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Trauma-Informed Judicial Practice Meets Therapeutic Jurisprudence: Compassionate Written Judgments in Child Protection Cases
No full textTrauma arises from profoundly distressing life events, and manifests in a range of often overwhelming physical and psychological symptoms. The legal community is increasingly recognizing that clients living with trauma need trauma-informed services—that is, services that “recognize, understand and minimize” the long-term impact of trauma. A trauma-informed approach acknowledges that “effective interventions with people require both the avoidance of retraumatization and the presence of respectful and supportive interventions that help people rebuild their lives.
Access to Algorithmic Justice Working Paper: Introducing the A2AJ’s Canadian Legal Data: An Open-Source Alternative to CanLII for the Era of Computational Law
No full textThe Access to Algorithmic Justice project (A2AJ) is an open-source alternative to the Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII). At a moment when technology promises to enable new ways of working with law, CanLII is becoming an impediment to the free access of law and access to justice movements because it restricts bulk and programmatic access to Canadian legal data. This means that Canada is staring down a digital divide: wellresourced actors have the best new technological tools and, because CanLII has disclaimed leadership, the public only gets second-rate tools. This article puts CanLII in its larger historical context and shows how long and deep eGorts to democratize access to Canadian legal data are, and how often they are thwarted by private industry. We introduce the A2AJ\u27s Canadian Legal Data project, which provides open access to over 116,000 court decisions and 5,000 statutes through multiple channels including APIs, machine learning datasets, and AI integration protocols. Through concrete examples, we demonstrate how open legal data enables courts to conduct evidence-based assessments and allows developers to create tools for practitioners serving low-income communities
Comment - The Collective Aspect of Job Seekers’ Data Rights
No full textTHE WORKPLACE is a complex and dynamic environment that mirrors societal relations and interactions. Given the inherent imbalance of power between employers and workers, as well as the lack of bargaining power of any individual worker, worker unions have emerged to provide workers with a collective voice and place them on more even footing with their employers, allowing them to achieve more than any single worker could on their own (Bok, 1971). Through the assertion of their members’ collective rights, worker unions have played a pivotal role in promoting rights such as fair wages, safe work conditions, health benefits, and insurance (Weil, 2005)
Replication Data for: The Effect of an ‘Appearance, Presentation, and Demeanour’ Instruction on Credibility and Deception Judgments in Mock Refugee Status Decisions
No full textThis set of files contains: • our participants’ credibility findings and confidence ratings data (Excel) • the codebook that the describes the coding used to code the textual elements (Word) • the coded text (Word) • the textual elements coding data (Excel) (2025-01-15
Corporations in the Crosshairs: Stakeholder Activism and the Role of Corporations in Society
No full textTOPIC AND IMPORTANCE
Stakeholders of a corporation have an interest in pushing a company to take actions which align with their values, whether it be on environmental, social or other issues. From customers and employees to share-holders and governments, stakeholders have been increasingly advancing environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues at Canadian companies, and at companies around the world. This rise in stakeholder activism has coincided with societies that are increasingly politically and socially divided, the COVID-19 pandemic, wars in both Europe and the Middle East, and historic inflation and interest rates, as well as an ongoing and worsening climate crisis. Given the rise of stakeholder activism, this article discusses what diverse tools stakeholders are using to shape corporate behaviour, as well as how companies and their lawyers are responding.
MAIN ARGUMENTS
In the latter half of the 2010s, companies began proactively advancing ESG goals as part of their business strategies. Many committed to climate-related objectives like “Net Zero” emissions, and funding diverse community initiatives like Pride parades. Companies have released bold purpose statements and annual reports discussing their ESG efforts, which have in turn raised expectations from stakeholders and calls for public accountability. However, if a company’s actions fail to align with stated goals, the disappointment felt by their stakeholders in turn leads to a rise in stakeholder activism. Now, with the growth of the anti-ESG and anti-diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) movements, companies are being pulled in two directions on controversial topics—between those stakeholders pushing for progressive priorities and those pushing for conservative ones. In response to the backlash to ESG and DEI, some companies are even rolling back their ESG and DEI initiatives. Stakeholders are using an increasingly diverse set of tools to advance their causes. In addition to long-used tactics such as protests and boycotts, advocacy groups have started using courts to advance climate-related interests. Others have directly launched litigation against the governments that regulate these corporations: for instance, youth activists in Mathur v. Ontario argue that the Ontario government’s failure to act on climate change violates the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. An-other prominent tool being used to push for change is shareholder proposals at annual general meetings; with ESG issues such as climate change and diversity on the meeting agenda, all stakeholders can see the arguments of the shareholder proponent and the response of the company. The company’s practices or stated goals may be placed under in-tense scrutiny. Companies respond to activism in different ways—they might choose to ignore activists, or they might sit down with them to come to a resolution. Some companies go on the offensive against activists and take legal action against them. These complex times require lawyers (both in-house at companies and externally) to advise not only on traditional law and compliance is-sues that have long been the focus of counsel, but also on strategy, communications and stakeholder engagement. In doing so, they must step out of their siloed role to become a strategic business advisor. This re-quires them to build a deep understanding of the business and its stake-holders, and to anticipate, mitigate and respond to stakeholder activism.
CONCLUSION AND ADDITIONAL CONSIDERATIONS The last half-decade of global tumult has created enormous levels of pressure on companies to respond to competing demands from their stakeholders on ESG issues. As stakeholders develop and utilize new tools to influence company behavior, lawyers will need to be nimble and work across business segments to guide the company
Crim-eviction: Eviction and Social Control at a Residential Tenancies Tribunal
No full textBecause eviction from rental housing can lead to highly negative outcomes, including homelessness, trauma, neighbourhood instability, and deepening inequities, it is important to understand the reasoning processes employed by tribunals when they wield the power of eviction. This article conducts a critical reading of decisions of the Office of Residential Tenancies, Saskatchewan’s residential tenancies tribunal, that deal specifically with urgent landlord applications for immediate eviction based on tenant behaviours that are alleged to be criminal, illegal, frightening, or dangerous. Coining the term “crim-eviction” to help describe this category of decisions, the article identifies that residential tenancies tribunals like the Office of Residential Tenancies are actively involved in the governance of perceived crime and disorder, as well as the discipline and management of marginalized tenants, through eviction processes. Whether or not criminal or illegal activity is alleged, the crim-eviction cases mobilize tropes and fears about crime, disorder, risk, and danger to rationalize the expulsion of tenants from their homes. Hearing officers draw on these familiar discourses and tropes, applying them in an administrative law context where formal rules of evidence do not apply, where appellate scrutiny is rare, where tenants almost never have legal assistance, and where tenants are already highly marginalized. Focusing on an eighteen-month period of eviction decisions, the article identifies several interrelated themes to support its arguments. First, it argues that the disciplinary lens adopted by the tribunal is characterized by a reliance on a conceptual binary that pits “good” tenants against “problem” tenants. Second, it shows how the tribunal uses ideas about “fear” and “risk” as justification for eviction. It shows that the tribunal is quick to associate evidence of police involvement with immediate eviction orders, and that it often views tenants who claim to be victims of harm with skepticism, depicting them instead as being responsible for the actions of those who have caused harm. The ideology of control taken up by the tribunal also manifests in a reliance on concepts from quality of life policing discourses, wherein damaged property is easily seen as a sign of disorder requiring eviction. Finally, the analysis identifies disciplinary attitudes towards even those tenants who are not evicted and the utilization in some cases of types of “civil probation” orders that serve to increase landlord power and further entrench tenant precarity
Reckoning with Queer History: The Canadian “LGBT Purge” Case and the Limits of Forgiveness
No full textThe Canadian government has a long history of regulation, exploitation, and violence against lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, and two-spirit (LGBTQ2S+) people. One of the most painful chapters in this history is the “LGBT Purge,” a term that refers to the expulsion of LGBTQ2S+ service members and employees from the Canadian Armed Forces, Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and Federal Public Service between 1955 and 1992. The LGBT Purge was the subject of a class action lawsuit filed in 2017 that resulted in a settlement agreement in 2018. On a parallel track to the settlement, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau issued a formal apology for the government’s history of state-sponsored discrimination against LGBTQ2S+ people in 2017. In this article, I consider these events from a legal historical and queer theoretical perspective. I focus on the potential of the settlement to promote reconciliation with LGBTQ2S+ people, contextualizing the settlement in light of neoliberal and homonationalist pressures on the class members to settle the past and forgive legacies of homophobic violence that continue to be felt today. Praiseworthy as the settlement terms might be, I conclude by arguing that forgiving the government’s history of discrimination against LGBTQ2S+ people is an historical impossibility
All Quiet on the Northern Front — the EU Directive on Adequate Minimum Wages as Seen from Sweden
No full textON 15 NOVEMBER 2024, the deadline for the implementation of the European Union (EU) Directive on Adequate Minimum Wages1 (hereinafter the Directive) passed. While most of the EU Member States have missed it (ETUC, 2024), a group of countries has instead opted for what the European Trade Union Institute senior researcher Torsten Müller defines as a “minimalistic” transposition (Staunton, 2024). Sweden is among them. The governmental inquiry issued in 2023 states that the Swedish system already meets the Directive’s requirements (Gunnarsson, 2023). No implementing measures are therefore needed — besides an extension of the tasks assigned to the National Mediation Office in collecting data on wage levels and collective agreement coverage that, following Art. 10 of the Directive, need to be reported to the European Commission every second year
