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.

In Minority Report, Precrime imprisons people for crimes they would have committed had they not been prevented. With Philip K. Dick as inspiration, the authors posit that developments in Canadian law indicate a trend toward imposing punishments at earlier stages of the prosecutorial process. As risk management logics shift to precautionary ones, the law has responded by developing criminal regulation techniques in light of the "war on terror": the need to ensure security, the proliferation of digital data, and the design of drones, social networking, and cloud storage to gather data. The book is a provocative read for scholars and students in criminal law, policing, and surveillance.

There is a consensus throughout much of the western world that the public sector is in urgent need of repair. This study seeks to understand why this is so by comparing developments in Canada and the United Kingdom. It looks to changes in values both in society and inside government, and to the relationships between politicians and civil servants at the top and between civil servants and citizens at the bottom. Donald J. Savoie argues that both Canada and the UK now operate under court government rather than cabinet government. By court government, he means that effective power now rests with their respective prime ministers and a small group of carefully selected courtiers. For things that matter to prime ministers and their courts, the decision-making process shifts from formal to informal, involving only a handful of actors. For things that matter less to them, the decision-making process is horizontal, cumbersome, and consultative, and involves a multitude of actors from different government departments and agencies as well as a variety of individuals operating outside government. Court governments undermine both the traditionally bureaucratic model and basic principles that have guided the development of our Westminster-Whitehall parliamentary system. Nonetheless, Canada and the United Kingdom still cling to accountability requirements better suited to the past and the traditional bureaucratic model. Savoie concludes with a call for new accountability requirements that correspond with court government as well as the new relationships between politicians and civil servants, and civil servants and citizens.

This book is an authoritative history of the Federal Court of Canada. The judges' work in various areas of substantive law provides illustrations of the functioning of the Court in the adjudication of disputes.

Includes section "Book reviews."

A commemoration of two significant dates, The Supreme Court of Canada and its Justices is also a colourful portrait and an indispensable reference book. A bilingual co-publication of Dundurn Press and the Supreme Court of Canada, the book contains biographies, with portraits or photographs, of every Justice appointed to the Court since its inception. The Supreme Court of Canada and its Justices also features a preface by Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin and a history of the Court by former Chief Justice Antonio Lamer. A succession list and a selected bibliography are included for researchers. A key section of the book deals with the Court’s distinguished building, which was designed by renowned architect Ernest Cormier. Written by Professor Isabelle Gournay of the University of Maryland and France Vanlaethem of the Universite du Quebec a Montreal, this section is illustrated with Cormier’s own watercolours and drawings, as well as current photographs. The Supreme Court of Canada and its Justices is a fitting commemoration of the Supreme Court’s 125 years and its fiftieth year as the court of last resort in Canada.

Four cases in which the legal issue was “race” — that of a Chinese restaurant owner who was fined for employing a white woman; a black man who was refused service in a bar; a Jew who wanted to buy a cottage but was prevented by the property owners’ association; and a Trinidadian of East Indian descent who was acceptable to the Canadian army but was rejected for immigration on grounds of “race” — drawn from the period between 1914 and 1955, are intimately examined to explore the role of the Supreme Court of Canada and the law in the racialization of Canadian society. With painstaking research into contemporary attitudes and practices, Walker demonstrates that Supreme Court Justices were expressing the prevailing “common sense” about “race” in their legal decisions. He shows that injustice on the grounds of “race” has been chronic in Canadian history, and that the law itself was once instrumental in creating these circumstances. The book concludes with a controversial discussion of current directions in Canadian law and their potential impact on Canada’s future as a multicultural society.