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The Supreme Court of Canada is set to decide whether methods of medical treatment constitute patentable subject matter. The concerns surrounding extension of patent protection to methods of medical treatment, argued almost entirely on the grounds of patentable subject matter, assumes that a physician carrying out such treatment is patent infringer. Canadian jurisprudence has largely taken this assumption to be true. Interrogating the historical jurisprudence supporting the prohibition on patentability of methods of medical treatment, this article demonstrates that this jurisprudence is far from clear as to whether the issue is, or should be, approached as a question of patentability or infringement. An analysis of the case law on both patentability of methods of medical treatment, and what constitutes infringing ‘use’ of an invention, demonstrates that both lines of jurisprudence share similar concepts and underlying concerns. This has generated uncertainty as to whether the issue of extending patent protection to methods of medical treatment has ever clearly been a question of patentability. Rather, examining both lines of jurisprudence side-by-side, this piece demonstrates that concerns underlying extension of patent protection to cover methods of medical treatment have historically been categorized as scope of protection concerns, rather than patentability concerns. As such, the debate surrounding patent protection and methods of medical treatment is best characterized as an infringement issue.

The Bank of Canada is an independent Crown corporation that sees its primary responsibility to be promoting Canada’s economic welfare by maintaining low and stable inflation. When it was first created in 1934, however, the Bank was a radically different institution—a privately owned corporation primarily meant to anchor Canada’s economy globally and manage foreign exchange. Not only was the Bank not tasked with managing inflation, but key policymakers behind its founding thought doing so would be a severe mistake. This article offers the first legal history of the Bank’s founding. It maps the enormous public debate that accompanied the creation of the Bank and the various, often contradictory visions expressed for it. The article labels these five visions: a Bankers’ Bank, a Government Bank, an Imperial Bank, an Economists’ Bank, and a Bank of the People. The article then looks at the original legal design of the Bank and argues that it largely fit the Imperial Bank model. Charting this history helps us better understand this vital organ of Canadian government, and has the potential to upset many of our accepted, contemporary notions of central banking.

In the era of rapid information exchange, engineers and computer scientists are not merely creators of technology but vital players in the shaping of public discourse, including in the context of serious health threats like the COVID-19 pandemic. Focusing on the dis/misinformation surrounding public health risks, this work will dissect the mechanisms that enable disinformation and explore how design decisions, algorithmic biases, and lack of regulation contribute to the spread of false information. Design decisions that include simplified sharing mechanisms, limited word counts, and basing the platforms in the sharing of emotional stories drive confirmation biases and discourage fact-checking. Users are further trapped by their past behaviors in algorithm-based echo chambers that repeat false information. These effects are solidified by failed regulation attempts and backfire effects, as well as barriers to regulation from organizations. Thus, the built infrastructure and embedded algorithms of these digital platforms create breeding grounds for disinformation. By indirectly governing social listening, engineers and computer scientists can actively influence the distribution and credibility of information, thus impacting public trust and health decisions. This work will further analyze the professional, ethical, and human rights responsibilities of the engineering profession as architects of social media and other digital platforms. In Ontario, Canada, the engineering profession’s specific responsibilities include statutory duties to serve the public interest, ethical obligations that are both statutory and normative, and compliance with laws related to privacy, human rights, and communication. This work contends that as a player in infodemics, engineering ethics education must shift away from a rules-based approach to instead prioritize social responsibility and foster engagement with societal and political dimensions of technology and its consequences.

The goal of this article is to better understand the potential of tribunals to improve access to justice in Canada. It begins by defining “tribunals” and “access to justice”, the key concepts of this article. Because tribunals and trial courts are functional alternatives for the resolution of many legal disputes, the article first reviews the merits of trial-level courts in this regard. It then turns to tribunals, reviewing some objective evidence of tribunal excellence in creating access to justice. Four key attributes of tribunals make them advantageous alternatives to trial-level courts for the accessible and just resolution of many types of legal dispute. First, tribunals are specialized instead of having general jurisdiction. Second, tribunals apply teamwork to dispute-resolution, instead of assigning all responsibility to individual adjudicators. Third, healthy forms of accountability are easier to establish in tribunals than they are in courts. This includes accountability of individual members to the tribunal and accountability of the tribunal to the legislature that created it. Finally, tribunals can be designed for maximal performance in creating access to justice, by contrast to courts which, for good reasons, resist design or reform efforts coming from outside themselves. The final Part of the article argues that tribunals can advance access to justice not only by taking on dispute-resolution work that courts would otherwise do, but also by offering authoritative legal vindication of rights that would otherwise be abandoned, or resolved in a completely privatized way. The tribunal promise of accessible adjudication can also be expected to improve the quality of settlements, in terms of upholding parties’ substantive legal rights.

Feminist judgment projects have proliferated in recent years, with contributors in over twelve countries rewriting judgments to bring the relationship between law, gender, and equality to light. The requirements of feminist judgments vary between projects, but many of them require contributors to replicate the generic conventions of judgments and limit their reference to legal precedents and other materials available at the time of the original decision. This article reflects on the politics of feminist judgments, challenging the premises of the conventional methodology in contexts where the law cannot be redeemed through liberal legal methods. One such area is HIV non-disclosure. Canadian courts have repeatedly found that the criminal law has jurisdiction over a person’s failure to disclose their HIV-positive status in sexual relations. The article argues that the law in this area should not be rewritten using the conventional methodology because the law should be abolished. In contexts like this, feminists should have recourse to an expanded referential universe, including creative tools, strategies, and forms of literary and artistic expression to represent gender and sexuality differently. The article concludes by constructing a “found poem” from the words of R. v Aziga, a 2023 decision of the Ontario Court of Appeal, to suggest a more progressive path forward in HIV non-disclosure cases.

Every May 18, mourners gather near the sandy beaches of Mullivaikkal, a small strip between Chundikulam and Mulltaitivu in the Northern province of Sri Lanka, to commemorate the 2009 genocide against the Tamils. Mullivaikkal is where approximately three hundred thousand Tamil civilians found refuge as they fled the military bombardment between January and May 2009.1 Starting in 2010, the remembrance day commemoration attracts thousands of locals, coming together near the beach to reflect and remember. Increasingly, the commemoration also attracts transitional justice experts, along with diplomats and international governmental organization workers. In my contribution, I reflect on the work of the local and diaspora Tamil transitional justice experts as they begin to gather evidence from the families of victims for the newly created 2024 Commission for Truth, Unity and Reconciliation. Drawing on Homer's The Odyssey and the story of the “lotus eaters,” I frame these experts as “truth eaters,” preoccupied with collecting victim narratives for the purpose of personal gratification. As they engage in the repeated collection of particular elements of the victims’ truth—elements predicated on the demands of the field of transitional justice—the truth eaters are oblivious to the root causes of the war. I explain how attention to root causes through a Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) lens can avoid the effects of the dominant liberal modes of truth seeking reflected in the work of these truth eaters.

(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…