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This article examines, from the standpoint of corrective justice, three basic situations of causal uncertainty in the law of negligence. In the first situation the uncertainty is about which of the possible defendants wrongfully caused the injury. In the second situation the uncertainty is whether the injury resulted from the innocent or the wrongful aspect of the defendant’s activity. In the third situation the uncertainty is whether the defendant’s negligence failed to prevent the materialisation of an independently existing risk. In viewing the parties as the doer and the sufferer of the same injustice, corrective justice confirms the centrality of causation to negligence liability. The article shows, nonetheless, how these three situations of uncertainty can be resolved within the corrective justice framework. Moreover, what emerges from the corrective justice analysis is that causal uncertainty is not a homogeneous problem; its solution varies with the kind of situation in which the uncertainty appears.

There has been a growing momentum toward a greater recognition and explicit use of Indigenous laws in the past several years. According to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report, the revitalization and recognition of Indigenous laws are essential to reconciliation in Canada. How, then, do we go about doing this? In this article, we introduce one method, which we believe has great potential for working respectfully and productively with Indigenous laws today. We engage with Indigenous legal traditions by carefully and consciously applying adapted common law tools, such as legal analysis and synthesis, to existing and often publicly available Indigenous resources: stories, narratives, and oral histories. By bringing common pedagogical approaches from many Indigenous legal traditions together with standard common law legal education, we hope to help people learn Indigenous laws from an internal point of view. We share experiences that reveal that this method holds great potential as a pedagogical bridge “into” respectful engagement with Indigenous laws and legal thought, within and across Indigenous, academic, and professional communities. In conclusion, we argue that, while this method is a useful tool, it is not intended to supplant existing learning and teaching methods, but rather to supplement them. In practice, we have seen that this method can be complementary to learning deeply through other means. There are many methods to engage with Indigenous laws, and there needs to be critical reflection and conversations about them all.

This Article advances the comparative constitutional literature by examining the exercise of remedial discretion in rights litigation. It compares how the Supreme Court of Canada and the Constitutional Court of South Africa remedy unconstitutional legislation under their respective, relatively new, bills of rights. It uses an internal legal approach and, rejecting universalism and convergence, it pays attention to difference in constitutional texts. By reporting remedial practices and studying the written and unwritten factors that judges identify as conditioning their remedial determinations, the Article studies the significant gap between authoritative text and practice. In a warning for those who draft bills of rights, who rely on their texts to forecast judicial practice, or who simply aim to delineate and understand the exercise of judicial power under bills of rights, judges’ discussion reveals that the scope of action they perceive as legitimate may differ from what a rights instrument’s text implies. This gap has implications for efforts to classify forms of judicial review as strong-form or weak-form, as it may reduce the effective distance between different models as they appear on paper. The Article identifies shifting and contradictory views about reading-in versus invalidating legislation, and about immediate versus delayed orders. Based on its comparison of judicial remedial practices, the Article flags the unavoidable uncertainty of applying a bill of rights to legislation. It interprets the practices of the two countries’ highest courts as embodying a preference for a judicial posture of legislative engagement over one of constitutional enforcement. This conception of the judicial role emerges from similarities in practice, despite differences in the authorizing constitutional texts. The Article establishes a firm basis for normative evaluation of the legitimacy of judicial remedial discretion exercised with a view to engaging the democratic branches of government.

During Justice Louis LeBel’s fifteen-year tenure at the Supreme Court of Canada, Québec’s distinct character was taken into account in several decisions, for example in cases involving the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms or language rights. Although Québec was not always victorious, the Supreme Court still recognized the legitimacy of Québec’s language policy and, as a result, gave Québec more control over admissions to English-language schools than is evident at first sight. However, the most significant recognition of Québec’s specificity is found in cases connected with the constitutional amending formula. In some of its key decisions, the Supreme Court adopted a “contractual” vision of the origins of Canada’s constitution and interpreted it in a way explicitly intended to provide protection for the interests of the provinces, including Québec’s specific interests.

This text compares the position adopted by the Court of Appeal in 2009 on the punishment of insults in the Genex ruling with the decisions rendered since then by the Supreme Court of Canada and the Quebec Court of Appeal. This analysis shows that the positions of the courts have changed and that offensive and insulting comments can no longer be sanctioned independently, as they were in Genex. The outcome is that insults must qualify as a breach of the right to the safeguard of reputation or of the right to equality, without which it will be found that the damage to the safeguard of dignity resulting from the insults cannot be considered as giving rise to compensation. The new analytical framework generates a confused amalgam in the distinction of rights guaranteed by the Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms.

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This article raises a dissenting voice against the widespread scholarly view that discretion in remedying legislative infringement of rights can be dialogic, gentle, and cooperative. It focuses on delayed and prospective orders under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the South African Bill of Rights. Scholars have neglected remedial discretion’s significant negative consequences. It harms litigants and other right bearers, potentially producing perverse systemic effects. In particular, keeping a rights-infringing criminal prohibition temporarily in force is unlikely to achieve legal certainty and risks undermining the rule of law. Far from being restrained and deferential, remedial discretion increases the reach of judicial decision-making and enables judges to shape new law more boldly. The widespread exercise of remedial discretion calls for refashioning the conception of a bill of rights’ place in a supreme constitution. If delayed or prospective remedies are sometimes appropriate, they are not something to celebrate.

The Canadian environmental assessment (EA) regime is broken. At a time when the Canadian economy is both increasingly sluggish and unsustainable, we have an obligation -- and perhaps a once-in-a-generation opportunity -- to fundamentally reform EA to enable it to finally live up to its promise of promoting sound and sustainability-based decisions. This task is even more pressing in light of the global commitment under the Paris Climate Change Agreement to rapidly transition to greenhouse gas emissions neutrality. Among the many priorities of meaningful EA reform -- moving beyond project-level assessments, focusing on net positive contributions to sustainability, avoiding costly trade-offs among interdependent economic, ecological, and social objectives -- we focus on the overarching need for polyjural collaboration and polycentric consensus-based decision-making. We argue that any serious effort to move from project-level EAs focused exclusively on adverse biophysical impacts towards a fully integrated, sustainability-based assessment (SA) regime requires a polyjural and polycentric approach capable of facilitating collaborative experimentation among multiple jurisdictional actors, including the federal government, provinces, territories, municipalities, Indigenous peoples, NGOs, academia, project proponents and industry groups, and the Canadian public. After examining the constitutional and political dimensions of the federal and provincial governments' role in EA, we provide two compelling rationales for transitioning to a SA regime. The paper concludes by setting out a series of possible forms of SA for the purpose of informing the federal government's review of its EA regime. In particular, we identify and analyze the competing options for jurisdictional cooperation, collaboration, and consensus-based assessment processes along with the constitutional and practical policy implications of each.

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.