Faculty of Law

Permanent URI for this communityhttps://hdl.handle.net/1807/75711

Established in 1887, the Faculty of Law is one of the oldest professional faculties at the University of Toronto, with a long and illustrious history.

Today, it is one of the world's great law schools, a dynamic academic and social community with more than 50 full-time faculty members and 15-25 distinguished short-term visiting professors from the world's leading law schools, as well as 600 undergraduate and graduate students.

This collection showcases some of the research and scholarly work by its faculty members.

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Now showing 1 - 20 of 1228

(Ab)Originalism and Canada's Constitution
(LexisNexis Canada, 2012) Borrows, John
Aboriginal and Treaty Rights and Violence Against Women
(Osgoode Hall Law School, 2013) Borrows, John
Violence against Indigenous women is a crisis of national proportions. Unfortunately, Indigenous peoples have been prevented from arguing that Indigenous communities are a constitutional site of activity for dealing with such violence. This article suggests that Aboriginal and treaty rights under section 35 of the Constitution could play a significant role in ensuring that all levels of government are seized with the responsibility for dealing with violence against women. This article explores how section 35 could be reinterpreted in ways that place issues of gender and violence at the heart of its analysis.
Aboriginal Title and Private Property
(LexisNexis Canada, 2015) Borrows, John
Abortion Law in Transnational Perspective: Cases and Controversies - (Introduction) (El aborto en el derecho transnacional: Casos y controversias: Introducción)
(University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) Cook, Rebecca J.
English Abstract: As this introduction illustrates, Abortion Law in Transnational Perspective: Cases and Controversies offers a fresh look at significant transnational legal developments in recent years, examining key judicial decisions, constitutional texts, and regulatory reforms of abortion law in order to envision ways ahead. While the United States and Western Europe may have been the vanguard of abortion law reform in the latter half of the twentieth century, Central and South America are proving to be laboratories of thought and innovation in the twenty-first century, as are particular countries in Africa and Asia. Abortion Law in Transnational Perspective offers a fresh look at significant transnational legal developments in recent years, examining key judicial decisions, constitutional texts, and regulatory reforms of abortion law in order to envision ways ahead. The chapters summarized in this introduction investigate issues of access, rights, and justice, as well as social constructions of women, sexuality, and pregnancy, through different legal procedures and regimes. They address the promises and risks of using legal procedure to achieve reproductive justice from different national, regional, and international vantage points; how public and courtroom debates are framed within medical, religious, and human rights arguments; the meaning of different narratives that recur in abortion litigation and language; and how respect for women and prenatal life is expressed in various legal regimes. By exploring how legal actors advocate, regulate, and adjudicate the issue of abortion, this timely volume seeks to build on existing developments to bring about change of a larger order. Spanish Abstract: El debate jurídico y judicial sobre el aborto ha tenido, a lo largo del siglo XX y principios del XXI, importantes revoluciones en su abordaje teórico y práctico, que son expresión de estrategias de sectores sociales, religiosos y políticos que en ocasiones resultan contrapuestas. Éste es un completo balance dinámico sobre las nuevas transiciones actuales y posibles y los desarrollos jurídicos más significativos a nivel transnacional en el tema del aborto, y da cuenta del nuevo desarrollo conceptual que concibe la idea de que no sólo la sanción penal, sino también la amenaza de la sanción penal, ponen en riesgo derechos fundamentales de las mujeres.
Abuse of Dominance: A Critique of Canada Pipe
(Canadian Bar Association, 2007) Trebilcock, Michael
Abuse of Joint Dominance in Canadian Competition Policy
(University of Toronto Law Journal, 2010) Iacobucci, Edward; Winter, Ralph
Abusive or Unconscionable Clauses from a Common Law Perspective
(Carswell, 2010) Waddams, Stephen
Accommodating Women's Differences Under the Women's Anti-Discrimination Convention
(2007) Cook, Rebecca J.; Howard, Susannah
The purpose of this article is to explore how the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (the Women's Anti-Discrimination Convention) can be more effectively applied to accommodate the differences women experience in the abortion context. Accommodating differences in the abortion context requires states to move beyond the myopic focus on the legality of the actual procedure to understand how the health care system neglects women, how antiabortion laws expropriate women's bodies and lives through forced childbearing and childrearing, and how they diminish women's moral agency. States are required not only to accommodate women's biological differences, but also to redress the dignity-denying treatment to which women are subjected in their various pathways to abortion. Equality requires that states address the discriminatory treatment in the health care system, and address socio-cultural norms to ensure that all women have equal and dignified access to services that respond to their particular health need, and that respect their moral agency.
Accountability and Proportionality in Youth Criminal Justice
(Carswell, 2009) Thorburn, Malcolm
Accountability and the Concept of (Global) Administrative Law
(Juta, 2009) Dyzenhaus, David
Accountability Mechanisms for Transnational Counterterrorism
(Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019) Roach, Kent
Accumulating Wisdom: An Updated Empirical Examination of Class Counsel's Fees in Ontario Class Actions
(Irwin Law, 2014-02) Alarie, Benjamin; Flynn, Peter
This article presents an empirical analysis of the decisions made by Ontario courts regarding the compensation of class counsel. The authors aim to provide an analytical tool that can be used as a guide for predicting and determining fee approvals in the future. The authors make the analysis more concrete by applying their empirical methodology to five currently ongoing class actions.
Achieving Transparency in Implementing Abortion Laws
(Elsevier, 2007) Cook, Rebecca J.; Dickens, Bernard; Erdman, Joanna
National and international courts and tribunals are increasingly ruling that although states may aim to deter unlawful abortion by criminal penalties, they bear a parallel duty to inform physicians and patients of when abortion is lawful. The fear is that women are unjustly denied safe medical procedures to which they are legally entitled, because without such information physicians are deterred from involvement. With particular attention to the European Court of Human Rights, the UN Human Rights Committee, the Constitutional Court of Colombia, the Northern Ireland Court of Appeal, and the US Supreme Court, decisions are explained that show the responsibility of states to make rights to legal abortion transparent. Litigants are persuading judges to apply rights to reproductive health and human rights to require states' explanations of when abortion is lawful, and governments are increasingly inspired to publicize regulations or guidelines on when abortion will attract neither police nor prosecutors' scrutiny.
Acquiring human embryos for stem-cell research
(Elsevier Ireland Ltd, 2006-12-21) Dickens, Bernard M; Cook, Rebecca J
Human tissue engineering and regenerative medicine may be considerably advanced by embryonic stem-cell research and cell line development, to provide preventive means, cures and treatment strategies for a range of debilitating conditions and injuries. Research may result in embryos from which stem-cells are derived losing viability, which offends some religious convictions. The different status religions and laws may attribute to embryos serves different purposes and results from different approaches. Neither need depend on, nor impose itself on, the other. Embryos surplus to IVF patients' needs may be donated to research with appropriate consent. In some circumstances, it may be ethical to ask patients to make their fresh embryos available for research. Prohibitions against deliberately creating embryos for research purposes are common, but not universally adopted, and are being challenged. Women who donate ova require information about risks, which for women considering donation for research may not be balanced by compensating benefits.
Action and Agency in the Criminal Law
(2009) Chiao, Vincent
This paper offers a critical reconsideration of the traditional doctrine that responsibility for a crime requires a voluntary act. I defend three general propositions: first, that orthodox Anglo-American criminal theory (as represented by Michael Moore's updating of Austin's volitionalism) fails to adequately explain why criminal responsibility requires an act. Second, when it comes to the just definition of crimes, the act requirement is at best a rough generalization, rather than a substantive limiting principle. Third, that the intuition underlying the so-called "act requirement" is better explained by what I call the "practical agency condition," according to which punishment in a specific instance is unjust unless the crime charged was caused or constituted by the agent's conduct (broadly understood) qua practically rational agent. The practical agency condition is defended as a reconstruction of what is worth retaining in Anglo-American criminal law's traditional notion of an "act requirement."
Acts and Actus Reus
(Oxford University Press, 2014) Chiao, Vincent
This chapter examines the concept of actus reus as a basic, essential component of criminal liability. It considers a range of recent scholarly interpretations of actus reus and the extent to which they are supported in the case law, with particular reference to the Canadian and U.S. jurisprudence. It discusses minimalist and maximalist interpretations of actus reus, the first of which conceives of actus reus on the basis of whatever the legislature has decided to criminalize and the second of which restricts criminal liability to positive acts. The chapter looks at approaches that interpret actus reus based on two factors: a person’s “control” over the prohibited outcome or conduct, proposed by Husak, and the person’s practical reasoning, proposed by Duff. The chapter argues that both minimalist and maximalist views of actus reus conflict with well-established features of the criminal law.
Addressing the Tension between Discrimination Law and Pandemic Clinical Triage Protocols
(Jotwell, 2020-07-31) Lemmens, Trudo
The Administration of the Federal Hazardous Products Act
(Thomson Reuters Canada Ltd., 1982) Shaul, Jeffrey; Trebilcock, Michael
Advance Tax Rulings in Perspective: A Theoretical and Comparative Analysis
(Thompson Reuters, 2014) Alarie, Benjamin; Datt, Kalman H.; Sawyer, Adrian J.; Weeks, Greg
Advance tax rulings are an increasingly common feature of mature income tax systems throughout the world. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD’s) work demonstrates that there has been a trend from 1990 to 2013 among OECD member countries to adopt advance tax rulings regimes. The international expansion of advance tax rulings seems both intuitively desirable and salutary. Upon deeper reflection, both theoretically and empirically, however, there is a puzzle. Why are advance tax rulings regimes so popular? This article makes two contributions to our understanding of advance tax rulings. The first contribution is to highlight that the increased pervasiveness of advance tax rulings internationally is potentially puzzling in the light of Givati’s analysis, which suggests that the balance of strategic considerations facing taxpayers systematically disfavours taxpayers seeking advance tax rulings. Theory thus appears – at least as a preliminary matter – to be out of step with the observed rulings practices tracked by the OECD. We then consider how to resolve the puzzling popularity of advance tax rulings. We find the increased pervasiveness of advance tax rulings regimes should not be entirely surprising despite the apparent conflict with economic theory. To complement the arguments from theory, we offer some tentative evidence that advance tax rulings may not be of any consequence economically speaking. Empirical analyses of panel data of rulings practices published by the OECD do not show any reliable correlations of observed practice with social or economic fundamentals. This finding is consistent with the puzzle posed by economic theory, which suggests that rulings regimes are not likely to be particularly important in practice. This can arise in part due to the relatively slow process for issuing advance rulings compared to the timeframe facing taxpayers to make key business decisions. From an optimistic perspective, advance tax rulings are best regarded as serving an expressive function in support of the rule of law and sound tax administration. Less generously, a cynic might be tempted to say that the resolution to the puzzle posed by the incongruence between theory and practice may be that the best reason to have a binding rulings regime may be because just about everyone else has one.
The African National Congress and the birth of constitutionalism
(Oxford Academic, 2020-05-21) Dyzenhaus, David

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