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 December 17, the Supreme Court of Canada heard Fraser v. Ontario (Attorney General), 2008 ONCA 760 (“Fraser“), which tests the constitutional right to collective bargaining under the Charter‘s s. 2(d) freedom of association in the case of farm workers. Coming off of a recent Labour and Employment Law exam and having an affirmed interest [...]

The Supreme Court heard arguments in the case of R. v. Suberu (previously heard in the Ontario Court of Appeal, (2007), 85 O.R. (3d) 127) in April of 2008 – over thirteen months ago. Although the public generally accepts and tolerates the simple truth that the Supreme Court is a very busy institution, at this [...]

(Part 1 of 3) Introduction The Supreme Court of Canada is in the midst of a little spring cleaning in the law of defamation. Cusson v Quan was a case concerning an Ontario provincial police officer who on his own initiative travelled to New York City following the events of September 11, 2001, to assist [...]

Last week, the Supreme Court released a statistical overview of their work from 1997 to 2007. The information is organized in five categories: (1) cases filed, (2) applications for leave submitted, (3) appeals heard, (4) appeal judgments, and (5) average time lapses. The numbers show some interesting trends over the past ten years, and provide [...]

At 9:45 AM today, the Supreme Court began their 2008 term and rendered judgment in 26 applications for leave to appeal. The justices dismissed all 26 applications, in a news release available here. The following criminal cases were all appealed from unanimous panels at the provincial level, and therefore were all required to seek leave: [...]

I came across a very interesting post by Professor Russ Brown over at the University of Alberta Faculty of Law Blog which discusses the recent trend at the SCC towards unanimity: During the open Q&A session following Justice Rothstein’s presentation at our faculty in September, I asked him where the Supreme Court of Canada needed [...]

The Supreme Court released two decisions this morning. Perhaps the justices were feeling festive, on this first snowy day of the year? The first decision was in the matter of R. v. Grover, 2007 SCC 51; this short judgment dealt with the ability of an appellate court to unseat a trial judge’s rulings on matters [...]

The Supreme Court today released their decisions in a number of applications for leave to appeal. While I was looking forward to examining the cases the SCC chose to review, all applications were unfortunately dismissed. For those interested, the news release detailing the SCC’s rulings can be found here. The Supreme Court’s brief summary of [...]

In a post written this past February, I noted the downward trend in the number of decisions rendered by the SCC in recent years and, in particular, of the especially small output in 2006. The end of June marks the midway point of 2007 and it may be interesting to track the SCC’s progress thus [...]