Canadian Courts

Policy Change, Courts, and the Canadian Constitution aims to further our understanding of judicial policy impact and the role of the courts in shaping policy change. Bringing together a group of political scientists and legal scholars, this volume delves into a diverse set of policy areas, including health care issues, the regulation of elections, criminal justice policy, minority language education, citizenship, refugee policy, human rights legislation, and Indigenous policy. While much of the public law and judicial politics literatures focus on the impact of the constitution and the judicial role, scholarship on courts that makes policy change its central lens of analysis is surprisingly rare. Multidisciplinary in its approach to examining policy issues, this book focuses on specific cases or policy issues through a wide-ranging set of approaches, including the use of interview data, policy analysis, historical and interpretive analysis, and jurisprudential analysis.

This comprehensive introduction to the contemporary Canadian judicial process and its relationship to law and politics engages students in key concepts, theories, and debates. Fully updated to reflect recent changes in Canadian law and politics, Canadian Courts is the most current resourceavailable on the subject.

A unique discussion of the judicial system in Canada, this is the first book on the court system to be written from a social science, rather than a legal, perspective. McCormick analyzes which courts and judges are most often cited, and discusses party-capability theory in a Canadian context. He offers new data on the courts, including statistics on the Supreme Court caseload, the success rates on appeals from provincial courts of appeal to the Supreme Court, and success rates, by litigant category, in provincial and appeal court decisions. Written in accessible language and offering data that have never before been published, Canada's Courts will be of particular interest to legal professionals and those in related fields of the social sciences.

One of the most important but least examined aspects of the Canadian judicial system is the dual structure of civil and criminal trial courts. Canada's Trial Courts examines the co-existence, in every province, of superior courts (presided over by federally appointed judges) and 'lower' courts (staffed by provincially appointed judges). Combining both political and legal analysis, this is the first book to provide an in depth study of the evolution and operation of Canada's trial courts. This collection of essays begins with an exploration of the constitutional origins of Canada's integrated court system and the failure of federal and provincial governments to cooperate in its development. Following are discussions of a number of contemporary reform projects in various jurisdictions, including Quebec, Nova Scotia, Alberta, and Nunavut, as well as examinations of competing visions of how Canada's trial courts should be organized in the future. To put the issue in a comparative perspective, the concluding section provides examples of how trial courts have been restructured in the United Kingdom and the state of California. Proposing a range of practical alternatives to the present system, the volume offers a ground-breaking legal analysis that addresses constitutional obstacles to trial court reform, and assesses the political factors that influence reform at the judicial level. Featuring distinguished contributors from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, Canada's Trial Courts offers a comprehensive and up-to-date examination of an important but neglected issue that ultimately has a profound impact on the quality of justice that Canadians experience.

Engagement with international law is notably absent in Canada's legal past. It is likely, however, to be a momentous part of Canada's legal future. It is the thesis of this book that a lack of basic international legal understanding on the part of lawyers and judges is no longer permissible in the integrated world in which we live, and that we must educate ourselves better if we are to manage that integration process in the interests of Canadian society. Accordingly, Using International Law in Canadian Courts sets out to provide Canadian practitioners and legal academics with a straightforward guide to using public international law in Canadian courts and tribunals.

From 1900 to 1908 includes the "Annual digest of Canadian cases ... decided in the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, in the Supreme and Exchequer Courts of Canada, and in the courts of the provinces ... Edited by Edward B. Brown."