Against Pure Pragmatism in Statutory Interpretation I
Rizzo & Rizzo, arguably Canada’s leading case on statutory interpretation, has now been cited at least 4581 times according to CanLII. Specifically, the following passage has been cited by courts...
View ArticleAgainst Pure Pragmatism in Statutory Interpretation II: Evaluating Rizzo
Please read Part I of this series before reading this post. In the first post of this series, I set out to explain the concept of pragmatism in statutory interpretation, as explained by Ruth Sullivan....
View ArticleAgainst Pure Pragmatism in Statutory Interpretation III: A Way Forward and...
About a month ago, I wrote two posts attacking the concept of “pragmatism” in Canadian statutory interpretation. So my argument goes, the seminal Rizzo case, while commonly said to herald a...
View ArticleInterpretation and the Value of Law II
This post is written by Leonid Sirota and Mark Mancini. We read with interest Stéphane Sérafin, Kerry Sun, and Xavier Foccroulle Ménard’s reply to our earlier post on legal interpretation. In a...
View ArticleThe Politics of Law
It is common in progressive circles (and, increasingly, in conservative circles, to some extent) to say that law=politics, or some variation thereof (law is always political, law is political, etc...
View ArticleAlexion: No Blank Cheques Here
In Alexion Pharmaceuticals Inc v Canada (Attorney General), 2021 FCA 157, the Federal Court of Appeal clarified the law of judicial review post-Vavilov (particularly as it applies to reasonableness...
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On Law and Music
What is the relationship, if any, between law and music? As a musician myself, I notice many commonalities between law and music. As a jazz musician, improvisation is what I spend a lot of time...
View ArticleSome Major Questions About Major Questions
In West Virginia v EPA, the Supreme Court of the United States, wielding the “major questions doctrine” found that the EPA did not have the statutory authority to adopt regulations implementing the...
View ArticleIf It’s Broke, You’re Not the One to Fix It
This post is co-written with Mark Mancini One of us (Sirota) has written any number of times about Québec’s Election Act, which is remarkable by the staggering restrictions it imposes on election...
View ArticleCanadian Sausage
We are sometimes told that laws are “ordinances of reason made for the common good”, or some such pieties about “the dignity of legislation”. But just as the best argument against democracy is not a...
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