Last week, the Ontario Court of Appeal confirmed that former Toronto Maple Leafs Captain Rob Ramage will serve the four year prison term given to him at trial for impaired driving causing death and dangerous driving causing death. The convictions relate to a 2003 head-on collision that killed Mr. Ramage’s passenger in the car, former [...]

International Court of Justice to Hold Special Elections to Replace Retiring Judges Recently, Justices Shi Jiuyong of China and Thomas Buergenthal of the United States announced their resignations from the International Court of Justice (“ICJ”), both before fulfilling the nine-year terms they were elected to. As a result, two special elections for their replacements will [...]

Baltasar Garzon, universal jurisdiction’s singular Spanish exponent, has been indicted for exceeding his domestic judicial purview. As noted briefly in TheCourt.ca last week, Garzon, the investigating magistrate who began proceedings against, inter alia, General Augusto Pinochet, Argentinian “dirty war” generals, al Qaeda members, suspected Basque terrorists, and the “Bush Six”, has been brought to legal [...]

In order to pull my weight in solidifying the general reputation of law students as somewhat nerdish types who just…can’t…get…enough…law, I recently picked up The Nine, journalist Jeffrey Toobin’s behind the scenes look at the U.S. Supreme Court through the nineties and early 2000s. (The book was reviewed by TheCourt.ca’s Jon Bricker back in March, [...]

The Supreme Court of Canada recently released official statistics on its work in 2009 along with comparisons with the previous ten years: Bulletin of Proceedings: Special Edition, Statistics 1999 to 2009 (26 February 2010). The official statistics are interesting and insightful. In light of recent, flavourful TheCourt.ca posts by my friend James Yap (“Judgment of [...]

TheCourt.ca is very pleased to reproduce the decisions of the Women’s Court of Canada. In 2004, this group of feminist/equality Charter activists, lawyers, and academics, decided to do something about what they saw as the sorry state of equality jurisprudence under s. 15. Their solution – rewrite the key decisions of the Supreme Court of [...]

On the afternoon of September 12, 2005, the media were more concerned with the news that Michael D. Brown—or “Brownie,” of Hurricane Katrina “heck of a job” fame—had resigned than what was happening in the Caucus Room of the Russell Senate Office Building in Washington. Inside, John G. Roberts was listening patiently as twenty one [...]

As briefly surveyed in last Friday’s Amici Curiae, the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, No. 08-205, is causing quite the stir in judicial circles for its recognition of corporations as legal persons entitled to First Amendment protection. What many conservative commentators are calling a major victory for free [...]

If there’s one thing law students revel in, it’s evaluations and rankings. For a discipline so fraught with subjectivity and indeterminacy, we place a heavy stake in the ambiguous, opaque, and really rather meaningless ratings we are subjected to once a semester. And how else to explain all the important life choices made chiefly on the [...]

Since the advent of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, a growing number of Canadian academics have delved into empirical, and especially quantitative, research on Supreme Court of Canada judicial decision-making. A flurry of articles and literature on the subject has been published in the past few months. Below is a sample of some such research. [...]