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In recent years, unwritten constitutional principles often find their place in Canadian constitutional law via their supposed foothold in the part of the preamble to the Constitution Act, 1867 that refers to “a Constitution similar in Principle to that of the United Kingdom”. Principles such as judicial independence, democracy, federalism, constitutionalism and the rule of law, and protection of minorities have been derived from the preamble. This article looks through over a hundred years of Supreme Court of Canada case law in order to determine what that preambular phrase has meant over time. It turns out that in the years immediately after 1867, it referred to what we now call political constitutionalism. A hundred or so years later, this same passage came to be associated with legal constitutionalism, though the Court has more recently backed away from the fullest implications of that approach. This article proposes a reading of the preamble and constitutional principles that is consistent with recent Supreme Court of Canada case law and defensible given current jurisprudential trends. That reading gives due regard to the traditional meaning of the rule of law all the while acknowledging that there are genuinely hard cases (particularly prevalent at the Supreme Court level) where neither rules nor principles provide clear answers. In those circumstances, respect for the rule of law requires as much wisdom and judgement as it does application of more prosaic legal skills. This article therefore recommends what is here referred to as a “sustainable jurisprudence” that offers an essential bridge between by now orthodox Dworkinian principle-based reasoning and contextual studies more commonly found in socio-legal, feminist, and other critical literature.

This article considers the content of the unwritten principle of democracy and its potential relevance in Canadian constitutional interpretation. The unwritten principles of federalism, the rule of law and constitutionalism, democracy, and the protection of minorities set out by the Supreme Court of Canada in the Secession Reference have received extensive academic attention. Much yet remains unknown, however, about the democracy principle. This article argues that we should interpret the unwritten principle as embodying a “thin” or procedural account of democracy tied to meaningful participation, rather than a “thick” version imposing specific outcomes or broader obligations. I argue that whatever the weight of a “thick” account of democracy, a “thin” understanding is preferable for filling in the content of a constitutional principle that has legal force. The central critiques of the use of unwritten principles in constitutional interpretation are 1) that they lack legitimacy and 2) that they are incoherent in relation to one another. Operationalizing a thin version of democracy in constitutional interpretation responds better to the claims that the unwritten principles lack legitimacy or are incoherent. A thin account still permits the unwritten principle to carry out its functional role in constitutional interpretation, such as enabling courts to fill in gaps in the text or to engage in structural reasoning. The article considers the implications of this approach for referendums and municipal elections.

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Principles form part and parcel of our law and legal discourse, so much so that we seldom think of what they are and what they entail. For centuries they have been invoked daily to interpret and argue about the law. But when it comes to matters of constitutional law, principles are further called upon to perform a perennially controversial function: to help police the boundaries of state action. In most common law jurisdictions with a written constitution, this function of principles runs against the generally accepted view that the exercise of judicial review must ultimately be governed and restricted by the terms of the national constitution. This Article argues that the exercise of judicial review based on principles is not confined to that view, once the relationship between principles and the constitution is unpacked and recontextualized.While the English-language literature on principles over the past half-century has been dominated by a select group of Anglo-American scholars, there is a wealth of untapped insights from other parts of the world. One of the major contributions by continental legal theorists even predates the earliest modern Anglo-American writings on the subject by more than a decade. Overall, the law literature in common law and civil law systems reveals a significant degree of commonalities in the basic characters of principles despite the absence of initial evidence of transsystemic borrowings. The wider conceptual inquiry also displays a shift in the focus of the debate, from the protracted search for a clear-cut distinction between rules and principles towards a redefinition of principles’ relationship with “written” law, be it in the form of a civil code or a constitutional instrument. From this inquiry reemerge “unwritten” principles not deriving from codified or legislated law although they have been used to develop the law. Translated into the constitutional domain, these unwritten principles bear no logical connection with the terms of the constitution. Their main functions cover the entire spectrum from serving as interpretive aids to making law by filling gaps. The theoretical framework fits with an ongoing four-century-old narrative of the evolution of constitutional principles and judicial review across most common law-based systems. Constitutional principles are another area where Anglo-American law and legal discourse is less exceptional and more universal than what many assume. Throughout modern Western history, legal battles have been fought and ensuing developments have been made on the grounds of principles. Our law and jurisprudence remain based on them.

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Taking its cue from the Supreme Court of Canada's constitutionalization of the criminal law's unwritten general part, this article illustrates the interaction between criminal law theory and constitutional law that process implies. It does so by applying a criminal law theory of why and when force in self-defence is justified in order to assess the constitutionality of the self-defence provisions of Canada's Criminal Code. The assessment concludes that, though frequently criticized for excessive complexity, the Code's provisions on self-defence accurately track the nuances demanded by the theory of self-defence best qualified to interpret the provisions. That theory, I argue, puts dignity rather than self-preservation at its centre.

Rightly regarded as the leading doctrinal textbook on criminal law in England and Wales, this resource owes its consistent popularity to its accessible style, depth of analysis and breadth of coverage. Over 50 years since the publication of the first edition, Professor David Ormerod and Karl Laird continue the tradition set down by Professors Sir John Smith and Brian Hogan by producing a textbook of unrivalled quality

This paper explores the implications of the idea of a constitution appropriate to a liberal-democratic state for the law of self-defence. The law governing self-defence, like other laws, must also a test of substantive legality appropriate to the constitution: it must be one that could not reasonably be rejected by a person who is a member of a civil condition created with the purpose of curing the insecurities of the state of nature. While this test of substantive legality is insufficiently powerful to determine all the details of the law of self-defence, it does have several important implications. First, the positive law must recognize a right of self-defence in the core case where the defender responds with necessary and proportionate force to a wrongful threat; second, the positive law must also provide at least an excuse leading to acquittal where the defender is reasonably mistaken about one of the conditions in the core case. Furthermore, the positive law must acquit a person who uses necessary and proportionate force to repel an innocent threat because the civil condition can provide no reason for punishing such a person.

With little public discussion, the Canadian law of self-defence has become, in important respects, more permissive than Florida’s Stand Your Ground law. This article provides original historical research into the origins of the Canadian law of self-defence that reveals the evolution of its current conceptual features. It compares these features with the features of the Florida law and warns that in climates of fear, despite Canadian safeguards, Canada’s law is vulnerable to biased or unprincipled application. The Gerald Stanley case in Battleford Saskatchewan serves as a warning. The author argues that Stanley’s successful accident defence in the homicide of Colten Boushie was, in fact, predicated on dangerous notions of defence of property and defence of person that prioritize the protection of property, liberty, and honour over human life.

This study analyzes the arguments employed by Quebec judges when deciding whether a clause is abusive under article 1437 of the Civil Code of Québec. This analysis is inspired by the common law distinction between the substantive and procedural aspects of contractual unfairness. Thus, courts often invoke substantive factors to assess a clause’s abusive character, such as the equivalence of the obligations, proportionality, reciprocity, commutativity, departure from the usual obligations or from the essential obligation and causal link. However, it was found that courts also rely on procedural criteria to assess abuse, such as the information given to the adhering party concerning the contents of the contract as well as compliance with the adhering party’s reasonable expectations.