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Business Organizations: Practice, Theory and Emerging Challenges, 3rd Edition
No full textBusiness Organizations: Practice, Theory and Emerging Challenges, 3rd Edition is more than just a comprehensive guide to the fundamentals of business structures, including partnerships and corporations. It highlights diverse perspectives on the objectives of business organizations, the roles and responsibilities of their officers and directors, and the functions of these organizations in Canadian society. This approach strives to promote a deep understanding of business organizations and of the ways in which legal and policy decisions impact their function.
This thoroughly updated and reorganized edition introduces an entirely new chapter on the principles of agency, along with a fresh examination of Indigenous business structures, including commentary on the challenges of imposing organizational structures conceived outside indigenous communities to enterprises operating within them. The casebook features expert insights from three new authors: Frankie Young, Peer Zumbansen, and Barnali Choudhury.
Drawing on the perspectives of leading Canadian business scholars, this casebook is designed to be an accessible classroom and research resource. It is a must-have addition to the faculty, firm, or private library of anyone interested in the various dimensions of the law of business organizations.
[From Business Organizations: Practice, Theory and Emerging Challenges, 3rd Edition ]https://commons.allard.ubc.ca/books/1412/thumbnail.jp
Binding Rights: Contractual Federalism and the Right to Housing in Canada
No full textCanada’s housing crisis continues to deepen, exacerbated by constitutional fragmentation and intergovernmental reluctance to implement human rights-based housing policy. While the federal National Housing Strategy Act recognizes housing as a human right, its application is limited and its legal force is limited to the federal level, leaving provinces and municipalities unbound. This article argues that contract law – particularly conditional funding agreements between the federal government and subnational actors – can serve as a pragmatic and legally coherent mechanism to bind municipalities to housing obligations, including the recognition of housing as a human right. Drawing on the Canada Health Act as a functional precedent and supported by constitutional jurisprudence, this paper demonstrates how the federal government can use contracts as justice-oriented tools to implement the right to housing. Contracts, though not a constitutional panacea, offer a legal and institutional bridge between aspirational rights and material obligations in a complex federal system
The Future of Warfare: National Positions on the Governance of Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems
Full text linkLethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS), such as drones and autonomous missile systems, are no longer a theoretical concern. Indeed, they are finding their way onto the battlefield. Amid growing international concern, States have articulated a range of positions on how LAWS should be governed, ranging from relying on existing international law(traditionalists), to a legal ban on LAWS (prohibitionists), to a new treaty that would ban certain uses and regulate others to “clarify and strengthen existing law” (dualists). In this post, we analyze a flurry of recent international diplomatic efforts to address LAWS, focusing on these three main positions adopted by various States and identifying potential next steps
Volumetric Subdivision and the Architectures of Property
Full text linkHenry Smith’s influential architectural or modular theory of property places things, defined by the right to exclude, at its core. Property as “The Law of Things” relies on an exclusionary strategy, augmented with governance strategies that delineate particular rights of use, to define owned things and to enable their uses. This Article considers that claim and Smith’s call for multi-dimensional theorizing that accounts for property in “the real world” and “in real life” through an analysis of the increasingly common practice of volumetric subdivision to produce three-dimensional property. Focussing on the statutory frameworks in the Canadian province of British Columbia, this Article describes the practice of subdividing land into air space parcels and then into condominium lots. The three-dimensional properties that emerge are embedded within condominium and, further, within air space parcel agreements that use easements and covenants to define legal relationships, including rights of access and support, obligations for repair, and provisions for cost-sharing and dispute resolution. This Article argues that the air space parcel and condominium frameworks are becoming the applied architecture of property and that Smith’s modular theory, with its emphasis on the things of property and the right to exclude, does not provide a satisfactory account of the property that they produce. However, in dealing with the emerging and, in some instances, almost unintelligible complexity, the Article turns back to the work of Smith and others in concluding that interests which are produced and represented as property should be placed within structures that conform with principles that animate the law of property
Advocating for children, families, and nations : kinship care placements for Indigenous families in BC
No full textWhen children are unable to remain in the care of their parents, they have traditionally been placed in foster care with caregivers who are contracted by a child and family service agency to care for them. Foster care providers are usually not known to the child or their family prior to the placement. Beginning in the 1990s, child and family service agencies in Canada began to place children with kinship caregivers as an alternative to foster care. Kinship caregivers are members of a child’s extended family or community network and are generally selected by parents to provide care. In British Columbia, provincial child and family service legislation, the Child, Family, and Community Service Act, RSBC 1996, c46, requires kinship care placements to be prioritized relative to foster care placements. For Indigenous children, this priority is also reflected in the federal legislation, An Act respecting First Nations, Inuit and Métis children, youth and families, SC 2019, c 24 (the “Federal Act”). Kinship care placements are a uniquely important placement option for Indigenous children given the long history of removing Indigenous children from their families that began with federal residential schools and continues through provincial child and family services. While the Federal Act is intended to make meaningful change for Indigenous families and, in particular, to address the over-representation of Indigenous children in government care, it is not sufficient on its own to improve access to kinship care placements for Indigenous families. The legislation does not address the systemic discrimination and access to justice barriers experienced by Indigenous families engaged with child and family service agencies and kinship care policy in BC is excessively narrow. Only by investing in child and family services designed to promote substantive equality for Indigenous children while addressing the conditions of systemic discrimination that their families experience can kinship care placements be meaningfully accessed in response to the ongoing harms caused to Indigenous families by child and family service interventions
Estoppel Without Regard to Equity? The Puzzling Omission of Promissory Estoppel’s Inequity Condition in Canada
No full textPromissory estoppel plays an important role in enabling the enforcement of promises not made for consideration in cases where the promise was intended to and did induce a party to change its position in regard to preexisting legal rights. However, Canadian law on estoppel has been plagued by confusion and misunderstanding. This article addresses the internationally notable absence of an inequity requirement from promissory estoppel in Canada. The requirement’s absence is peculiar, in that estoppel’s very foundation is in equity, and it must assure that its effect is indeed equitable. Drawing on the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in Trial Lawyers Association of British Columbia v Royal & Sun Alliance Insurance Company of Canada, I show how Canadian law is flawed in the absence of this vital element. I further demonstrate that, in fact, Canada was once a leader on this point before the widely-known opinion about it by Lord Denning in England in 1966. Later, the requirement fell through the cracks as the Supreme Court of Canada lost its grasp on its own precedents, and on the law on estoppel more generally. However, drawing on the older jurisprudence, and scholarship here and abroad, the situation can be rectified by having Canadian law again recognize promissory estoppel’s crucial inequity requirement
Values and propriety in zoning : contextualizing British Columbia\u27s housing reforms
No full textThere is currently a wave of legislative reform underway in which senior levels of government intervene in land use zoning, which has been almost exclusively under the control of municipal governments in American and Canadian legal practice (among other places). Driven by widespread housing shortages, these reforms are broadly aimed at loosening municipal restrictions on housing production. Urban areas that have only allowed single-family homes have been a particular focus. British Columbia has joined other jurisdictions in enacting land use reforms. The City of Vancouver suffers from a particularly acute housing shortage and is one of the least affordable cities in the world. This thesis reviews the reforms taken in two examples of this legislative reform movement—California and New Zealand—in order to critique the effectiveness of the British Columbia reforms to date. However, most theories of property law are ill-suited to support such a critique. Traditional theories focus on the related concepts of exclusion and use, and conceive of intrusions on an owner’s dominion as incidental to ownership. Under zoning, however, the restrictions are not incidental, but fundamental: all uses are forbidden except those specifically allowed. This thesis applies Gregory Alexander’s theory of “property as propriety”, which focuses on the social nature of property and its role in fostering substantive views on the proper ordering of society, to zoning powers. Applying this lens, the author identifies three chief values underpinning Vancouver’s dominant urban-pastoral system of values: privileging low-density residential neighbourhoods separated from commercial uses; a structural status quo bias; and a link between regulating built form and social hierarchies. As an alternative, the author proposes a principle of abundant housing: the legal system should, in a given area, support housing in sufficient quantity to meet demand in that area. Despite positive elements, British Columbia’s reforms are expected to be largely ineffective in addressing Vancouver’s housing shortage. In addition to several technical weaknesses that limit their applicability to the City of Vancouver, by failing to address the City’s reliance on discretionary housing approvals, the reforms are expected to be insufficient to substantially improve Vancouver’s housing shortage
Positive Covenants and the Inherent Instability of Alteration Agreements Within Condominium: \u3cem\u3eThe Owners, Strata Plan NW 2476 v. Jensen\u3c/em\u3e
Full text linkPositive covenants—contractual obligations to do things that touch and concern land—are not recognized as property interests at law or in equity. A positive covenant, including the requirement to maintain or repair a building, only binds the parties that contract to be bound. The obligation is personal to the contracting parties and does not run with the land; future owners are bound only if they agree to be bound. The Supreme Court of Canada confirmed as much in 2020 in a dispute between owners of air space parcels over an obligation to pay parking fees: “Where positive covenants are concerned, the general rule is that they do not run with the land.” In The Owners, Strata Plan NW 2476 v. Jensen, the British Columbia Civil Resolution Tribunal (the “CRT”) ruled that Trevor Jensen, the owner of Strata Lot 1 in a duplex-style complex with nine buildings and seventeen strata lots, was responsible for the cost of replacing two skylights that a former owner had installed in the roof under an alteration agreement with the strata corporation. The strata corporation’s bylaws allowed alteration agreements to permit such modifications to common property (including the roofs of strata lots), but only if the owner agreed “to take responsibility for any costs relating to the alteration as well as the future repair and maintenance”. In this instance, the former owner had agreed to assume future costs associated with the skylights, and thus to indemnify the strata corporation. Moreover, the alteration agreement purported to bind the owner’s “heirs, successors and assigns”, i.e., future owners, to costs associated with the alteration in the common property
Algorithmic Sentencing & Displaced Judicial Discretion: Storytelling Solutions for Rule of Law Problems in the Age of AI
Full text linkHybrid regulation of low-carbon economies
No full text[The full abstract for this thesis is available in the body of the thesis, and will be available when the embargo expires.