If Philip Girard wrote it, it’s worth reading.

Philip (a former colleague at Dal) makes his home at Osgoode.  He is the best role model for how to give an academic paper I’ve seen.  And here’s an “end of term/in the crunch”-sized introduction to him for those who haven’t had the pleasure before.

One of Philip’s great strengths is the clarity of his claims.  Here’s the thrust of his direction in “Writing Canadian Legal History:  Origins”

“It is as if our constitution prior to 1982 was never truly ours.  We had some input into it, and made it work as best we could, but it wasn’t really produced by us.  I want to argue that such has been the case for a very long time, that the roots of this state of affairs lie in the seventeenth century, and that they were only reinforced in subsequent periods.”

The paper is a revision of the DeLloyd Guth Visiting Lecture in Legal History, hosted each year by the University of Manitoba’s Faculty of Law.

Read “Corporate Restructuring, the Evolution of Corporate Assets and the Public Interest” for two reasons. First, some great pieces build on an expanded case comment model, as this one does. So, it’s a good illustration of a genre of scholarship. Here, the case is Century Services Inc, which was the first Supreme Court case to interpret the provisions of the Companies Creditors Arrangement Act. Second, read it because the area of law it explores, insolvency law, is fascinating and the CCAA traces its origins to the early 1930s. Subsequent courts have struggled to refine and in some ways redefine its object and function. Jassmine Girgis traces that history briefly and elegantly. The main thrust of the piece is to explore the public interest objectives of the CCAA, most specifically.

Jassmine Girgis finds her home at the University of Calgary’s faculty of law. She researches broadly across areas of corporate and commercial law.

I follow Irus Braverman’s work with enthusiasm. She describes herself as working at the intersections of law, geography, anthropology, and posthumanism. I first read her work on acts of planting and uprooting trees in Israel/Palestine and I was hooked. She frames the nexus of inquiry in her work, as a general matter, as focused “on several common themes: the imbrications between law, space, and power, with an emphasis on materiality; the governance of populations through natural (e.g., trees, animals) and unnatural (e.g. flushometers, turnstiles) things; the role of low-level bureaucrats, especially inspectors, in the construction of particular legal geographies; the physical and symbolic manifestations of the public/private divide (e.g., at the checkpoint, the public toilet, and the zoo); and the heightened role of seeing and vision in various legal and material constructions (tree landscapes, checkpoints, zoos, doors and dogs in U.S. criminal procedure)”.

Read “Animal Frontiers: A Tale of Three Zoos in Israel/Palestine”. I wanted to profile it because it bridges Irus’ work that finds Israel/Palestine as its geography with her work that finds the zoo as its geography (or other institutions of animal conversation or animal wilderness). It some ways, the piece serves as a microcosm for many of the themes that run through Irus’ work more generally. This piece explores three zoos – Jerusalem, Qalqilya, and Gaza. In diving into each, Irus teases out the stories of an animal – the Persian Fallow Deer, a giraffe (Brownie), and a lioness (Sabrina). The interweaving stories, and geographies, are beautifully drawn.

Irus is an engaging writer, firmly located in her work. As a teaser, from the beginning of her section on the Qalqilya Zoo:

“Patrons of the Qalqilya Zoo will find the giraffe exhibit empty. Nowadays, the giraffe stands motionless in the zoo’s museum, stuffed and preserved by a taxidermist, confronting each viewer with the corporeality of its life and death. How did this giraffe come to live in Qalqilya? How did it die? Why does the zoo mount and display it? And what can the somber story of the giraffe’s death at the height of the Second Intifada – the popular Palestinian uprising of 2004 – teach us about the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians and between humans and nonhumans across war-ridden divides?”

 

In “The Donoghue Diaries: Lord Atkin’s Research Notes in Donoghue v Stevenson” John Kleefeld, a faculty member at the University of Saskatchewan, bravely approaches what must be one of the most written about cases in the Commonwealth cannon. How could anyone find something new to say? John embraces the task with his characteristic good humour, creative pen, and careful and meticulous knowledge of the law, legal process, and legal research.

This piece offers us a reconstruction of the diaries of James Richard Atkin, author of one of the Donoghue v Stevenson judgments. Trolling through the 372 carefully annotated footnotes is a pleasure and an exercise in discovering the unknown interstices of the case. In setting out the diaries, John reviews the major cases (carefully working through their doctrinal nuances), alongside the broader political, social, and to a lesser extent economic, context in which the case was decided. He speculates about the court and its personalities.  Great fun for a Friday.

If transformative constitutionalism and deliberative democracy sound good, check out Graham Mayeda, “Has Public Protest Gone to the Dogs? A Social Rights Approach to Social Protest Law in Canada”

I’m more familiar with Graham’s work on international trade and investment issues. This piece is in his strand of scholarly work on social protest, which builds from his graduate work in philosophy.

The article looks at different paradigms for understanding social protest (distinguishing traditional approaches with social rights approaches) and explores the legal frameworks through which social protest might be mediated. Graham looks in particular at some of the legal challenges arising from the Occupy movement in Canada and the Sharbot Lake protests. Ultimately, he aspires to an approach to navigating social rights that will enable greater democratic deliberation.

Corporate scholars, writ large, have made a variety of scholarly interventions into the work that corporate, securities, and commercial law might be asked to do in the area of corporate social responsibility. For a relatively recent intervention in this field, see the work of Galit Sarfaty, “Human Rights Meets Securities Regulation”, which is a fine illustration of this strand of engagement. Galit’s primary focus is the question of whether securities regulation is an appropriate mechanism for compelling human rights compliance. More specifically, she focuses on the Dodd-Frank Act, a piece of legislation that was adopted in 2010 in the United States, and which has garnered significant attention (and some directed criticism). The legislation imposes reporting requirements on publicly traded companies that manufacture products using conflict minerals that originated in the Democratic Republic of Congo and bordering countries, and requires natural resources companies to disclose particular payments made to governments for the commercial development of oil, natural gas, or minerals. Galit also explores the value of regulatory convergence in securities regulation, at least in this area.

Galit Sarfaty holds a CRC in Global Economic Governance at UBC’s faculty of law. Her scholarly work builds on her interdisciplinary interests at the nexus of law and anthropology. She often employs ethnographic methods to explore the decision making and regulatory processes at work within legal institutions.

…or perhaps more accurately, how might we think through the dilemma of what can be justified (either in law or moral philosophy) in terms of the consequences for former rebels in non-international armed conflicts? Check out Frédéric Mégret’s piece

Fred’s article is a wonderful example of a thought piece. In aid of bridging the gap between international humanitarian lawyers and moral philosophers, he seeks to develop the most defensible case for granting amnesties in these complex and contested circumstances. The substantive topic is engaging enough on its own. The piece is additionally worth reading, though, because it provides an opportunity to watch Fred think, and the organization of his thinking about this topic is marvellous. The piece unfolds by him asking himself questions: could the justification be this? No. How about this? Not really. And so on.

Fred is the Canada Research Chair on the Law of Human Rights and Legal Pluralism at McGill. He works in those areas, not surprisingly, and more generally in international law and international criminal law and procedure. Less obvious from his profile is that he’s a “go to” man if you’re interested in anything related to technology. Over time he’s started three or four blogs (see this older one on technology).

In “Taxation and Development – Again”, Michael Keen of the IMF offers a wonderful overview of the burning issues in taxation and development that have attracted attention and concern by tax administrators, policy-makers, scholars, and international bodies like the IMF for the last seventy or so years. The piece is worth reading because it provides a succinct “state of the union” review of the big ideas of development in tax; it offers a worthy plea about the need for much more empirically-grounded, specifically-oriented, work in the “development” area; and it bridges the connections between academic scholarship in the development area and the complexities of translating that work into tangible and implementable policy action at the local and domestic levels. The paper is also a good reminder that some terrific scholarship is undertaken outside the bounds of the formal academy.

Sometimes I enjoy reading a piece because its author offers a careful review of the “state of the union” in the area, taking issue with some of the leading thinkers, drawing out connections between them and underscoring the evolution of ideas over time. In that vein, check out Vrinda Narain’s piece, “Taking ‘Culture’ out of Multiculturalism”

The piece builds from the Supreme Court of Canada’s recent jurisprudence useing multiculturalism as a tool to Quebec’s Bill 94. Vrinda’s analytical frame shifts the narrow lens of the focus on cultural difference to a wider angle that includes structure difference. She tours, with care, the contributions made by other scholars, gently taking issue with some visions, expanding on others, and drawing connections among and across approaches.

You can find Vrinda at McGill’s faculty of law. She has a joint appointment with the Institute for Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies in the Faculty of Arts. Her research spans constitutional law, social diversity, and feminist and critical race legal theories. You can find her “in interview” here

If you don’t want to hand a Kleenex to someone searching for a phone number, then you must read “Misreading Like a Lawyer: Cognitive Bias in Statutory Interpretation” by Jill Anderson.  Jill takes four interpretive settings, genocide in Rwanda, the destruction of records by Enron, voter impersonation, and the Americans with Disabilities Act, and shows how lawyers get readings wrong because we don’t understand opaque constructions. She then draws on the psycholinguistics literature to explain why we make these kinds of interpretive mistakes, time and again, and what might be done to save us from ourselves.  This is a seriously good piece.

You can find Jill at UConn Law.