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The Universal Declaration on Human Rights was pivotal in popularizing the use of ‘dignity’ or ‘human dignity’ in human rights discourse. This article argues that the use of ‘dignity’, beyond a basic minimum core, does not provide a universalistic, principled basis for judicial decision-making in the human rights context, in the sense that there is little common understanding of what dignity requires substantively within or across jurisdictions. The meaning of dignity is therefore context-specific, varying significantly from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and (often) over time within particular jurisdictions. Indeed, instead of providing a basis for principled decision-making, dignity seems open to significant judicial manipulation, increasing rather than decreasing judicial discretion. That is one of its significant attractions to both judges and litigators alike. Dignity provides a convenient language for the adoption of substantive interpretations of human rights guarantees which appear to be intentionally, not just coincidentally, highly contingent on local circumstances. Despite that, however, I argue that the concept of ‘human dignity’ plays an important role in the development of human rights adjudication, not in providing an agreed content to human rights but in contributing to particular methods of human rights interpretation and adjudication.

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In AB v. Bragg, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that fifteen-year-old AB should be allowed to use a pseudonym in seeking an order to disclose the identity of her online attacker. By framing the case as one pitting the privacy interests of a youthful victim of sexualized online bullying against principles protecting the free press and open courts, the SCC approached but ultimately skirted the central issue of equality. Without undermining the important precedent that AB achieved for youthful targets of online sexualized bullying, the author explores the case as a missed opportunity to examine the discriminatory tropes and structural inequalities that undergird the power of this kind of bullying. Viewed through an equality lens, enhanced access to pseudonymity for targets is not necessarily about privacy per se, but rather an interim measure to respond to the equality-undermining effects of sexualized online bullying—a privacy mechanism in service of equality.

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Although it has long been acknowledged that heuristics influence judicial decision making, researchers have yet to explore how sentencing guidelines might interact with heuristics to shape sentencing decisions. This article contributes to addressing this gap in the literature in three ways: first, by considering how heuristics might help produce the phenomenon of sentence clustering, in which a significant proportion of sentences are concentrated around a small number of outcomes; second, by reflecting on the role of sentencing guidelines as a feature of the environment within which sentencing decisions are made; and third, by analysing the guidelines from Minnesota and from England and Wales, theorizing how their content might interact with heuristics to make clustering more or less likely. Ultimately, we argue that sentencing guidelines likely affect the role played by heuristics in shaping sentencing decisions and, consequently, that their design should be informed by research evidence from the decision sciences.

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Recent amendments have underscored punitive aspects in sentencing. This is apparent in the multiplication of mandatory minimum sentences, restriction of conditional sentences, limitation of credit for pre-sentence custody, and doubling the victim surcharge with no discretion for exemption. Apart from their specific effects, these amendments signal a reorientation of the principles and objectives of sentencing expressed in Part XXIII of the Code and in the jurisprudence that has evolved since 1996. They diminish the importance of rehabilitative and restorative aims in favour of greater retribution. As a result, they alter several principles of sentencing that remain in the Code as they were enacted in 1995 - including proportionality, individualization and totality. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

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Over the last century, all common law countries have experienced a movement away from a highly discretionary sentencing environment to one in which judicial discretion is more constrained. (For general discussion of structured sentencing, see chapter 6 of A. von Hirsch, A. Ashworth and J. V. Roberts (eds), Principled Sentencing: Readings on Theory and Policy (3rd edn, Oxford: Hart, 2009).) Some jurisdictions have transformed their sentencing environments by introducing relatively inflexible and tightly binding guideline schemes. Others have taken a middle ground – creating advisory guidance schemes – while a third category has resisted all attempts to structure judicial discretion. This essay describes and compares the divergent histories of two jurisdictions – Canada, and England and Wales – as they have confronted the challenge of structuring sentencing. Despite similarities in the way that sentencing is approached in the two countries they have taken remarkably divergent paths over the past 25 years – and not in the directions that might have been anticipated back in the mid 1980s. After a promising start in that decade, Canada has rejected the adoption of sentencing guidelines, and elected to retain its traditional, highly discretionary approach to sentencing. In contrast, England and Wales has slowly, but surely, adopted a comprehensive and relatively binding set of guidelines, although this outcome also seemed unlikely in 1988.

Three decades of research on public perceptions in Canada has fundamentally shifted academic and policy approaches to understanding public views of crime and punishment. The contributions of Anthony Doob and his colleagues have influenced methodology, such as the inclusion of experimental design, and have supported an underlying commitment to understanding the public's view of crime and its relationship to policy. This article examines key findings coming out of this body of research and the impact of this work on current criminal justice policy in Canada. Despite the significance of this body of work on public perceptions research, the impact on current criminal justice policy appears to be diminishing.

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Disclaimer: This summary was generated by AI based on the content of the source document.

This article described three heuristics that are employed in making judgments under uncertainty: (i) representativeness, which is usually employed when people are asked to judge the probability that an object or event A belongs to class or process B; (ii) availability of instances or scenarios, which is often employed when people are asked to assess the frequency of a class or the plausibility of a particular development; and (iii) adjustment from an anchor, which is usually employed in numerical prediction when a relevant value is available. These heuristics are highly economical and usually effective, but they lead to systematic and predictable errors. A better understanding of these heuristics and of the biases to which they lead could improve judgments and decisions in situations of uncertainty.

Disclaimer: This summary was generated by AI based on the content of the source document.

Disclaimer: This summary was generated by AI based on the content of the source document.