lacks substance not, or not simply, because the commissioner is a public official, or because the interference with his/her religious beliefs is indirect or partial. Rather the religious objection of the marriage commissioner falls outside the scope of freedom of religion under section 2(a) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms [the Charter], because it involves a belief about how others in the community should behave and be treated. A marriage commissioner has no claim to be exempted from the duties of his or her position on the basis of such a belief.

There is a debate at the moment about whether the law societies (which regulate the legal profession in the various provinces) must accredit a law program to be offered by Trinity Western University [TWU], a private Evangelical Christian college. The Law Society of Upper Canada [LSUC], along with the law societies of British Columbia and Nova Scotia, refused to the accredit the proposed program because of the school’s discriminatory admissions policy and in particular the covenant that all students are required to sign, in which they agree, among other things, not to engage in sex outside of marriage and sex with a same-sex partner. The issue in the TWU accreditation case is whether the covenant is simply an internal matter (a rule that applies simply to the internal operations of a voluntary religious association) or whether it impacts outsiders to the religious community or the public interest, more generally. As I understand it, the law societies are not claiming that the members of a religious community need to be protected from oppressive or discriminatory internal rules. There are two ways in which it may be argued that the TWU program (and the covenant in particular) will have an impact on the public interest. The first argument is that a school that teaches its students that homosexuality is wrongful or immoral will not properly prepare lawyers for practice in the general community. Lawyers have duties to their clients, to the law, and to the institutions of justice. An accredited school must be willing to affirm basic equality rights. Second, admission to Canadian law schools is competitive. If its program is accredited, TWU will select students from a large number of applicants. Following graduation (as well as articling, and bar exams), TWU students will be eligible to practice law in a particular province. The accredited law schools are a gateway to the legal profession. The concern then is that TWU’s admissions policy will have a discriminatory impact on gays and lesbians who wish to enter the legal profession.

How much does it cost individual Canadians to seek civil justice? This article compiles empirical data about the monetary, temporal, and psychological costs confronting individual justice-seekers in this country. The article suggests that analysis of private costs can improve access to justice in two ways. First, it can help public sector policy-makers to reduce these costs. Second, it can help lawyers and entrepreneurs to identify new, affordable ways to reduce the costs that are most onerous to individuals with different types of civil legal need.

The presence of a physical object (a book, DVD, CD) plays a determinant role in how information products (e.g., commercial copies of computer programs, books, musical recordings, video games, and virtual worlds) are regulated, in contrast with copies of similar information products with no physical embodiment. The presence of a physical object influences how law makers distinguish goods from services, to define a contract of sale or license, to apply the first sale doctrine in copyright law, and to determine which acts reserved to copyright holders are involved in a commercial transaction. In this article, I argue that the emphasis on a physical object is to a large extent arbitrary, leads to double standards, legal and normative incoherence, and ultimately that it is detrimental to recipients of information products and copyright user rights.

In Mouvement laique v Saguenay the Supreme Court of Canada held that the recitation of a prayer at the opening of a municipal council’s public meeting breached ‘the state’s duty of neutrality’ in matters of religion. The comment discusses some of the difficulties or challenges raised by the Court's commitment to religious neutrality.