Wednesday’s symposium on the Nadon Reference was a great success. CPAC‘s cameras captured the event so it will be available online at some point if you weren’t able to make it in person. I presented my Legal Academia 2.0 thinkpiece. It went down well, though as I accept, the idea is emergent rather than dominant. […] Read more

On Friday, the Globe and Mail dropped a large bombshell by revealing that four of the six judges proposed by the federal government to fill Justice Fish’s seat on the Supreme Court of Canada came from the federal courts. Regular readers will of course know that in Reference re Supreme Court Act, ss. 5 and […] Read more

There is a piece in the latest print issue of Maclean’s magazine (sub only) on a very interesting Federal Court case from earlier this month: Muhammad v. Canada (Citizenship and Immigration), 2014 FC 448. M’s details were posted on what I have dubbed “Canada’s Least Wanted“, the Canadian Border Services Agency’s ‘wanted‘ list of immigration […] Read more

My suggestion to headline writers is made with tongue firmly in cheek, of course. Often in public law cases, the federal government is a “winner” or “loser” only in the limited sense that a position it took as an institution was vindicated or not. That the identity of the cabinet members tends to be largely […] Read more

A quick note on McCormick v. Fasken Martineau DuMoulin LLP, 2014 SCC 39, an interesting case about whether law firm partners can be required to retire at 65. Short answer: yes (in British Columbia). The BC Human Rights Tribunal found that Mr. McCormick was an employee of the firm, a finding which would have entitled […] Read more

T.R.S. Allan is one of the most important public-law thinkers of the present age and his new book, The Sovereignty of Law, is a major contribution to public law theory. Here is a brief summary which may be of interest to readers. At the heart of this book is the distinction made by H.L.A. Hart […] Read more

Quite a bit away from our usual fare, but my paper for the upcoming Symposium on the Nadon Reference draws on my experiences in the online world. Here is the abstract for Legal Academia 2.0: Across the country, legal and political aficionados hunched over their keyboards waiting for the announcement. Some were genuinely surprised by […] Read more

By now, it is a familiar story. The standard of review is reasonableness. An exhaustive review of the relevant statutory language and factual matrices follows. And then there is a brief conclusion: the decision is reasonable or unreasonable.At the risk of beating a horse whose death certificate is now turning yellow and fraying at the […] Read more

APOLOGY: I worked on this post Thursday evening and hit “publish” on Friday. It did not appear until Saturday, however, and when it did, one of the drafts appeared. Here, fixed as of Monday May 12, is what I actually wanted to say. Apologies to anyone who got the half-baked version of my analysis. It […] Read more

The final pre-copy-edit version of my paper, Unreasonable Interpretations of Law is available for download from SSRN. I have made some revisions in response to comments. The paper will appear in a volume of the Supreme Court Law Review which will also be published as a stand-alone book, Administrative Tribunals and Judicial Deference in Canada: […] Read more