Advocates for the Rule of Law

Last month the High Court of Australia released its decision in Addy v Commissioner of Taxation [2021] HCA 24 (“Addy”). The Australian apex court’s decision has received an unusual (for an income tax case) amount of attention as “the backpacker’s case”. But the High Court’s ruling is interesting for a number of reasons and should be on the radar of ...

On October 12, 2021, Advocates for the Rule of Law returned to the Supreme Court of Canada in Her Majesty the Queen, et al. v. David Sullivan, et al. and Her Majesty the Queen, et al. v. Thomas Chan, et al. (SCC 39270) to make submissions on the effect of a declaration under s. 52(1) of the Constitution Act, 1982 ...

In Vavilov, the Supreme Court of Canada held that, to the extent possible, the law of judicial review should “develop and strengthen a culture of justification in administrative decision making” (Vavilov, at para 2). What is this culture of justification as adopted in Vavilov? It asks decision-makers to ensure that their exercise of delegated public power can be justified to ...

Section 159 of the current Quebec bill on “the official and common language of Quebec, French” intends to amend the Constitution Act, 1867 by introducing in it what follows: FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS OF QUEBEC90Q.1. Quebecers form a nation.90Q.2. French is the only official language of Québec. It is also the common language of the Quebec nation. This scheme has been referred ...

Justice Côté’s partial dissenting reasons in References re Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act, 2021 SCC 11 offered an original interpretation of the Constitution Act, 1867 that challenges the conventional view on the Parliament of Canada’s authority to enact Henry VIII clauses. A Henry VIII clause is a statutory provision that delegates to the executive the power to amended an enabling ...

There is a lively debate afoot in legal circles, both in the United States and now in Canada, on the “common good.” It began with Adrian Vermeule’s call for a “common good constitutionalism,” in which vague provisions would be infused with values drawn from the Catholic natural law tradition. Many others have now adopted the “common good” moniker, though it ...

A renaissance of interest and juristic thinking about the moral foundations of the law and legal reasoning is underway, and its reverberations have now reached Canadian shores. On February 22, Leonid Sirota and Mark Mancini published a post on the Double Aspect Blog entitled “Interpretation and the Value of Law”.[1] Although the post itself merely claims to show “[w]hy the ...