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Many scholars have offered theories that purport to explain the whole of the law of torts. At least some of these theories do not seem to be specific to a single jurisdiction. Several appear to endeavor to account for tort law in at least the major common law jurisdictions or even throughout the common law world. These include Ernest Weinrib's corrective justice theory, Robert Stevens's rights theory, and Richard Posner's economic theory. This article begins by explaining why it is appropriate to understand these three theories as universal theories of tort law and why it is important that they be so understood. This explanation draws upon various overt claims (or other strong intimations) made by the theorists themselves to the effect that this is how their respective accounts should be understood. The article then proceeds to test these theories, all of which are leading accounts of tort law, against the evidence in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The parts of tort law on which we focus are (1) the breach element of the action in negligence, (2) the law that determines when a duty of care will be owed in respect of pure economic loss, (3) the law that governs the availability of punitive damages, (4) the defense of illegality, and (5) the rule in Rylands v. Fletcher and its descendants. The article concludes that none of the theories is a satisfactory universal account of tort law. All of them suffer from significant problems of fit in that they cannot accommodate (often even approximately) the areas of law that we discuss. Although each of the theories contains a great many valuable insights, they all nonetheless fall well short of accomplishing that which they are held out as providing. In the course of this analysis, the article explains why this is an appropriate line of criticism and identifies the degree of lack of fit that we regard as being “significant.”

For women seeking to extricate themselves from the web of entrapment woven together by the multiple threads that make up the coercive control repertoire of their abusive intimate partners, it is often difficult to avoid engagement with legal systems. Yet, the legal systems they encounter—criminal, family, child welfare, immigration among them—are frequently unwelcoming (if not hostile), controlling, demeaning, fragmented and contradictory. While there has been a recent explosion of interest in “access to justice,” little attention has been paid to how we might conceptualize access to justice in a manner that speaks meaningfully to the circumstances of women who experience abuse in their intimate relationships. For such women, access to justice is curtailed not only by lack of representation, delays, costs, and procedural complexities—the obstacles commonly associated with access to justice failings—but by three inter-related phenomena: the enduring hold of an incident-based understanding of domestic violence; the failure of legal actors to curb men’s strategic use of legal systems to further their power; and the host of complications—contradictory expectations, inconsistent orders, repetitious proceedings, sweeping surveillance—that arise when women are compelled to navigate multiple intersecting legal systems. What is required, I argue, is a conceptualization of access to justice that places women’s safety and well-being at its core.

This paper argues that there are distinct parallels between changes to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act enacted by Bill C-31 (2012), in particular the Designated Foreign National regime (DFN), and Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers who arrive by boat. It is contended that recent Australian history and policy demonstrate the perils of adopting an ideology of control and exclusion toward asylum seekers instead of a politics of hospitality, and that Australia’s present political climate provides a stark and salutary warning to Canada, as it follows a similar path of securitization. The paper first explains what is meant by a politics of hospitality. In Part I, it analyzes Australia’s attitude toward, and its treatment of, asylum seekers, focusing in particular on the period since 1989. It is argued that Australia’s inhospitable stance toward asylum seekers has had discernible negative outcomes that provide important lessons for Canada. Part II provides a brief historical overview of Canadian policy toward asylum seekers, followed by an analysis of the DFN regime with reference to international law. It then argues that the DFN provisions contravene the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The paper concludes by suggesting that Canada is at risk of following Australia’s security-oriented, inhospitable stance toward asylum seekers.

Disclaimer: This summary was generated by AI based on the content of the source document.

Disclaimer: This summary was generated by AI based on the content of the source document.

Disclaimer: This summary was generated by AI based on the content of the source document.

An article from Les Cahiers de droit, on Érudit.

An article from McGill Law Journal / Revue de droit de McGill, on Érudit.

Although there is a presumption of juror impartiality in Canadian law, this presumption may be set aside where there is evidence of widespread racial bias in the community from which the jury will be drawn. Following R. v. Parks (1993), defendants are entitled to challenge potential jurors if they believe that racial bias will interfere with the ability of the jurors to judge the case impartially. Although the challenge procedure has been in place for some time, little attention has been given to whether this procedure effectively screens jurors for bias. The present study provides an in-depth examination of the challenge for cause procedure through a detailed analysis of the jury selection phase of a sample of cases that occurred in an Ontario courthouse between 2009 and 2011. A total of 32 defendants and 1,392 prospective jurors were involved in these proceedings. Only a small minority of potential jurors (8.3%) reported that they would be unable to judge the case impartially due to the defendant’s race. Despite this, triers found on average 20.9% of prospective jurors unacceptable, suggesting that something other than expressed bias motivated the determination of juror acceptability. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)

Canadian copyright collectives and the Copyright Board have in recent years advanced the theory that when the Board certifies collectives’ tariffs (or fixes the royalties in individual cases), those tariffs become mandatory on users. Users have no choice whether to deal with the collective; they must pay the specified royalties as long as they make a single unauthorized use of a work from the collective’s repertoire. Many users, for some strange reason, have also subscribed to this view, despite its extraordinary consequences. This article, first in a series of two, shows that this spectre of a “mandatory tariff” lacks any basis in law. Established case law debunks it, standard principles of statutory interpretation contradict it and the legislative history discredits it. An approved tariff creates a compulsory licence that interested users can avail themselves of, if they wish to obtain a licence, but it does not force users to become licensees. Copyright collectives can recover unpaid royalties only from users who offered to pay them and later default on their payment.

Canadian copyright collectives and the Copyright Board have in recent years advanced the theory that when the Board certifies collectives' tariffs (or fixes the royalties in individual cases), those tariffs become mandatory on users. Users have no choice whether to deal with the collective; they must pay the specified royalties as long as they make a single unauthorized use of a work from the collective's repertoire. Many users, for some strange reason, have also subscribed to this view, despite its extraordinary consequences. This is a second article in a series of two. The previous article showed that the “mandatory tariff” theory cannot, as a matter of statutory interpretation and in light of the case law, withstand scrutiny. This article shows that in addition, construing the Act in accordance with the “mandatory tariff” theory gives rise to numerous practical challenges, conceptual puzzles, procedural nightmares, and constitutional headaches, each of which should weigh the scales against it. In contrast, the “voluntary licence” theory avoids all these quandaries, and, in addition to being consistent with earlier case law, appears clear, simple, and coherent.

Stéphanie Ghozlan, 2015 49-2 Revue juridique Thémis de l'Université de Montréal 399, 2015 CanLIIDocs 4942