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The Case for Expanding the Right to an Interpreter Beyond the Courtroom
Full text linkFor an accused who is not proficient in an official language, interpreter assistance is critical to ensure a basic level of understanding and participation in the criminal process. Section 14 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms constitutionalizes the protection against linguistic prejudice in legal proceedings. The Supreme Court of Canada has given section 14 a generous interpretation in the criminal context, but the availability and quality of courtroom interpretation is often compromised in practice due to a shortage of qualified interpreters and concerns about delays. Outside the courtroom, however, neither the Charter nor any statutory right in Canada independently guards against linguistic prejudice without resort to another procedural right (e.g. arguing that the accused did not understand their right to silence as a result of language barriers). I argue that inadequate interpreter assistance is no less harmful outside the courtroom. It could prevent a meaningful exercise of the rights to silence and to counsel. While it is difficult to directly attribute wrongful convictions to inadequate interpreter assistance, this paper uses the case studies of Gene Gibson and Vicente Benavides to show it contributes to familiar causes of wrongful convictions, including false guilty pleas, tunnel vision in police investigations, and ineffective assistance of counsel. Such linguistic prejudice is exacerbated by the fact that interpretation errors and miscommunications are difficult to discover or remedy once they have occurred. Interpreter assistance should therefore be more widely available in police interviews and consultations with counsel. I also propose that a legal right to interpreter assistance be recognized in these settings. This is consistent with the principles underlying section 14 and the need to protect other procedural rights under the Charter. It broadens the basis of judicial scrutiny and helps reduce linguistic prejudice and the risk of wrongful convictions
The Fragmentation and Complexity of Labour Law, Effective Protections, and Better Work: An Analytical Framework
Full text linkLabour law is a fragmented regulatory landscape bringing together multiple legal sources drawn from various areas of law, institutions, and interactions between multiple regulatory tiers and frameworks. This article offers a conceptual and analytical framework for understanding the intricate contemporary structure of labour law and its effectiveness in ensuring the protections it has historically been intended to provide. The article considers four types of legal fragmentation — temporal, vertical, horizontal, and institutional — distinguished by character and effect. The fragmented architecture of legal regulation leads, unsurprisingly, to complexity. The article puts forward an analytical approach that assesses how labour law’s complexity and fragmentation impacts its effectiveness. The article first explains the process of mapping a fragmented regulatory landscape and outlines the analytical benchmarks for assessing legal effectiveness. The concluding section examines labour law as a fragmented landscape and the resulting normative dynamics
Rethinking the Concept of the Employer in the Digital Economy: Corporate Fragmentation and Power Dynamics Through Labour Law and Competition Law Lenses
Full text linkThis article argues that the transformative dynamics brought along by the digital economy call for a normative rethinking of the allocation of employers’ obligations across the value chain, so as to better target the actual holders of labour market power. There is a growing mismatch between the role of the employer as typified in labour law frameworks — as the owner of productive assets and able to conduct its business autonomously — and the limited bargaining autonomy of the firms that gravitate in the ecosystems of digital tech corporations. This phenomenon can be attributed to two parallel trends. The first is the aggravation of contractual and corporate fragmentation, driven by subcontracting and outsourcing practices; while the second is the changing nature of power dynamics among business players, resulting in new forms of market concentration. If left unaddressed, both evolutions would eventually lead to a widespread deterioration of working conditions. The article therefore seeks insights into how the scope of the obligations of the employer might be broadened beyond the contractual employment relationship. To this end, it explores recent normative openings in European Union labour law such as the Platform Work Directive and the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive. It also draws on competition law developments in the digital economy field, which might provide interesting insights for promoting fairer labour markets in situations of excessive power concentration
Rethinking Legitimacy: Courts, Constitutions and Politics
No full textThis book presents a new perspective on the debate around legitimacy, politics and constitutional law in Supreme Courts.
Moving away from the troubling perception that Supreme Courts are trampling on the wrong side of the law/politics divide, it accepts and defends the critical claim that constitutional law is intrinsically and inescapably politics: in style, substance and outcome.
It explains what is involved in that claim and recommends a more nuanced and compelling account than it is caricatured to be. The book proceeds to demonstrate how the legal and judicial process can proceed if the law-is-politics critique is taken seriously. Insisting that it cannot be business as usual, the author offers a series of constructive proposals about how constitutional law and judicial decision-making can continue in anything like their present format and style.
Recognising that a more radical approach could be taken to the way in which democracy might re-organise, the book runs with the idea that it is possible to incorporate and accommodate the law-is-politics argument within a governmental system of constitutional democracy that resembles closely what now occurs. In that sense, the book is both critical and constructive as well as principled and pragmatic.https://digitalcommons.osgoode.yorku.ca/faculty_books/1444/thumbnail.jp
Privacy as Professional Identity
No full textThis article explores an important course of action to safeguarding privacy in the workplace, grounded in the professional identity of workers and their corresponding moral and ethical duties towards clients or patients. Described as “privacy as professional identity,” this concept is developed through two key contributions. First, the article argues that workers who are ethically and legally obligated to protect the confidentiality and privacy of their clients or patients — such as psychologists and lawyers — also inherently safeguard their own personal privacy. This argument is substantiated through illustrative examples and anchored in theoretical frameworks concerning the right to privacy. Second, the article critically evaluates the advantages and limitations of privacy as professional identity, contrasting them with the two dominant paradigms in labour law scholarship: privacy as an individual right, and privacy protected by collective action through trade unions or other forms of employee representation. By doing so, the article demonstrates the potential of privacy as professional identity to enhance workplace privacy protections, either independently or in conjunction with these established strategies
Comment - Reflecting on Privacy’s Perceived Omnipotence and the Lost Role of Equality in Regulating Working Time
No full text“PRIVACY AND THE RIGHT TO (DIS)CONNECT” (Collins, 2025) is a beautifully written and captivating work concerning the enmeshment of personal and work time amid the always-on work culture. It argues that while the industrial era created a space and time configuration for work at the factory, information and communication technologies have dissolved previous divisions, essentially moving us back to feudal times. Now, we are always at the beck and call of the master, but with a digital “DING”: an email, text, or WhatsApp from employers, clients, and co-workers, transgressing formerly held boundaries of space and time allotted for work and contractual or statutory entitlements for personal time (Collins, 2025). This depiction of work as all-consuming is in stark contrast to basic human needs, Collins argues. It also goes against early efforts to regulate working time during industrialization that attempted to create boundaries to allow for life’s multi-dimensions: work, family, civic association, and leisure (Renan Barzilay, 2012)
Realism, Legal
No full textThis entry considers the legal realists’ neglected contribution to law and literature. Starting with Cardozo’s essay ‘law and literature’ on the importance of judicial style, it then considers the contributions of the legal realists to the topic, focusing especially on the contributions of Karl Llewellyn and Jerome Frank. Cardozo and Frank—both judges who were interested in making sure they effectively conveyed their ideas—focused on the style a judge should adopt. By contrast, Llewellyn’s more sociological perspective was concerned with how different periods and jurisdictions were dominated by different judicial styles
