CANADIAN LAW JOURNALS have never been known for going out of their way to facilitate direct conversations between legal scholars working on cognate issues. However, if there is anything to the old liberal adage that the truth is more likely to emerge from the civil yet robust debating of competing ideas, the lack of opportunities for holders of rival views to respond, in real time, to each other’s arguments is deplorable. Therefore, I wish to commend the Osgoode Hall Law Journal for convening this timely scholarly exchange on the problematic phenomenon of racial profiling in Canadian policing and, more specifically, the under-explored question of how courts should respond to it in view of Canada’s distinct legal framework. I also wish to thank Terry Skolnik, Fernando Belton, and Jeanne Mayrand-Thibert (hereinafter SBMT) for agreeing to engage in this dialogue.

Taxpayers’ cross-border activities often result in two (or more) states claiming the right to tax their income. To address concerns about how those tax liabilities might aggregate and suppress international activities, states typically agree to split the tax base between them. But how can states fairly share tax revenue from cross-border activities? Tax scholars and policymakers offer different normative perspectives to address this inter-nation equity conundrum. In this article, we conceptualize these normative perspectives into two types. One centres on identifying where the economic factors that lead to the ability to produce the income are located (and uses that determination as the basis for an equitable split of taxing rights). Accordingly, a state with a greater degree of economic connection should enjoy a greater share of taxing rights. This perspective, we contend, is distinguishable from the infusion of cosmopolitan distributive justice theory into tax law. The latter approach portrays the redistribution or transfer of tax revenue, a form of tax aid from high-income countries to low-income countries, usually with the goal of funding humanitarian or developmental spending. Perhaps due to ambiguities in the overarching inter-nation equity concept (which seemingly includes cosmopolitan distributive justice) existing tax policy scholarship often fails to adequately distinguish the two perspectives when articulating the justifications for international taxing rights (re)allocation involving low-income countries. This article demonstrates the policy imperatives for distinguishing the two perspectives. For textual and conceptual clarity, we frame the first perspective as “allocative justice” and the latter as “redistributive justice.” For low-income countries to escape the trap of fiscal imperialism it is essential that they (as well as international tax policymakers in all states) establish international tax regimes that align with allocative justice and resist tax bargains that unduly cede taxing rights to which they have a justifiable claim. Redistributive justice may also play a role in supporting or explaining tax sharing arrangements between countries, but that framework should not be conflated with allocative justice.

Shari’a, InshAllah: Finding God in Somali Legal Politics (“Shari’a InshAllah”), written by Mark Fathi Massoud, professor of politics and legal studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is a compelling and fascinating work chronicling the relationship between law, religion, and politics in the context of Somalia’s recent history. In this book, Massoud explores the inextricability of religion from Somali legal politics as the country grapples with its colonial and post-colonial legacies and relationships to power in a society where God serves as a conduit for both faith and aspirations of self-determination. In a region where distrust of Western institutions and fears of authoritarian rule dominate state and capacity-building exercises, Massoud demonstrates how activists, lawyers, lawmakers, dictators, rebel groups, militants, and international aid organizations contend with competing sources of law, power, and politics in a fractured state. He further demonstrates the potential of Shari’a (i.e., Islamic law) to bridge divides across the most diverse of actors in order to produce a common logic of deference, submission, and adherence to the Rule of Law. Perhaps most critically, Massoud investigates the position of Shari’a in global discourse and how Western conceptions of Shari’a (seemingly influenced by orientalist tropes, imperialism, and Western hegemony and exceptionalism) give rise to misapprehensions of its utility, flexibility, necessity, and effectiveness in societies where Islam transcends political disagreements, clan affiliation, and personal identity.

ON DECEMBER 19TH, 2019, the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) handed down one of the most influential cases of the decade in Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration) v Vavilov. From an FBI raid to uncovering secret Russian spies, it is not often that Canadian administrative law deals with such an exhilarating situation. However, for the respondent, Alexander Vavilov, this was the situation that jolted him into the throes of administrative legal reform in Canada.

In 2019, two Roma-Hungarian travellers were prevented from boarding their flight to Canada. Even though their documents were in order and their travel was legitimate, they were singled out for examination and extra scrutiny. This article—relying on new evidence produced in a series of legal proceedings—shows how Canada has implemented a de facto system of racial profiling in airports overseas. This program was not built overnight, but produced by a series of historical accretions, all organized around the idea that potential refugees can be detected by their race. This article shows how Canada, to deter asylum seekers, has conscripted private actors to screen out some migrants. In this study, we explain how this racial profiling regime operates and test its legality against international legal instruments. We argue that this law offends basic Canadian legal commitments and that the practice ought to end.

I AM VERY GRATEFUL to the editors of the Osgoode Hall Law Journal for their invitation to submit a response to the journal’s review of my book, Assisted Suicide in Canada: Moral, Legal, and Policy Considerations. That review appeared in its spring 2023 issue.

DID YOU HEAR THE ONE about the Supreme Court of Canada justice owing the Prime Minister five thousand dollars? No, this is not the set-up of a cheesy law school joke nervously told at a pub night mixer. Rather, it was a shockingly true occurrence in the Laurier era that goes to show how drastically different (and a tad more corrupt) our legal system was over one hundred years ago. While not all the historical points of interest are juicy revelations concerning public officials, A History of Law in Canada, Volume Two: Law for the New Dominion 1867–1914 wraps an explosive period of Canada’s past into a book that should pique the interest of readers beyond those already invested in this nation’s legalities of yore.

This article systematically explores, for the first time in the published literature, how the development of the common law of employment could advance in light of the Charter values doctrine, focusing on freedom of association. It contends that courts must scrutinize the common law’s impairments of that freedom, and unless they are necessary to similarly important common law values, eliminate them where it is possible to do so within courts’ powers to incrementally change it. A number of such paths are open. If asked to do so, courts probably can and should provide Canadians with a common law of employment that better respects employee freedom of association. Nonetheless, any reconciliation between the common law and freedom of association is likely to remain incomplete for some time, or perhaps indefinitely. Policymakers, seeing the potential for a period of legal uncertainty and the likely persistence of residual but important impairments of freedom of association, should consider legislative reform.

LADY JUSTICE CAN OFTEN BE FOUND, in statue form, in or near courthouses. This symbol of the Western justice system is blindfolded to show neutrality. She carries a scale to weigh facts and arguments fairly. Sometimes, she also holds an olive leaf to symbolize mercy and healing. A sword is the other accessory that Lady Justice invariably carries. The sword is a ubiquitous part of this symbol because most people believe that justice in general, and criminal justice in particular, necessarily involves inflicting pain upon wrongdoers.

MOCK JURY STUDIES INVESTIGATING the impact of religious symbols on jurors have produced conflicting findings, raising questions about how religious bias should be studied in judicial settings. Our study adds to the literature in three ways. First, we develop a clear theoretical framework which identifies dispositional and situational triggers allowing researchers to more precisely define and measure religiously motivated bias. Second, we show that mock jury experiments with video-based treatments simulating audio-visual cues are more likely to produce reliable findings relative to text-based studies. Third, we present the first empirical evidence of how mock jurors react to courtroom oaths. Our analysis suggests jurors may be prone to trust witnesses who give religious oaths, and this could vary by degree of religiosity and religious group affiliation. These findings shed light on debates concerning whether witnesses should be permitted to swear religious oaths, wear religious garb, or testify about their religious beliefs.