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Part-Time for All: A Care Manifesto
No full textPart-Time for All offers solutions to four pressing problems: inequality for care-givers; family stress from demands of work and care; chronic time scarcity; and policy makers who are ignorant of care and care-givers with little access to policy making—the care/policy divide. Only a radical restructuring of both work and care can redress all these problems. We propose new norms: no one does paid work for more than 30 hours a week, and everyone contributes roughly 22 hours of unpaid care to family, friends, or their chosen community of care. Other approaches provide only partial solutions. For example, wages for housework, or excellent daycare, or flexible work hours would not overcome the care/policy divide. We explain why everyone needs to acquire the knowledge and dispositions that come from the sustained experience of providing care throughout one’s life. We show how work can be transformed to allow time for care giving, and how these new norms will generate a cultural shift in the value accorded care. While we focus primarily on human-to-human care, we include care for the earth. The final two chapters describe how these processes of transformation could be feasibly accomplished and why these changes are possible in high-income countries within our current global economy. Every one of our proposals already exists in at least one country; the task is to integrate the key reforms and scale them up. Given the magnitude of the current problems, deep changes are needed. Part-Time for All offers a feasible path forward.https://digitalcommons.osgoode.yorku.ca/faculty_books/1403/thumbnail.jp
Public Order Policing: a Proposal for a Charter-compliant Legislative Response
Get PDFThis article offers a brief response to the Final Report of the Public Order Emergency Commission by two authors who provided expert reports to the Commission. We focus on Commissioner Rouleau’s recommendation that the provinces and the federal government create a “major event management unit” to ensure “integrated command and control” of large events, and that governments clarify the scope of police power to create exclusion zones and to impose other limits on protest and assembly. We argue that nothing short of legislation on point would suffice to address problems of coordination among police agencies and the lack of clarity on public order police powers that arose in Ottawa and in other large events over the past two decades. We emphasize the need for public order legislation to address and protect the Charter rights of protestors, especially and including freedom of peaceful assembly
Corporate Law’s Threat to Human Rights: Why Human Rights Due Diligence Might Not Be Enough
Get PDFThe take-up of mandatory human rights due diligence (HRDD) initiatives by states is continuously gaining momentum. There are now numerous states adopting some form of HRDD laws. While corporations being duly diligent in respecting human rights is a positive step towards addressing problems of business and human rights, these HRDD initiatives on their own may only be a form of window-dressing, that is, enabling states to put a smart spin on their efforts to address business and human rights issues without addressing some of the root causes of that predicament. As a result, HRDD laws are likely to be a helpful, but insufficient tool for addressing corporate abuse of human rights. One reason for this is because the root cause of many business and human rights problems is the structural elements and goals of corporate law facilitates corporate violations of human rights. So long as states fail to transform the way in which corporations operate – in part, by reconceptualizing corporate law – even the best drafted HRDD laws will be inadequate to halt corporate harms
Do Automated Legal Threats Reduce Freedom of Expression Online? Results from a Natural Experiment
Get PDFAutomated law enforcement systems support privately-operated enforcement bots to take legal action in hundreds of millions of cases a year. In the area of copyright, legal scholars have hypothesized the existence of “chilling effects” that harm public discourse by influencing people to self-censor protected speech. We test this hypothesis in a large-scale quasi-experiment with 9,818 accounts on Twitter that made 5,171,111 tweets. In a confirmatory interrupted time-series analysis, we find evidence that people reduce how much they post online after receiving a take-down notice from a copyright enforcement bot. On average, accounts sent fewer tweets after enforcement (p\u3c0.001). Accounts also changed from a daily increase in public tweets to a decline on average (p\u3c0.001). We also report on novel software that conducts third-party monitoring of the behavioral outcomes of automated law-enforcement systems. Since automated law enforcement can influence public discourse, third-party monitoring like this report will be essential to governing the power of enforcement algorithms in society
Interlinking between Income Tax, Citizenship and Democracy? A Case Study of Canada and China
Get PDFThe interlink between taxation, citizenship and democracy appears to be obvious in Western democracies: citizens are voters, taxpayers and beneficiaries of public spending funded by tax revenues. The literature on the politics of taxation suggests that democratic institutions affect taxation at every stage of the policy-making process, the type of elections and governance model influence the level of redistribution and complexity of the tax system, democracies generally choose policies that are more favorable to the poor than non-democracies, the tax mix varies with the nature of the political regime, and more repressive governments rely less on personal income taxation. Political citizenship is not identical to tax citizenship as most countries rely on residence as the basis of tax jurisdiction and some citizens living abroad are not tax residents. However, citizenship can be viewed as a proxy for domicile and, in effect, correspond to residence in most cases. The principle of “no taxation without representation” captures the quintessential link between taxation and democracy. This paper examines the interlink in Canada and China
The Digitization of Money: Stablecoins and CBDC
Get PDFWhether tokens are transferable peer to peer or via third party intermediation, through automation, tokenization could deliver gains by greatly speeding up settlement and increase efficiency by ensuring all parts of a transaction occur simultaneously, in what is called atomic settlement. This article addresses only the first model, that of the digital bearer instrument transmitted from a payer to a payee typically in a discharge of a debt. [...]a digital currency transferable under a decentralized protocol - such as (but not only) over a distributed ledger and yet issued centrally - is considered to operate in a hybrid scheme. The Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OSFI) in Canada defines cryptocurrencies to be digital assets that depend primarily on cryptography and distributed ledger or similar technology. [...]virtual currencies are privately issued digital currencies. They are contrasted with CBDCs which are obligations of the central bank. A virtual currency may have its own unit of account, fluctuating by reference to the value of an official unit of account, in which case it is selfanchored, which is in fact unanchored to any unit of fiat currency or commodity. Alternatively, a virtual currency may be a claim-check or stablecoin that is denominated in, namely pegged to, or claimed at par with, either an official currency\u27s unit of account (as well as a basket of such currencies) or in the value of a specified amount of a designated commodity, whether or not it is backed by a reserve of such currency or commodity. Since prices of goods and services are typically denominated in an official currency, particularly (if not only) claim-checks or stablecoins denominated in that currency are good candidates to become private money to be used in retail transactions. They are currently already used in crypto-asset transactions (including crypto lending). Otherwise, their use is particularly efficient in crossborder payments (including remittances) and, as long as central banks do not issue digital coins of their own, are good substitute to cash also in domestic transactions. As their use reduces the need for intermediation it lowers transaction costs and provides streamlined settlement
The Elusive Pursuit of Justice: Sexual Assault Survivors\u27 Speak About Redress in the Aftermath of Violence
Get PDFThe struggle of survivors to obtain justice after they have been sexually assaulted has been a much discussed topic in recent years. Significant attention and resources are being directed towards this issue, making academic research particularly valuable at this time. However, instead of asking how legal processes can theoretically be made better, as is the case in most of the literature on this topic, my focus has been on asking why survivors want to engage in a legal process at all. What do they get from reporting their assaults and does what the legal system offers them respond to what survivors are looking for from justice? This project starts this conversation by asking survivors what they think justice should be in the aftermath of a sexual assault. Using feminist standpoint epistemology and grounded theory, I interviewed sixteen survivors and seven lawyers to explore what justice means for survivors in the aftermath of an assault. From the data, I identified four major themes including: harms and healing, accountability, punishment, and restorative justice. I found that survivors were not satisfied with the justice they could obtain under criminal law. They stated that it was difficult, financially and emotionally, to engage in criminal proceedings that were unlikely to resolve in a way that made them feel as if justice was done. While other forms of legal justice are also available, survivors often found these to be inaccessible as well, or they were unaware of the existence of these alternative options. The survivors I spoke with imagined an expansive ideal of justice. To most of the women I interviewed with, justice involved the prevention of future violence, something they did not think the legal system was currently equipped to deal with. They were curious, though conflicted, about restorative models, but appreciated their focus on attempting to reform offender behaviour. They also stressed the importance of being supported in their attempts to recover from sexual assault, highlighting that financial compensation was crucial for any survivor to heal
The International Patent Practice Narrative: Patent Agents, Epistemic Capture and the Patent Bargain
Get PDFThis work explores the question of how professionalization of patent agency along with its accompanying discourse has affected the direction of international patent institutions and networks. Professionalization of patent agency is defined as the government regulation of who may provide patent agent services to the public through the form of professional licensing requirements. To the extent that professionalization of patent agency has created a unique discourse of patent agency, to what degree and in what respects has this discourse transformed global patent institutions? In particular, has this discourse created a form of ‘epistemic’ or ‘cultural’ capture that has the effect of delegitimizing other valid forms of discourse? Through the application of several methodologies, namely, historical analyses, doctrinal analyses and qualitative empirical work, this study attempts to create what epistemic capture theorists refer to as a capture story, which is a story of how cultural influences of a regulated industry – here, professional patent agents – come to dominate the regulatory discourse to the exclusion of other viable, competing conceptions of what constitutes the public interest. This work concludes that professionalization of agency within the patent system is interconnected with enablement as an organizing principle of the patent system as a social institution. Prior to professionalization, when agency was democratized throughout the patent system, so too was democratized enablement a guiding principle of the patent system. The formation of a unique, legitimized professional patent agent epistemic community has resulted in diminishing the democratization of enablement across the patent system as a social institution. This work discusses several of the practical and normative implications of the diminishing value of democratized enablement. Finally, this work concludes with a discussion of the future prospects of agency within the patent system
Homeless Encampments: A Philosophical Justification
Get PDFHomeless encampments have become increasingly common in US and Canadian cities. Their prevalence raises a fundamental question: are encampments justifiable when individuals lack access to housing? This article argues that encampments are only partially justifiable as a response to homelessness. A complete justification implies that individuals can lawfully establish permanent encampments when they lack access to housing. A partial justification, on the other hand, forbids the establishment of permanent encampments, but permits individuals to establish temporary ones in certain circumstances. Encampments are partially justified for four principal reasons. First, they are a response to public and private law’s failure to alleviate homelessness. Second, encampments informally accommodate people experiencing homelessness within systems of mutual coercion. Third, they informally redistribute the property system’s benefits and burdens. Fourth, encampments bear some hallmarks of justificatory defences in the criminal law. The concluding parts of this article explain the implications of tent encampments’ partial justifiability. First, the concept of partial justification explains why courts have allowed unhoused persons to establish temporary encampments in limited contexts. Partial justifications thus limit State power. Second, the partial justifications for encampments illustrate the importance of housing in ways we may overlook. Furthermore, these partial justifications support a State duty to provide housing or the means to acquire it. By exploring the partial justifications for encampments, this article shows why the right to housing can also be understood as a right to be protected against the legal condition of homelessness