University of Toronto Law School Faculty Blog

Prof. Ed Morgan - "It's a legal maze for Canadian authorities abroad"

This commentary by Prof. Ed Morgan was first published in The Globe and Mail on May 27, 2009.

Canadians may be surprised to learn a few things about our constitutional law.

First, the military owes no duty toward detainees arrested by us and turned over to a foreign state for custody.

Second, our intelligence service does owe a duty toward prisoners taken into custody by a foreign state and turned over to us for interrogation.

Third, our diplomats are obliged to intervene with a foreign legal system that fails to live up to our domestic standards of punishment.

And fourth, our police are free to comply with a foreign legal system that fails to live up to our domestic standards of search and seizure.

When it comes to the powers of the Canadian government abroad, each new court ruling makes us wonder if the judges took the time to read the last one. How did this confused state of affairs come to be?

DLS Executive Director Judith McCormack - "When poverty becomes respectable"

Judith McCormack is the executive director of Downtown Legal Services, the community legal clinic of the University of Toronto Faculty of Law.

First published in the Toronto Star on May 17, 2009.

As painful as the current economic crisis may be, it does at least provide us with some valuable insights.

Now that the threat of poverty has suddenly landed on the doorsteps of so many ordinary, hard-working people, it forces us to see this particular problem in a new and clear-eyed way. In fact, many of the myths about poverty have gone up in smoke, much like Bernard Madoff's investments.

Try as we might to cling to the outdated idea that poor people are lazy or dependent, we're now face to face with the evidence that layoffs, economic restructuring and market forces can quickly push any of us into dire straits.

We've lost our ability to pretend that poor people are "them." Alas, it turns out they could be us, or our neighbours, friends and relatives.

This uncomfortable revelation has the effect of highlighting the ways in which we normally stigmatize the poor, and the punitive nature of our social policies toward them.