Good Intentions

Colby Cosh recently complained that there appears not to be a law professor in the Great Dominion with the vanity, technical chops and spare time to provide the kind of free legal commentary American court watchers take for granted.

I am not a law professor, and I despair both of my technical skills and my spare time. But I have plenty of vanity, and am opinionated enough. So I took the challenge personally. Not to mention that I get annoyed at the Supreme Court of Canada, and the errors of journalists, sometimes including Mr. Cosh, often enough to need an outlet.

The result is this blog devoted to Canadian law and politics. To explain the title, Canadian judges (and before 1949, the British Privy Council), supposedly divine the "pith and substance" of a law before deciding whether it is appropriately enacted by the federal or provincial level of government. Moreover, it sounds cooler than "living tree."

I decided to make this blog anonymous so that my clients and employer are not associated with my opinions. The downside is that I may have some undisclosed conflicts of interest. If they are too blatant, I will just avoid commenting, but readers should, of course, be critical.

My biases are centre-left, pro-legislative supremacy and pro-classical federalism (i.e., in the current context, usually pro-provincial jurisdiction and sympathetic to the historic positions taken by Quebec federalists).

Whether any of the posts are, in fact, pithy or substantive, I leave that to the readers (if I ever have any) to decide. Charitably, I hope.