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(Un)Necessary Evils?: Ethical and Emotional Conflicts for Social Change Lawyers in Canada
No full textThis thesis concerns an exploratory study about “social change” lawyers in Canada. Based on qualitative interviews, I aim to provide a modest but in-depth examination of the experiences and practical challenges these lawyers face in their work and how they navigate them. I find their approaches are divided between external and internal, both of which are affected by lawyers’ positionalities and experiences. “External approaches” concern how they reconcile conflicts in their values and responsibilities to different groups—namely individuals, communities and social movements—with each other, and with their obligations to the legal profession. Meanwhile, “internal approaches” concern how they navigate conflicting feelings arising out of working in contradictory and oppressive external systems. Ultimately, there is no formula or answer to how this work can be done; both approaches rely on finding a balance between conflicting parties or feelings and accepting an inherent uncertainty and unresolved nature of the work
Law, Language, and Authority: The Algorithmic Turn
No full textLaw is formed by language and law utilizes language. Law is also like language in that it consists of social rules that aid in the structuring of society. From the time that we first put language into writing, we have been invested in the technologizing of language. There is a clear trajectory of our interest in having machines do things with language that we would otherwise do ourselves. This dissertation investigates how law’s relationship with language changes with the use of algorithmically driven technologies, and correspondingly, the consequences for the changing nature of authority since the use of language in law is closely entwined with the use of language in exercising authority. Drawing on J. L. Austin’s speech-act theory as framework, which scrutinizes language as a form of action and effects rather than as a medium for transmitting information, this dissertation is divided into three pillars that grapple with how algorithms do things with words in the context of law. The first pillar offers an analysis of generative AI and the implications for authorship. The second pillar moves from algorithms and authored words to an examination of algorithms and drafted words, specifically through an analysis of the nature of the emerging “algorithmic contract,” in which an algorithm fills in for human expertise in the contracting process. The third pillar of this dissertation investigates the consequences of executing algorithmic contracts, paying particular attention to the accelerating issue of technology-facilitated gender-based violence in the ride-hailing industry. Taken together these three pillars have implications for understanding law’s authority as we adopt increasingly sophisticated technologies in society. This final chapter on authority taps into cyberfeminism to help elucidate the changing nature of authority as we delegate authority, often unintentionally, to algorithms. The findings drawn from this investigation offer solutions to some of the legal conundrums posed by algorithmically driven technologies that do things with language. These findings also have import for the relationship between law and language and for better understanding the nature of law in the Algorithmic Turn
Disaster and Development
No full textThis chapter discusses the relationship between law, disasters, and development. Despite the long-standing and intimate relationship between disasters and development there is surprisingly little legal scholarship on the subject. The chapter offers a historical and conceptual framework for understanding the relationship and its impact on international law and policy-making and argues the adoption of Sustainable Development Goals and the advent of paradigms such as resilience, climate change adaptation, and catastrophic risk management are rationalizing our understanding of disasters along new and unchartered trajectories. Ignoring the legal, political, and economic causes of global inequality, experts and policy-makers committed to these paths often rely on ahistorical assumptions. In order to counter these trends, scholars must turn their attention to how the international economic system and objectivist claims underlying development agendas and metrics may be structuring relations between and within countries in ways that entrench historical inequities rather than ground promises of hope
The Regulation of Prostitution in China: Law in the Everyday Lives of Sex Workers, Police Officers, and Public Health Officials
No full textIn this compelling book, Margaret L. Boittin delves into the complex world of prostitution in China and how it shapes the lives of those involved in it. Through in-depth fieldwork, Boittin provides a fascinating case study of the role of law in everyday life and its impact on female sex workers, street-level police officers, and frontline public health officials. The book offers a unique perspective on the dynamics between society and the state, revealing how the laws that govern sex work affect those on the frontlines. With clear and accessible prose, this book is a must-read for anyone interested in law, state-society relations, China, and sex work.https://digitalcommons.osgoode.yorku.ca/faculty_books/1441/thumbnail.jp
Out of Place when Studying China’s Sex Industry
No full textThe chapter explains how being out of place can paradoxically put one back in place – or exactly where one needs to be to achieve their research goals and values. The author, Margaret Boittin, is a lawyer and US-trained political scientist who works in a Canadian law faculty. She explains how being out of place is relative. She may not be out of place in North America as “a white woman with blond hair and blue eyes,” but she was obviously out of place when she was studying sex workers in China. Embracing this outsider status also became the source of her strength during fieldwork and later in the academy. Boittin concludes with a reminder about the exhaustion of being out of place but also with gratitude to the many respondents – sex workers, their clients, and police – who felt comfortable with her precisely because she was an outsider
Regulating Health and Safety in Capitalist Workplaces: History, Practices, and Prospects
No full textOccupational health and safety (OHS) regulation sits atop structures of risk creation integral to uneven processes of capitalist accumulation. It is largely shaped by the struggles of working people to limit the harms that otherwise would be inflicted upon them. This chapter examines OHS regulation in advanced capitalist countries, with a concentration on the English-speaking world. It outlines the broad lines of its historical development, beginning from the rise of industrial capitalism through to the first decades of the twenty-first century and the creation of new modes of regulation, often referred to as regulated self-regulation. It then reviews debates over the performance of this mode of regulation, including the relation between self-regulation and state enforcement, the practice of state enforcement, and the efficacy of worker participation rights. Finally, the chapter concludes with a discussion of emerging OHS challenges to the regulatory regime, including precarious employment
Corporations as International Economic Law Actors
Get PDFActors in international law are presumed to be states. Yet in the international economic law arena, the corporation is one of the most prominent non-state actors. Indeed, in some instances, the corporation may even be more influential than the state in some arenas of international economic law. This short piece examines three instances of this influence. First, it looks at the role of corporations in law-making; second, it examines corporations’ role in monitoring and compliance; and, third, it explores corporations’ legal personality in international economic law. Finding corporations’ immense influence on law-making and monitoring and compliance, combined with a robust legal personality, this piece concludes that not only are corporations actors in international economic law, but they are also part of the framework of global governance in the area
Pt 1 Remembering Peter - His Brilliant Legacy: A Conference in Honour of Peter W. Hogg
No full textThis session includes:
Conference Opening
The opening will situate Peter\u27s immense influence on Canadian constitutional law and beyond - both beyond constitutional law in Canada, and beyond Canada.
Remembering Peter This panel will allow more personal memories of the late Dean Hogg from people who knew him and worked with him.
Chair: Dean and Professor Emeritus John McCamus, Osgoode Hall Law School
Speakers: The Hon. Justice Louise Arbour, CC, GOQ, The Hon. Justice James MacPherson, Ontario Court of Appeal, The Hon. Justice Patrick Monahan. Ontario Court of Appeal, former Dean, Osgoode Hall Law Schoo
Constitutional Cases 2024 (Pt 3A) | Immigration and Refugee Law and the Constitution
No full textDrawing from Canadian Council for Refugees, panelists will analyze the implementation of the 2002 “Safe Third Country Agreement” vis-a-vis the s.7 right to life, liberty, and security of the person, and s.15 equality rights. Panelists will also address these Charter arguments in relation to rights under international law regarding non-refoulement and detention.
Panelists: Jamie Liew (virtual) (Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa)
Audrey Macklin (Faculty of Law, University of Toronto) and Josh Blum (Jared Will & Associates)
Sharry Aiken (Faculty of Law, Queen’s University) and Colin Grey (Faculty of Law, Queen’s University)
Jackie Swaisland (Landings LLP)
Chair: Sean Rehaag (Osgoode Hall Law School)
The 27th iteration of the Constitutional Cases conference was held on Friday, April 12, 2024. Osgoode Hall Law School’s Annual Constitutional Cases Conference, recognized as the leading constitutional law conference in Canada, brings together many highly respected constitutional scholars, lawyers, students, and experts for an insightful and practical analysis of the Supreme Court’s significant constitutional judgments of the past year
The Highest Suggestion in the Land: Obiter Dicta and the Modern Supreme Court of Canada
Get PDFThe Supreme Court of Canada is unlike any court of appeal in Canada. Many decades ago, the Court shed the traditional mould of an error-correcting appellate court. The modern Court is a “jurisprudential overseer” and its appeals are occasions for legal innovation. This essay explores whether the distinction between non-binding obiter dicta and binding ratio decidendi has any continued significance for the Court. In this essay, I argue that the modern orthodoxy about the Court’s institutional role obliterates any such distinction. This conclusion runs contrary to the Court’s own jurisprudence on this topic, which attempts to preserve the distinction by remaking it in a modern image. The Court has settled on a spectrum view about its obiter: the weight of obiter decreases as it moves away from dispositive ratio. I show that the obiter-ratio distinction is rooted in a model of adjudication––dispute-resolution–– that the Court no longer adheres to, as is evinced by the muscular role of reference opinions and other doctrinal developments. This descriptive argument is also a normative argument against the modern orthodoxy about the Court’s role as jurisprudential overseer: the fact that the modern orthodoxy obliterates the obiter-ratio distinction is a reductio ad absurdum against that orthodoxy