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As the world rapidly urbanizes, cities are expanding to provide space for growing populations. The predominant growth pattern for the last several decades - continued outward expansion, or “urban sprawl” - is helping to lock in carbon expenditure for generations. By contrast, and perhaps counterintuitively, densification of cities can contribute both to CO2 emissions reductions and biodiversity protection. This chapter argues that environmental law should go beyond addressing negative externalities of activities within the city, to engage with the built form of the city. Legal and land use planning tools such as greenbelts and planning/zoning reform, and practices such as city building, placemaking, and nature-based urban solutions provide avenues for building cities in a way that promises climate mitigation and biodiversity protection in their very structure.

Assessment is the practice of documenting, evaluating, and measuring students’ learning or achievement. Assessments can be formative (that is, occurring throughout a course) or summative (occurring at the culmination of a course). Legal education, and therefore assessment practices, are influenced by many factors including the regulation of higher education, socioeconomic conditions, colonialism, corruption, privatisation, and other local conditions. Assessment methods in legal education tend to be summative, typically focusing on legal knowledge, and often occur in the form of a formal written or oral examination. Assessment is often norm-referenced rather than criterion-referenced. Over the past several decades, teaching methods in law have diversified significantly and new forms of assessment have been introduced. AI, globalisation, online education, economic conditions, and other phenomenon will undoubtedly impact the role and types of assessment in legal education.

SDG 9 - ‘fostering innovation’ - commits governments to actions to incentivize and support scientific research, the development of new technologies, and innovative entrepreneurship. The ‘adequate, balanced and effective’ protection of intellectual property (IP) is a key element in supporting attainment of this and related SDGs, even though IP is not specifically mentioned in SDG 9. In this chapter, we study the Canadian approach to innovation through the country’s national and provincial innovation and IP strategies. These initiatives generally support the goals of SDG 9, but they do not specifically address the systemic barriers that exist for women inventors and entrepreneurs. Different policy mechanisms are required to achieve gender equity and an inclusive IP and innovation environment. These strategies must fully account for women’s lived experiences and must actively dismantle the structural impediments that prevent these inventors and entrepreneurs from fully participating in the IP system.

"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

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.

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.