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Copyright laws throughout the world are copyright holder centric and present a very fragmented source to comprehend the rights of users, and in particular of consumers owning copies of copyrighted works. Although in recent years, a growing number of commentators have worked towards defining the place of users in copyright law, little attention has been devoted to the nature and justifications of copy ownership of copyrighted works. This paper applies property and copyright theory to define and justify the existence of copy ownership of copyrighted works. It seeks to carve out in clearer terms the place of copy ownership legally and normatively, to offer a counterbalance to a predominant copyright holder centric approach to copyright law. Part One of this paper lays the theoretical framework of property and copyright theory. Part Two applies the theoretical framework to define the nature of the copy of a copyrighted works as well as its justifications. It explores the ramifications of copyright acting as a property-limitation rule to copy ownership, and how copy ownership can also act as a property-limitation rule of copyright.

This paper was written on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Annual Workshop on Commercial and Consumer Law and as a contribution to a collection of retrospective essays in the 50th volume of the Canadian Business Law Journal. In the paper, I reflect briefly on the impact of collective action on consumer access to courts, and the promised guarantee of effective justice. In the first part of the paper, I summarize the results of an empirical study which asked class action lawyers to identify the categories of cases being litigated, including those that come within the rubric of "consumer protection actions." I then examine two of the more significant advances in consumer rights litigation, namely, the development of the waiver of tort doctrine and the widespread rejection of mandatory arbitration clauses in consumer contracts. In the final part of the paper, I discuss two challenges to achieving substantive justice for consumers that have recently become more pronounced: increasing reliance on cy près distribution of settlements, and the effect of adverse costs awards on representative plaintiffs.

The Internal Inquiry into the Actions of Canadian officials in relation to Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad Abou-Elmatti and Muayyed Nureddin is a particularly pronounced example of the use of secrecy that has defined Canada in the wake of 9/11. Despite having the authority to hold some portions of the Inquiry in public, the Iacobucci Inquiry was conducted almost exclusively in camera and ex parte. The result was an inquiry that was unlike previous commissions called under the federal Inquiries Act.

Law can be the site through which women's dignity and equality can be expressed and pursued. Speaking the language of rights translates one's needs from private interests to public claims through words and concepts that the community – local, national and/or international – have already validated. Law can therefore offer a medium to confront the injustices and unfairness built into other systems of political, social and economic ordering. Women's rights advocates have won significant victories through law and have generated gains for women's dignity and equality. However, law can also be a place where women's rights are not only silenced but where social, economic and political power structures are replicated and work against women's rights.

The remedies that administrative tribunals can administer is an under studied area. Often, empowering legislation simply extoils an administrative tribunal to do what is ''fair and just''. In this paper, I argue that when confronted with open-textured remedial provisions, tribunals may often benefit from drawing by analogy from developed common law principles used to quantify monetary and non-monetary relief.

With this brief introduction to a special issue of the Osgoode Hall Law School Comparative Law and Political Economy Research Paper Series, we hope to evoke some of the discussions and background preparation that invigorated the 2010 Osgoode Graduate Law Students' Association conference.

As part of an international group of scholars who came together in December 2007 to discuss and debate the use of class actions worldwide, the authors prepared a report on the role of class proceedings in Canada. The original report followed a format designed by the conference organizers and traced the procedural particularities and historical pedigree of class actions in Canada, as well as the general policy rationales and arguments that continue to attend them. Condensed versions of the country reports, including this Canadian report, were published in March 2009.

On May 25 - 26, 2010, Université Laval, the University of Windsor Faculty of Law and the University of Louisville Brandeis School of Law, hosted the Sixth Administrative Law Discussion Forum in Quebec City, Canada.The forum provided an opportunity for thoughtful exchange among administrative law academics on contemporary issues that cut across national borders. The discussions reflected in this collection of papers touch on a variety of major administrative law themes. In addition, they examine local aspects of problems that transcend regional and national borders, and show connections and preoccupations between jurisdictions and indeed between countries.

In December 2009, the Ontario Legislative Assembly enacted the Adjudicative Tribunals Accountability, Governance and Appointments Act, 2009 (ATAGAA). This new legislation offers a unique approach to ensuring that adjudicative tribunals in the province are transparent, accountable and efficient in their operations while preserving their decision-making independence. The statute presents an approach that the author has termed "collaborative governance" as it aims to bring the executive branch of government and the tribunals together in reaching effective and accountable means of internal governance. The author argues, however, that the approach taken by the statute does not address many of the contemporary concerns about accountability that are experienced by tribunals on the ground. She argues further that the legislation is inconsistent in its underlying commitment to the concept of accountability as it does not take into account the importance of accountability on the part of the executive to tribunals. Finally, the approach taken by the legislation must be channelled properly to avoid disintegrating from a collaborative governance approach to one of command and control.

Hate mongers have found it strategically useful to present themselves as defenders of free speech. The shift from advocate of hate to defender of free speech fits well with the hate monger's self-understanding as a victim of state oppression and a defender of Western values against multiculturalism. More often, though, the opposition to hate speech regulation has a principled basis. There are many committed civil libertarians who regard hate speech as odious but are nevertheless prepared to defend the right of others to engage in it. Their opposition to the restriction of hate speech rests on a commitment to individual liberty sand a concern about the reach of state power. While I think the "civil libertarian" position is mistaken, it is not without merit. What is perplexing though is the extraordinary energy that these advocates of free speech put into the fight against hate speech regulation. They seem convinced that the integrity of the free speech edifice depends on holding the line here. Yet they seem indifferent to the more significant ways in which freedom of expression is being eroded in Western democracies. Whether by design or not, the obsessive opposition to hate speech regulation diverts our attention away from more fundamental free speech issues concerning the character and structure of public disclosure, and more particularly the domination of public disclosure by commercial messages and the advertising form. But, of course, these are not issues that can be addressed by the courts, except in indirect ways, and that may partly explain the lack of attention they receive.

Increased access to justice is a key objective of class proceedings. Yet there is no consensus on what the term means in the class action context. This paper engages the access to justice paradigm by exploring the settlement approval phase of a class action. In Part A, the author offers a robust definition of access to justice that includes considerations of substantive justice. In Part B, the prevailing approach to the assessment of the fairness of a settlement is critiqued. Two common criteria in the fairness analysis, the presumption of fairness and a lack of objectors, are argued to be unreliable determinants of a just result. In Part C, the author evaluates a particular form of settlement - a cy pres distribution of settlement proceeds to charities. Such settlements, the author concludes, illustrate why current standards for settlement approval must be revisited in order to promote more meaningful access to justice.

If custody and access disputes are a deck of cards, the trump suit is the best interests of the child. When separating parents litigate about how and with whom their child should live, findings about what’s best for the child are meant to sweep away the parents’ interests and rights-claims. This principle is uncontroversial, but applying it is difficult. What parenting arrangements are best for children, and how successful is the legal system in putting these arrangements in place?

“Whose Best Interests?” compares the law of custody and access disputes with the procedure used to resolve them, and argues that there is a fundamental contradiction between these two things. The former focuses on the interests of the children involved to the exclusion of all else. The latter, however, is essentially designed to protect the best interests of the adult parties to the dispute. The article concludes by considering two alternative reforms which might resolve this contradiction.

The study of the law of remedies has found a place in the curriculum of many common law law schools. This has generated debate on whether the law of remedies exists as a distinct body of law governed by its own systematic structures and principles, and which can comfortably take its place beside other substantive private law subjects. The author argues that it can, and then suggests a number of important areas of law in which debate on appropriate remedial response is central to the articulation of the particular interest which has been violated. The author suggests that there is much useful work to engage the energies of scholars of the law of remedies.

There has been very little critical and feminist commentary in Canada on the admissibility of prior sexual misconduct evidence as similar fact evidence in sexual assault cases. The lack of critical attention to this area of evidence law is surprising given that the similar fact evidence rule, like other rules of evidence, serves as a site for gender, race, and sexual orientation bias.

The regulations in Alberta dealing with driver’s licenses were amended in 2003 to require that all license holders be photographed. The license holder’s photo would appear on his or her license and be included in a facial recognition data bank maintained by the province. Prior to this change, the regulations had permitted the Registrar of Motor Vehicles to grant an exemption to an individual who, for religious reasons, objected to having her or his photo taken. Members of the Hutterian Brethren of Wilson Colony, who believe that the Second Commandment prohibits the making of photographic images, had been exempted from the photo requirement under old regulations, but were required under the new law to be photographed before a license would be issued.

In June 2008, I was asked by the Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) to write a report about the regulation of hate speech on the internet, focusing specifically on s. 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act (CHRA). Section 13 prohibits the repeated communication on the phone system or the internet of any matter that is likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt by reason of the fact that that person or those persons are identifiable on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination such as race, gender, or religion.

During the last few years there has been a disinformation campaign against human rights commissions. While it is not surprising that Internet blogs post things about HRCs that are false and malicious, these claims have seeped into mainstream discourse. This paper sets out some of the claims made about the CHRC and describes how they are misleading or just plain false and it considers how these deceptive and invented claims have entered mainstream discourse. This will involve some general observations about the state of public discourse in Canada.

This paper summarizes the recommendations made in the report I prepared for the Canadian Human Rights Commission concerning s.13 of the CHRA. In the report I recommended the repeal of the section so that the CHRC and the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal would no longer deal with hate speech, and in particular hate speech on the Internet. I took the position that state censorship of hate speech should be confined to narrow category of extreme expression – that which explicitly or implicitly threatens, advocates or justifies violence against the members of an identifiable group, even if the violence advocated in not imminent – and that the restriction of this narrow category of expression should be dealt with under the Criminal Code rather than the CHRA.

Research paper prepared for the Law Commission of Ontario.