The TEN THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW sections give you thumbnail sketches divided by subject of some important topics in Canadian public law.
The listings in the LINKS TO RESEARCH RESOURCES sections have been carefully selected as providing substantive free full-text easy to navigate primary and secondary source research material relevant to the development of Canadian and international public law. The home pages of many significant organizations may be absent simply because their sites do not yet provide substantive web-based research materials – missing organizations can be quickly located using a search engine like www.google.ca. The root home page is offered for most sites, instead of links to groups of documents, to reduce the risk of broken links. While some general impressions of each site are offered, no attempt is made to describe all sites’ contents.
The cases selected for the CASES TO NOTE sections are featured because of their national or international impact, their dealing with new and novel points of law, their settling of long-standing legal debates, or because they superbly sum up the pre-existing law. These cases will be updated as additional new and notable cases come to light.
WHAT IS PUBLIC LAW?
Although the private law comprised predominantly of contracts, property and torts is often considered as an integral whole developed through hundreds of years of common and civil law tradition, public law does not seem to be viewed by all its practitioners and users in an integrated way. This bias against a holistic approach to public law may stem from its details being mostly developed over the last century. Public law has as long a history as the private law, but its relative importance compared to private law has greatly increased as government has increasingly assumed responsibilities that previously were dealt with by private parties or entered fields of regulation that had been completely unregulated.
The public law forms an integrated web of rules governing every aspect of relationships between governments and the people they govern. Each of those rules can influence the other rules and the decision makers who administer them. An integrated and holistic approach to public law can arguably best address its interpretation, operation and reform.
Government may choose to pursue its objectives using either the regulatory or criminal laws at its disposal, and must always act within the boundaries of the Constitution in doing so. Constitutional law is the glue that holds government and society together, and includes certain aspects of human rights and aboriginal law. Regulatory law places limits on business activity, defines who is entitled to government benefits, imposes duties on private persons, and includes aspects of environmental law, and occupational health and safety law. Information and privacy law may be partly constitutional and in many respects regulatory in nature. Unlike the primary role of regulatory law which is to impose rules on otherwise acceptable activity, the criminal law sets up absolute prohibitions on anti-social conduct that society has rejected as unacceptable in any context.
In the course of considering public law, it is helpful to keep in mind what might be termed the “Public Law Uncertainty Principle”: whereas private law strives for certainty in relationships between private parties, public law embraces uncertainty by constantly modifying and reinterpreting the relationship between government and private persons. Such an evolving but workable relationship is achieved through new legislation, regulations and official practices emerging from policy development work, new judicial and tribunal decisions, and new understandings by the public and government of their respective rights and obligations when dealing with each other.
HOW THIS SITE CONTRIBUTES TO GLOBAL ACCESS TO LEGAL INFORMATION
The 4th International Conference on Law Via the Internet held in Montreal, Canada in 2002 resulted in the Montreal Declaration on Public Access to Law being adopted. It was declared in part by the Legal Information Institutes that:
• Public legal information from all countries and international institutions is part of the common heritage of humanity. Maximising access to this information promotes justice and the rule of law;
And that to further this goal the Institutes agreed:
• To promote and support free access to public legal information throughout the world, principally via the Internet;
• To cooperate in order to achieve these goals and, in particular, to assist organisations in developing countries to achieve these goals, recognising the reciprocal advantages that all obtain from access to each other’s law;
• To help each other and to support, within their means, other organisations that share these goals with respect to:
• Promotion, to governments and other organisations, of public policy conducive to the accessibility of public legal information;
• Technical assistance, advice and training;
• Development of open technical standards;
• Academic exchange of research results.
See www.worldlii.org/worldlii/declaration for the full text of the declaration. This site seeks to contribute in its own small way to the public legal information access goals of that declaration. It should also be noted, however, that considerable added value can be gained from commercially provided legal database services and private legal publishers whose information would not exist without their ability to receive payment for that information.
