Over the past two decades, academics and judges have debated the issue of awarding damages for violations of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in the absence of mala fides. It took the threat of a dessert ambush to get the matter to the SCC. Back in June, leave to appeal was granted for […]
Last Friday, the Supreme Court delivered its ruling in R. v. Jaw, 2009 SCC 42, the second in so many months considering the potentially prejudicial effects of erroneous jury instructions. The issues on appeal and holding of the court are not the most compelling, both being construed rather narrowly to a specific set of facts. The […]
Offshore trusts are major tax-planning and estate-planning tools which can be used to protect assets from taxation and to defer accrued capital gains for a long term. For all such planning tools to work, however, the "offshore" aspect of the trust—that is to say its non-Canadian residence—has to be a central feature of the structure. […]
Pragmatism: The New Ideology When U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Souter announced his retirement earlier this year, some liberals openly hoped that President Barack Obama would choose as his replacement a judge who would augur a fierce intellectual revival for the high court’s moribund liberal wing. By those aspirations, Sonia Sotomayor would appear to disappoint, […]
Introduction In light of Justice Sotomayor's recent comments during oral arguments in Citizen United v. Federal Election Commission, it may be useful to consider the state of the corporation as a distinct legal entity. On September 9, 2009, Justice Sonia Sotomayor made the following remark in her question to Mr. Abrams: "Because what you are suggesting is […]
In the past two years, a number of major media acquisitions have transpired in Canada including CTVglobemedia’s purchase of CHUM, CanWest’s purchase of Alliance Atlantis, and Astral Media’s purchase of Standard Broadcasting. In response to this continuous consolidation, various media activist groups have emerged to voice their concerns and dissatisfaction. Among these groups is the […]
On September 2 of this year, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal issued its decision in Warman v. Lemire, 2009 CHRT 26. Making national news in doing so, Tribunal member Athanasios Hadjis declared as unconstitutional section 13(1) of the Canadian Human Rights Act (the Act) for unjustifiably infringing on the freedom of expression guaranteed under section […]
The Supreme Court of Canada has taken big steps in the last year at making its records more accessible and its website more useful. I was reminded of the great potential of these resources last week when I got an email about one of the first questions that new U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor […]
On Wednesday, TheCourt.ca published a student post on the Supreme Court's decision to grant leave to appeal to R. v. Caron. Today we publish a second piece on Caron, which was intended to be published earlier but a glitch in our process caused a delay. It is important to note that the following comment was […]
It's no secret that we at TheCourt.ca are enthusiastic about s. 24(2) jurisprudence, having written a number of impassioned articles on the subject. Some of us on the staff waited with bated breach for the SCC's decisions in Grant, Suberu and Harrison, which were finally released last July over a year after oral arguments were […]