Kerry Sun

The Supreme Court of Canada has ignored both legislative intent and legal precedent in setting a new standard that makes it much more difficult to sentence youth offenders as adults theglobeandmail.com/opinion/articl…

In the morning, the SCC made it much harder for courts to sentence young offenders as adults. In the afternoon, we learn that the killer who stabbed a Toronto grandmother to death in a parking lot is 14. What great news for Kymani Wint.

Worth noting that the Supreme Court of Canada's majority judgment is not only incompatible with the legislative intent behind the Youth Criminal Justice Act, but overturns a consistent line of appellate jurisprudence, as Côté & Rowe JJ. note in dissent. decisions.scc-csc.ca/scc-csc/scc-cs…

Interesting new post from @ProfMarkElliott on debates about the ECHR in the U.K. Very happy to see Prof Elliot make reference to my recent @thenewdigest post on the importance of not conflating human rights with human rights law ⬇️

B.C. Court of Appeal dismisses appeals of Trans Mountain protesters, affirming it is no defence to criminal contempt for defying a court order that the accused believed Indigenous law gave them a right to enter the work site: R. v. Cavanaugh, 2025 BCCA 252 canlii.ca/t/kd9vm

The courts’ watering down of the Refugee Convention’s standard of “persecution” that is applied in Canada continues. The federal government needs to reset what was intended to be a high bar by clarifying it in s96 of IRPA.

If you believe there is more to law than just what people in power say it is; that justice and law are intrinsically connected, such that the total absence of one means a failure of the other; that one can criticizen law from within law - then you believe in natural law.

Ontario Divisional Court dismisses leave to appeal Schabas J.'s decision, in which the court had found a "serious issue to be tried" in relation to whether there was a right to bike lanes under Charter s. 7 and enjoined the Ontario government from removing bike lanes in Toronto.

Good article by @LawProfHolloway (with a nice Scruton quote) on the deeper significance of the Supreme Court of Canada abandoning its traditional robes

Now and then you get glimmers of realization that something weird is going on. For example, in Sullivan, where the SCC denied that a s 52 declaration of unconstitutionality actually affects the text of statutes. I mean, duh, we all knew that really, but it's a big admission…

Canada has a constitutional set-up very different from that of the US - importantly we have no equivalent to Article III. But I often think that some of our worst/weirdest constitutional rulings and doctrines all stem from a generally accepted view that courts are not principally…