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Should family lawyers be subject to special rules of professional conduct? This debate has resurfaced because of the 2021 amendments to the federal Divorce Act (“Act”), which imposed new professional obligations on lawyers. The suggestion is that the Act now conflicts with the Federation of Law Societies Model Code of Professional Conduct (“Model Code”), such that the Model Code needs to be amended to comply with family lawyers’ legislative professional obligations. There are also questions about whether additional guidance is needed for lawyers when representing parties who are experiencing family violence. Against this backdrop, I review the question of whether family lawyers ought to be governed by a separate code of professional conduct, suggesting that there are questions about the lawyer’s role which need to be answered before a comprehensive regulatory change can be considered. I also argue, however, that family violence concerns, specifically in relation to intimate partner violence, need to be central to discussions about professional rules and ought not wait. This paper concludes with recommendations for reform to the Model Code and questions for future debate and discussion.

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This article criticises the government's rejection of proposals by the Prison Reform Trust that would have extended self-defence in householder cases to victims/survivors of domestic abuse. The authors argue that the Prison Reform Trust proposals should be enacted, and further supported by novel complementary reform of the option to retreat, and the exclusion of intoxicated mistaken belief in self-defence claims. Specifically, the authors advance a statutory rebuttable presumption regarding the option to retreat in cases involving domestic abuse, namely, an assumption that the victim/survivor was not realistically able to retreat safely, unless it is proven otherwise. The authors also examine the appropriateness of the policy decision to exclude intoxicated mistaken belief in all self-defence cases and advocate for its removal. It should be replaced with a requirement that all mistaken beliefs must be reasonable regardless of the presence of intoxication. Procedural recommendations are also advanced, including amendment of the Crown Court Compendium to include judicial directions on self-defence which adopt a social entrapment approach in domestic abuse cases, and supported by the admissibility of non-medical expert evidence on the nature and impact of coercive control.

Intimate partner violence [IPV] causes myriad and gendered harms, but Canadian law has inconsistently provided avenues of economic redress. Although tort law has evolved to allow IPV survivors to seek compensation, tort-based remedies are sought rarely and largely limited to intentional torts such as assault, battery, and the intentional infliction of emotional distress. These torts do not always encompass the harms sustained by IPV survivors, particularly those caused by economic abuse and coercive control. In Ahluwalia v Ahluwalia, a 2022 family law case, Justice Renu Mandhane responded to this gap in the law by recognizing a new tort of family violence, but her decision was overturned by the Ontario Court of Appeal in 2023, and the case is now before the Supreme Court of Canada. Our paper provides a feminist analysis of the role of tort law in providing compensatory remedies for survivors of IPV. We situate tort remedies and Ahluwalia within the wider context of Canadian laws addressing IPV and feminist critiques of tort law and theory. This wider context raises issues about access to justice and socio-economic responses to IPV for members of marginalized groups in particular. We also examine how myths and stereotypes have influenced this area of law and the role of lawyers and judges in this respect, including in Ahluwalia. We conclude that recognition of the tort of family violence is an important but limited step forward in compensating the harms of IPV, and we urge governments to do more to systemically remediate these harms.

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Purposive interpretation leads a double life. As a matter of constitutional practice, it forms the doctrine through which courts in Canada and around the world determine the concrete protections that abstract constitutional rights afford. However, as a matter of constitutional theory, purposive interpretation is routinely rejected as either an empty phrase that offers no alternative to established theories of constitutional interpretation or a dangerous doctrine that provides no basis for distinguishing between justified and unjustified interpretations of constitutional rights. This essay formulates a conception of purposive interpretation that is not vulnerable to these objections. The purposive approach to the interpretation of constitutional rights follows from a set of ideas about how legal interpretation differs from interpretation more broadly, how constitutional interpretation differs from interpretation in other legal domains, and how constitutional interpretation constrains both the purposes it attributes to particular provisions and the application of those purposes to particular contexts. My aim is to show that these ideas fit together in a coherent doctrinal whole that is neither empty nor dangerous. Purposive interpretation is not empty because it offers a genuine alternative to the presuppositions and structure of opposing interpretive paradigms. Purposive interpretation is not dangerous because it provides a principled set of resources for distinguishing between justified and unjustified interpretations.

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Between 2006 to 2008, no less than three public inquiries recommended that, absent a reasonable likelihood of re-prosecution, prosecutors should allow the wrongfully convicted to be acquitted and not be subject to prosecutorial stays. Prosecutorial stays are an exercise of prosecutorial discretion under. 579 of the Criminal Code that can only be challenged with evidence of flagrant impropriety. They do not provide protection against double jeopardy. They can amount to a third “legal limbo” verdict between guilty and not guilty. Only two prosecutorial services in Canada have adopted the three inquiry recommendations in their guidelines or deskbooks. This failure has real world consequences: namely at least five cases involving seven accused in four different provinces since 2016 where convictions were overturned because of new evidence relevant to guilt or innocence only to be the subject of a prosecutorial stay which deprived the previously convicted person of a verdict on the merits. In addition to being at odds with the three inquiry recommendations, such uses of prosecutorial stays promote continued suspicion of the wrongfully convicted and create two classes of the wrongfully convicted: those who are acquitted and those who only receive a prosecutorial stay.

How intimate partner violence (IPV) is conceptualized affects what we see when we look at situations involving IPV and what we think the solutions to the problem of IPV are—either in individual cases or in the development of broader legal and policy responses. In this article, it is suggested that while conceptualizing IPV as coercive control is an improvement over previous understandings, it does not go far enough. Coercive control must be located within a broader conceptualization of IPV as a form of social and systemic entrapment if it is not to operate in a harmful manner for victim-survivors.