Your search

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.

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

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.

This paper is a feminist judgment in R v JA (Supreme Court of Canada 2011), a spousal sexual assault case involving the issue of whether parties can consent in advance to sexual activity that will occur while they are asleep or unconscious. The Supreme Court’s ruling in JA has generated critique and debate amongst feminist and law and sexuality scholars that pits women's equality and security interests against their affirmative sexual autonomy. Using the methodology of a feminist judgment, I endeavour to analyze whether it is possible to adopt an approach to advance consent that protects or at least balances all of these interests. My particular focus is the spousal context, where courts have often interpreted the sexual assault provisions of the Criminal Code to the detriment of women’s sexual integrity and equality, yet where arguments about affirmative sexual autonomy have also predominated. Taking a harm-based approach to criminality that considers both negative and positive sexual autonomy, the judgment concludes that advance consent should not be considered valid without certain legal safeguards being put into place.Este artículo es una sentencia feminista de R v JA (Tribunal Supremo de Canadá 2011), un caso de agresión sexual conyugal que implica la cuestión de si las partes pueden consentir de antemano una actividad sexual que ocurrirá mientras están dormidos o inconscientes. El fallo de la Corte Suprema en JA ha generado críticas y debates entre feministas e investigadores en derecho y sexualidad, que enfrentan los intereses de igualdad y seguridad de la mujer con su autonomía sexual afirmativa. Utilizando la metodología de un juicio feminista, se intenta analizar si es posible adoptar un enfoque de consentimiento anticipado que proteja, o al menos equilibre, todos estos intereses. El enfoque particular es el contexto conyugal, donde los tribunales han interpretado a menudo las disposiciones sobre el asalto sexual del Código Penal en detrimento de la integridad sexual y la igualdad de las mujeres, incluso también donde también han predominado los argumentos sobre la autonomía sexual positiva. A partir de un acercamiento a la criminalidad basado en el daño, que considera la autonomía sexual negativa y positiva, la sentencia concluye que el consentimiento previo no debe ser considerado válido sin que se pongan en práctica ciertas garantías legales. DOWNLOAD THIS PAPER FROM SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2891024

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