I’m joining the Canadian Tax Journal’s current tax reading review team, so I’m going to step away from The Friday Library for the 2016-2017 academic year.  I’ll leave old posts on the blog in case the prior reading lists are useful.

The provision of public services and goods is a perennial and critical issue in the design of good social (and therefore legal) policy.  Here is Kathryn Chan (UVic) taking on the incentive effects created by our legal framework. In her comparative piece (Canada/UK), “The Co-optation of Charities by Threatened Welfare States” she finds that Canada’s legal framework orients charities to the government’s substantive agenda, thus stifling dissent and independent agency.

We owe scholars like Isabel Grant credit for hard work that results in our better understanding law’s effects on people’s daily existence.  It’s even better when that work results in changes to the formal law.  Here is Grant on “Intimate Partner Criminal Harassment Through a Lens of Responsibilization”.  Grant’s work is always carefully argued and her claims are well supported – this piece is no deviation from her high standards.  It offers us a unique and thoughtful analysis of the data set of cases addressing liability for criminal harassment (348 decisions).

Emily Satterthwaite is writing great tax scholarship.  In “Tax Elections as Screens” she comes at a familiar tax topic (tax elections) in a more general way and with an entirely unique aim: to show that elections can provide helpful information to tax administrators.  The paper is a bit of work if you aren’t passionate about tax, but the very generic version of the question (are there places where choices enabled by law yield information in addition to the intended information that could be used by regulatory bodies?) is sufficiently worth contemplating that the paper may be interesting even for those for whom tax is not a life’s calling.

“After decades in exile, banishment is back” asserts Audrey Macklin in her contribution to the EUDO CITIZENSHIP Forum Debate, The Return of Banishment:  Do the New Denationalismation Policies Weaken Citizenship?  There isn’t a lot of debate among the contributors to the collection (it’s back) – so you can cheat and just read Macklin’s “Kick-Off contribution”.  Better though, to set aside a day and develop a richer sense of what’s happening in banishment around the world.

Professional regulation is a hot topic among legal ethics types and legal regulators and there’s nothing like bringing a corporate law and governance scholar to the table.  In “Large Law Firms and Capture” Anita Anand, Kimber Chair, invokes capture theory from the law and economics literature to argue that large law firms have an incentive to follow the rules of professional conduct.

 

Is nuisance really environmental law?  If you want to check your answer, see “Evergreen? The environmental law of torts” by UO’s Lynda Collins.  Among other strengths of the piece, it’s fun to track the trajectory of the Canadian cases and to contemplate tort law’s potential in this area.

No one knows how Robert Leckey does it.  He produces volumes of thoughtful scholarship.  Just because it’s a bit off his beaten track, check out “The Harms of Remedial Discretion”.  It takes a familiar comparison (Canada and South Africa – charter/bill of rights) and asks whether we have under-considered the harms of remedial discretion.

Anthea Vogl and Elyse Methven are at UTS.  Check out their short piece, “We will decide who comes to this country, and how they behave:  A critical reading of the asylum seeker Code of Behaviour”.  Two aspects of the piece drew my attention.  First, they report on the results of a FOI request to the Australian Department of Immigration and Border Protection about the Department’s use of the Code of Behaviour for “illegal maritime arrivals”.  Second, they reflect on the regulatory effect of the Code, not just in terms of its actual enforcement, but also in terms of its reach into the lives of all Australians.

I read as much Mariana Valverde as possible.  Here she is, working with graduate student Jacqueline Briggs, on “The University as Urban Developer:  A Research Report”.  We may not think of our employers as urban developers, but of course many of them are.  This piece is a teaser – there’s a larger project in progress, but for those of us with an interest in university governance or thoughtful research or both, it’s worth reading.