Professional LLM in Criminal Law and Procedure

Credits: 6.0

This course examines the impact of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms on criminal law and procedure. It studies the historical evolution of the constitutionalization of criminal law and procedure in Canada, including the theoretical and empirical debate about the relation between due process and crime control. It involves an examination of the major decisions of the courts and their legal repercussions in fields such as detention and arrest, search and seizure, the exclusionary rule, the presumption of innocence, the right to counsel, trial within a reasonable time, jury selection, discovery, mens rea, cruel and unusual punishment, intoxication, the insanity defence, regulatory offences, hate crimes and sexual assault.

Credits: 6.0

Students will explore the origins of key elements of the current criminal law, from blood feuds and the ordeal, to public prosecutions, the origins of policing and current police-related issues, rights to counsel, key changes in legislation including laws and policing powers pertaining to gangs and organized crime, mandatory-minimum sentencing, imprisonment, and alternative dispute resolution. This course also introduces students to contemporary debates in criminology, while demonstrating a range of research methods and approaches.

Credits: 3.0

The law of evidence occupies a distinctive position in the administration of criminal justice. Neither substantive nor procedural, principles of evidence translate raw information and experience into juridical fact, shaping the stories that serve as the basis for judgments about guilt and blame. This course builds upon basic knowledge of the laws of criminal evidence, seeking to expose and assess the deeper tensions, trends, and problematics that animate this fascinating element of the criminal justice system. Students will encounter these deeper issues by placing the contemporary law of evidence in the arc of its historical development, by seeking to understand Canadian evidence law in comparative perspective, by means of sustained attention to the theoretical problems that afflict questions of proof and “knowing” in a trial context, and through attention to the way that power and social justice are implicated in evidentiary issues. With these perspectives in hand, the course will examine pressing contemporary issues in the law of evidence, including the role and use of scientific evidence; the problem of wrongful convictions; the assessment of credibility; and proof in crimes involving violence against women and children.

Credits: 3.0

This course examines the theoretical and empirical underpinnings of criminal law through an examination of the classic and modern debates about punishment. Key concepts such as deterrence, rehabilitation, incapacitation, retribution and denunciation are critically examined. Topics include strict discipline, privatization of prisons, conditional sentences, aboriginal sentencing circles and the New Zealand Family Group Conference.

Credits: 6.0

Recent high profile cases in white collar crimes such as fraud, foreign corruption, insider trading and competition law have reinforced the importance of corporate compliance. Disasters such as the BP Gulf spill and the Japanese Nuclear catastrophe dramatically illustrate failures of risk management.

This course examines the ways in which criminal and regulatory law prevent harm in the conduct of commercial affairs. Part I explores the relationship between risk management and legislative rules or principles. Organizational liability for financial crimes is linked to the purpose of corporate criminal liability as contrasted to individual liability. Part II examines specific topic areas including foreign corrupt practices, securities offences (such as insider trading) in both the Criminal Code and provincial legislation, competition offences (such as price fixing, misleading advertising), and environmental offences. The course is designed to allow students to focus on areas of specific interest to the student and then apply broader theoretical principles. Part III concerns the procedure surrounding crimes and regulatory offences, including internal investigations, dawn raids, Charter issues, and sentencing principles. Part IV examines a risk management matrix and template for corporate compliance, which is based on a theory of justice that ranks priorities.

Credits: 3.0

The overrepresentation of Indigenous People in the criminal justice system is one of the clearest markers of what the Supreme Court of Canada has referred to as “a crisis in the Canadian justice system”. The course will begin with an examination of Indigenous concepts of justice before proceeding to a critical analysis of the relationship between Indigenous people and the Canadian criminal justice system at the stages of policing, arrest, bail, sentencing and parole. Historical, theoretical, policy, empirical, doctrinal and statutory lenses will be employed. Students will examine the process of creating Gladue reports, sentencing circles, Indigenous courts and the representation of Indigenous people on jury rolls. The recent expansion of Gladue principles into bail, civil contempt, and extradition hearings will also be considered.

Credits: 3.0

Issues of mental health in the criminal justice system are often treated as narrow sub-topics in criminal law courses, issues that arise in respect of questions of fitness to stand trial or the defence of not criminally responsible on account of mental disorder. Important as these points of contact between mental health and criminal law are, this focus is radically under-representative of the ways in which the criminal law and criminal processes affect those suffering with mental health issues. In this, it misses the significant social and policy implications of recognizing that mental health is a constant and widespread concern in the practical day-to-day operation of the criminal justice system. This course will provide students with an understanding of a range of doctrinal and institutional locations where issues of mental health are worked with in the criminal justice system, including determination of fitness to stand trial, the defence of NCRMD, sentencing considerations, treatment orders, assessment orders, warrant of committals, therapeutic remands, and bail hearings. It will also examine the role of bodies like Mental Health Courts and the Ontario Review Board, as well as Post-Charge Diversion programs. But beyond equipping students with this doctrinal and institutional understanding, this course will ask students to consider broader questions of the systemic role of criminal law in regulating those with mental health issues, the relationship between criminal responsibility and mental health, and what an approach to criminal justice system that takes mental health as a serious, central concern might look like.

Credits: 3.0

This course will study the law that governs the administration and experience of imprisonment. Topics will include (1) the Canadian sentencing and prison system in comparative perspective; (2) the structure of s. 12 of the Charter and how it limits each of sentencing and imprisonment; (3) the relationship between sentencing law and conditions and effects of confinement; (4) the law and policy of prison administration including security classification, programming and conditional release; (5) the legal rights of prisoners including Charter rights, human rights law, judicial review and habeas corpus; (6) solitary confinement and the history of attempts to eradicate the use of indefinite isolation in federal prisons.

Law school education, academic scholarship, and even the legal system itself tends to focus on the “front end” of the criminal legal system: the rules of investigation, trials, and the determination of guilt or innocence. This course will focus on how criminal law imposes and delivers punishment on the “back end” of the system: on the relationship between sentencing and imprisonment, the administration and legal regulation of the prison system, and the experiences of prisoners. We will think theoretically, comparatively and critically about the Canadian prison system.  We will pay special attention to uniquely Canadian realities of overrepresentation of Indigenous and Black people in the prison system, and the degree to which both sentencing and prison law attempts to grapple with the historic and present-day impacts of discrimination and disadvantage.

We will consider the legitimacy of judicial discretion and the politics of sentencing policy throughout the course, with a focus on how sentencing relates to imprisonment. In the mandatory minimum context, the Supreme Court has invited sentencing judges to think about the impacts of imprisonment on vulnerable groups and variation in penal severity as part of the proportionality analysis.  In the context of credit for pretrial confinement, sentencing judges are already attentive to the ways in which particularly onerous conditions must be credited in the sentencing analysis.

Prison law involves a unique mixture of prison legislation combined with administrative and constitutional law. The legislation that has governed the federal prison system since 1992 is the Corrections and Conditional Release Act (CCRA).  The CCRA is considered strong legislation from a prisoner rights perspective, but we will consider the application of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to prisoners by examining topics that the CCRA does not cover, including prisoner voting and access to in-custody mother-baby programs. We will also focus on a topic that has been the subject of an extraordinary amount of attention in recent years: solitary confinement or the practice of locking some inmates in cells for up to 22 hours per day. We will consider whether the movement to abolish solitary confinement has succeeded. We will think about the future of prison law and consider whether and how litigation is an effective way to ensure a humane prison system governed by the rule of law. Finally, we will consider differences between provincial and federal systems of imprisonment in Canada.

Credits: 3.0

Over the past two decades the criminal justice systems in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom have all struggled with the problem of mounting claims of wrongful conviction. This course will explore both the causes of wrongful convictions and the various remedial approaches adopted by different jurisdictions. In particular, we will study the following factors which contribute to wrongful convictions: adversarial excess, police and prosecutorial misconduct, inadequate disclosure, frail identification evidence, false confessions, jailhouse informants, faulty forensic testing and junk science. With respect to remedial options we will explore the operation of s.696.1 of the Criminal Code (ministerial review), the Criminal Case Review Commission (U.K.) and Innocence Protection legislation (U.S.). In addition, this course will examine the findings and recommendations advanced in the growing number of Canadian Commissions of Inquiry designed to explain and analyze the causes of a wrongful conviction in a particular case.