Justice In Canada Research Articles

The 'Canada Brand': Violence and Canadian Mining Companies in Latin America

This is the first report to profile specific forms of violence and criminalization associated with Canadian mining projects in Latin America over a fifteen-year period. Each incident is carefully footnoted and all web links are preserved using Harvard Law School’s Perma.cc service. The report is critical of the lack of Canadian mechanisms for investigating human rights abuses of Canadian companies operating overseas. It draws on the thinking of former Supreme Court of Canada Justice Ian Binnie and others to argue that the concepts of proximity to violence and complicity of the Canadian company should be the basis for rethinking the current law in Canada.

Chronic, Irremediable Depression Constituting Mental Disability: Expanding Legal Rights to Euthanasia in Canada

Interdisciplinary and comparative research aims to establish: (a) if the challenge in differentiating between short-term and chronic psychological pain is legally problematic for the Canadian justice system; (b) if chronic, irremediable depression constitutes severe, intolerable, enduring suffering satisfying the disability requirement permitting euthanasia; (c) if chronic depression meets the grounds for mental disability classification; (d) if the application of “terminality” in Carter v Canada differs from the practical, legal interpretation by Canadian courts (e.g., a recent Alberta Court of Appeal decision); and (e) the medical, ethical, moral, and legal implications for physicians, patients, clinicians, and the legal community.

Everyday Legal Problems and the Cost of Justice in Canada: Overview Report

Law and legal problems are part of everyday life. If you have ever been harassed at work, unfairly fired or evicted, divorced, not received support payments, disputed a will or a cell phone contract, or had your credit rating challenged, you may have already experienced one of these types of everyday legal problems. If so, you are not alone. Almost half (48.4%) of Canadians over 18 will experience at least one civil or family justice problem over any given three-year period. Even though many Canadians do not understand, feel connected to or welcomed by the justice system, essentially all of us will experience at least one everyday legal problem over the course of our lifetime.

‘I don‘t know what you people are so concerned about’: homicide survivors’ experience with the Canadian criminal justice system

Victims of crime are often confused and frustrated by the criminal justice process. Those who have lost loved ones to homicide – often called ‘homicide survivors,’ ‘secondary victims,’ or ‘co-victims’ – suffer not only loss and a justice system that seems to have little place for them, but are often also left unaware of the circumstances of their loved one’s death. The current study sought to further our understanding of the experience of homicide survivors in the Canadian justice system. Toward this end, in-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with five individuals who lost loved ones to homicide. Results showed that receiving information and being treated kindly were far more important than having an influence over the proceedings; additionally, there was a great deal of distrust of the justice system as a whole, regardless of the kindness shown by individual actors in the system. Policy implications and directions for future research are discussed.

A Study on Correctional System of Restorative Justice in Canada

A Study on Correctional System of Restorative Justice in Canada

15. African Canadians' Struggle within the Canadian Justice System

The following posters are a result of research done by the students in Dr. Cynthia Levine-Rasky’s Sociology 233: ‘Race’ and Racialization course. These ten posters were chosen by the entire class to be exhibited at I@Q.

A Third Revolution in Family Dispute Resolution: Accessible Legal Professionalism

Innovation in family law firms can tangibly improve access to justice in Canada. This article develops that claim by drawing on empirical data and scholarship about Canadian family law. Part 1 explains how and why legal needs arising from the dissolution of intimate relationships are so difficult for the parties to meet. This Part draws on civil legal needs surveys, surveys with lawyers, and data from interviews with litigants. The focus shifts to family law firms (including sole practitioners) in Part 2, using new empirical data about the Canadian lawyers who do this work. Three promising opportunities to innovate for accessibility in family law practice are identified: (i) innovative fee structure; (ii) innovative service variety; and (iii) innovative division of labour. A revolution in Canadian family law is proposed in Part 3. Our family law doctrine was revolutionized beginning in the 1960s, and family law alternative dispute resolution was similarly transfigured beginning in the 1980s. It is now time to foment a third revolution, in family law practice accessibility, to bring the benefits of family justice to all Canadians who need them.

Improving Wrongful Conviction Review: Lessons from a Comparative Analysis of Continental Criminal Procedure

The study of wrongfuil conviction has yielded much evidence outlining that factors such as mistaken identification, false confessions, unsavoury informants, and misconduct on the part of the prosecution, defence, and police, inter alia, are causes of wrongfuil conviction common to most, if not all, criminal justice systems. Despite the resurgence of scholarly and popular interest in the phenomenon of wrongful conviction, there are a number of gaps in our knowledge and there is little scholarship available that addresses the subject of this article.In this article, the author addresses the question posed by Professor and Dean of Social Ecology (University of California — Irvine) C. Ronald Huff: "Are some criminal justice systems more likely to produce wrongful convictions than others?" The author undertakes a comparative study of criminal procedure in France and Germany in order to critique and appraise the Canadian approach to wrongful conviction review. He argues that incorporating specific elements of Continental practice into our domestic procedures would substantially increase and improve the opportunities for correcting miscarriages of justice in Canada.

Overcoming Bias: Mediation-Arbitration in Canadian Civil Litigation

Mediation-Arbitration (“med-arb”) is a seldom-used ADR procedure in Canadian civil litigation. The reluctance to employ it is rooted in preconceptions about legal bias. In a Canadian justice system challenged by problems of access to justice and cost, lawyers must learn to use med-arb as a hybrid dispute resolution method that uses one neutral instead of several and removes cases from the public court docket. This imperative requires a fresh look at the nature of med-arb’s structural bias to determine the extent to which bias is a real obstacle to a just resolution.The analysis begins with the origin of the med-arb structure in final-offer arbitration, in order to identify the justice expectations med-arb is suited to meeting. The author then brings med-arb’s structural bias within recent treatment of the general theory of impartiality in the Canadian legal system. The emergence of issue-alignment bias as a concept withstanding objective scrutiny helps one understand the nature of med-arb’s structural bias. This analysis yields the result that bias in med-arb is not inherently fatal to a just result. Rather, once one understands the suitability of med-arb to certain expectations of a just result, the structural bias becomes part of the bargain and the efficacy of the hybrid procedure becomes more evident.

The Language of Administrative Law

Administrative law has changed radically in its scope and breadth in recent decades. Old analytical frameworks have been cast aside and replaced by more open-textured concepts, such as "legality", "rationality" and "fairness." In demonstrating that administrative decisions are beyond the legal pale, lawyers have resort to various devices: mission statements, labels, terminological exactitude, metaphors and personification.Although language plays a useful descriptive role in administrative law, by setting out a landscape that can be comfortably viewed and usefully discussed from 20,000 feet, overreliance on these devices obfuscates the inevitably normative task judges have in judicial review cases: deciding and explaining whether intervention would be justifiable or not. Falling back on language may be a coping mechanism for judges, lawyers and academics deprived by the recent administrative law reformations of clear principles around which their work can be organized. In this paper, I demonstrate the limits of language in administrative law, with a view to understanding the role of judicial review more clearly. Descriptive language is often either useless – because it adds nothing but a conclusory label to a conclusion reached on other grounds – or downright dangerous – because it hides judicial value judgements. Administrative lawyers have to think and judges to justify themselves in normative terms. Mission statements, labels, terminological exactitude, metaphors and personification are descriptive devices better left to publishing houses. This is an early draft that will be published in a volume of the Canadian Bar Review in honour of former Supreme Court of Canada Justice Louis LeBel.

Indigenous legal traditions and Canadian Bhinneka Tunggal Ika: Indonesian lessons for legal pluralism in Canada

Bhinneka Tunggal Ika is a popular Indonesian phrase meaning “unity in diversity.” Through comparing Canadian and Indonesian approaches to conceptualizing and administering legal pluralism vis-à-vis indigenous peoples, the paper uses this concept to recommend direction for the administration of justice in Canada. The areas of comparison are the three main barriers to instituting a robust legal pluralism in Canada – legitimacy, dependency, and implementation. Where Asian and particularly Indonesian philosophies of legal pluralism create an atmosphere that legitimates legal pluralism's role as a nation-building tool, North American philosophies exacerbate an already adversarial and hierarchical relationship between multiple coexisting legal orders. While these divergent ways of framing legal pluralism have not resulted in large differences for these countries in terms of legislating to reconcile the existence of indigenous legal orders with those of the state, they have affected the way indigenous peoples and state citizens actually practice such coexistence. In general, current Indonesian practices founded on the idea of regionalism and bhinneka tunggal ika (unity in diversity) offer more opportunities for indigenous legal traditions to function. In contrast, Canadian practices founded on the centralization of power and the dominance of state legal order over indigenous ones hinder such opportunities. Ironically, the origins of the Canadian legal system and the creation of the nation were dependent on and shaped significantly by indigenous and non-indigenous societies' early respect for each other's legal orders – as treaties and early Canadian jurisprudence show. This paper advocates for a return to that respect in the interest of Canadian nation-building.

The Cost of Seeking Civil Justice in Canada

How much does it cost individual Canadians to seek civil justice? This article compiles empirical data about the monetary, temporal, and psychological costs confronting individual justice-seekers in this country. The article suggests that analysis of private costs can improve access to justice in two ways. First, it can help public sector policy-makers to reduce these costs. Second, it can help lawyers and entrepreneurs to identify new, affordable ways to reduce the costs that are most onerous to individuals with different types of civil legal need.

No Lawyer for a Hundred Miles?: Mapping the New Geography of Access of Justice in Canada

No Lawyer for a Hundred Miles?: Mapping the New Geography of Access of Justice in Canada

Racialization, crime, and criminal justice in Canada

Acknowledgments Introduction The Racialization of Crime Structure of the Book Part One: Concepts, Theories, Approaches 1. Concepts and Theories about Race, Racialization, and Criminal Justice Conceptualizing Race, Racism, and Racial Difference The Racialization of Crime and Criminal Justice in Canada The Criminalization of Racial Groups Part Two: Constructing Criminal Justice 2. Intersectionality, Crime, and Criminal Justice Intersectionality and Feminist Criminologies Who Is an (In)Credible Lawbreaker or Victim of Crime? Normative Expectations and Criminal Justice The But For Phenomenon Rethinking the Criminal?Victim Dichotomy Intersectionality and Equality 3. Race, Crime, and Mental Health Anti-Psychiatry and Critiques of the Psy Complex Racial Discrimination, Racial Disparities, and Mental Health Mad or Bad? Categorizing Dual Deviants Diagnosing Dangerousness: Mental Illness and Violence Deinstitutionalization and the Criminalization of Madness 4. Media Representations of Race, Crime, and Criminal Justice Newsworthiness and Crime Reporting Race, Crime, and Moral Panics Crime and Criminal Justice as Spectacle Part Three: Administering Criminal Justice 5. Race, Racism, and Policing Policing Under the Radar Racial Profiling and Police Stop and Search Decisions Race and Police Use of Force 6. Race, Sentencing, and Imprisonment Gendering Criminal Justice Race and the Criminal Justice Process Unintended Consequences of Criminal Justice Reform 7. Criminal Victimization and Hate Crimes Victimization of Women Racialized Youth and Criminal Victimization Hate Crimes in Canada Part Four: Criminalizing Racial Groups 8. The Racialization of National Security Legislative Changes The New Enemy The Exceptional State? Bolstering Domestic Security 9. The Racialization of Immigration Surveillance Migration Surveillance Preventing and Deterring Unwanted Migration Detention and Deportation The Rise of Anti-Immigration 10. The Criminalization and Racialization of Poverty Rolling Back State Support The Undeserving Poor Penalizing and Criminalizing Poor People References Legal Cases Cited Index

Data and Diversity in the Canadian Justice Community

This study explores the importance of quantitative and qualitative data in the development of more inclusive policies of recruitment and appointment in the justice community. Since at least the Abella Equality in Employment Royal Commission Report in 1984, the link between obtaining and analyzing data on recruitment and achieving greater inclusion has been well-documented and oft-repeated. The authors focus on the apparent resistance on the part of governments (in the case of judicial appointments) and private as well as public legal employers (in the case of legal recruitment) to keep, track and publish demographic data on who seeks these opportunities and who is selected for them. While the rhetoric around diversity and inclusion is now pretty much universally in favour of a judicial and legal community that reflects the society and communities they serve, opinions continue to differ sharply on the means of achieving this goal. Many view the focus on numbers and data alone as myopic, and as likely to obscure as reveal the reality of diversity in the judiciary and legal profession. Others are simply worried about efforts to manipulate such data, the impact of ranking, identifying “good” and “bad” firms and organizations in simplistic ways, and so forth. In other words, some fear the focus on data may in fact undermine the goal of a more inclusive justice community. The authors disagree. The authors’ view is that, while better practices with respect to collecting and publishing data on diversity will not in and of themselves make the justice community more inclusive, these data represent a necessary first step. The authors also explore blending quantitative and qualitative data together to provide a basis for a better understanding of the progress towards a more inclusive justice community in Canada.

Wigs, Skeletons, Bibs, Bands, and Bundles: An Albertan Barrister Deciphers the English Court of Appeal (Criminal Division)

There are a number of features of British criminal appeals which differ from the Canadian justice system. This article explores these differences by reviewing the changes and customs adopted by the English Court of Appeal (Criminal Division).

Wendy Chan and Dorothy Chunn, Racialization, Crime, and Criminal Justice in Canada.

Wendy Chan and Dorothy Chunn, Racialization, Crime, and Criminal Justice in Canada.

Representing Canadian Justice: The Iconography and Symbolism of the Supreme Court of Canada

The goal of this paper would be to bridge the world of artistic and architectural representations of the law, primarily in the form of the constitutional court houses, and the legal cultures and constitutional traditions that inspire their design. I will proceed by undertaking a comprehensive research of the Supreme Court of Canada, including its history, esthetics, architectural and design innovations, personal input of the architects, social and historical contexts, as well as some of the legal and constitutional concepts that they embody. The assumption of my hypothesis being constitutional court houses, with their often impressive artistic details and inscribed legal maxims, seem to possess a quasi-religious significance, being an extension of what has become in many societies, especially developed liberal democracies with strong rule-of-law traditions, the secular approximation of a religious institution and, thus, the courts are transformed into a kind of temple of law. However, the challenge of creating a courthouse, especially the Supreme Court of Canada, that reflects the legal traditions and social norms (the former often being in conflict with the latter) as well as the ever evolving aspirations of a dynamic and highly diverse, pluralistic society such as Canada’s is, in many respects, an impossible one, and it remains an open question whether the image that the court conveys to the visitor, is ,as Gournay & Vanlaethem state in their essay, the most “eloquent three dimensional representation of the role the Supreme Court has assumed in the life of the nation.”

Threats, approach behavior, and violent recidivism among offenders who harass Canadian justice officials.

We examined the characteristics of offenders who harassed justice officials, comparing those who threatened or approached their victim with those who engaged in other problematic communications. We also explored predictors of subsequent violence. We identified 86 offenders from the files of a justice officials protection and investigation service in Ontario, Canada, who had used threatening, disturbing, intimidating, or harassing language (written or verbal) toward police, prosecutors, judges, defense attorneys, probation officers, or correctional workers. We conducted chi-squared tests and ANOVAs to compare offenders who did versus did not threaten or approach on criminal history, substance abuse, mental health, and other variables at the index offense, and tested predictors of future violence using the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) area under the curve. Using threats was associated with being male, a prior criminal history, substance abuse, and suicidality. Approaching the victim was associated with younger age, less previous offending, and absence of a prior acquaintance with the target. Postindex criminal offending was common (55%), but typically nonviolent, and on only 3 occasions (4%) was the victim the original target of harassment. When violent recidivism did occur it was not toward the target; it was best predicted by younger age at index, criminal history, and using threats. Offenders who harass justice officials are rarely violent toward these victims, and their violence is predicted by well-established variables.

Restorative justice and community justice in Canada

(2014). Restorative justice and community justice in Canada. Restorative Justice: Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 218-224.