Common law respecter and DPhil student @OxfordLawFac.
Oxford, England
Joined August 2012
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Kerry Sun retweeted
Migrant workers brutally killed two elderly British Columbians who employed them and now we are being told that it's against their Charter rights to jail them for 25 years without a shot at parole. What a disgrace.
Murder parole rules ‘unconstitutional’, B.C. judge rules
theglobeandmail.com/canada/a…
Kerry Sun retweeted
It's terrible that @mcgillu is making its students attend class with a rapist-murderer who also paralyzed a girl by beating her. It's unbelievable that he'd be welcomed as a law student, of all places. What a failure of judgment by @LawMcGill
cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/…
Kerry Sun retweeted
“I think too often schools just fail to provide students with anything that is or should inspire that sense of reverence, of awe,” says Caylan Ford (@caylanford), founder of the Alberta Classical Academy on Forum Dialogue with @TheNewsForum_.
MLI’s Managing Director Brian Lee Crowley (@brianleecrowley) sits with Ford to discuss how and why education should shape character and not only job skills, and why multicultural Canada still needs a shared civic culture.
One point of tension between the majority and dissent in R. v. Cope, 2026 SCC 32 —which this column aptly highlights — is the degree to which curial deference to a sentencing circle's recommendations amounts to a privatisation of a public function, namely, criminal sentencing.
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You know it's bad at the Supreme Court when it decides that indigenous offenders are entitled to have a council of co-ethnics lobby judges for lower sentences. We're quickly approaching a duty to consult... for criminal trials.
My column:
nationalpost.com/opinion/jam…
The Cope judgment seems to treat the crime as a kind of private wrong, being of particular concern to the Indigenous community to which the accused belonged [128]. The Cope dissent is sceptical, pointing out that the victim might be from a different community altogether [275].
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Kerry Sun retweeted
“This progressive pile-on against Bill 21 and the notwithstanding clause at the Supreme Court of Canada exposes dual myths of democratic pluralism and political disadvantage used to justify intervention in Supreme Court cases. Governments, public institutions, and federally funded advocacy organizations participated in a nearly week-long process in which 94 per cent of the non-attorney-general factums addressing section 33 sought new limits on the clause. In both form and substance, the Supreme Court engaged in a prolonged faux-committee hearing, adopting the role of the “super-legislature” it promised it would not become,” writes MLI Senior Fellow Dave Snow.
Read here⬇️
macdonaldlaurier.ca/the-inte…
Kerry Sun retweeted
The Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s Judicial Foundations Project is planning a one-day symposium on “Judicial Power and the Canadian Constitution,” tentatively scheduled for February 4, 2027, at Hart House, University of Toronto. We hope to bring together scholars, experts, and practitioners from across Canada, and potentially the wider Commonwealth, to reinvigorate interest in the development, scope, and exercise of judicial power in Canada.
@CopelanPeter @SunKerry @GeoffSigalet
Kerry Sun retweeted
"In essence, Justice Murray found that drug users have a constitutional right, under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, to be exempted from federal possession and trafficking laws in B.C., so they may receive a 'safer supply.'"
theglobeandmail.com/opinion/…
Kerry Sun retweeted
Big 🤓 news: the Alberta Court of Appeal has found 4-1 that the federal government's reforms to the Impact Assessment Act, following the Supreme Court of Canada's decision in 2023 that it was largely unconstitutional, did not sufficiently address their overreach into federal jurisdiction.
Big win for Alberta and provincial rights.
albertacourts.ca/docs/defaul…
Kerry Sun retweeted
The Supreme Court ruled today that judges MUST "meaningfully engage" with the recommendations of a sentencing circle when sentencing indigenous offenders.
The court also upheld a lighter sentence for an indigenous man who severely beat his girlfriend. scc-csc.ca/judgments-jugemen…
Kerry Sun retweeted
Today @thenewdigest: we are delighted to publish a fascinating essay by @MaxSaintH on the legal dimensions of the prosecution and persecution of Christians during the Roman Empire.
Enjoy!
thenewdigest.substack.com/p/…
It’s remarkable and telling that the Advocates’ Society has condemned the application of what are, basically, techniques of Critical Legal Studies — as soon as those techniques are applied in the pages of a national newspaper against expansive judicial readings of the Charter.
It has come to my attention that I have been denounced by @Advocates_Soc for criticizing judicial decisions — and yes, individual judges.
Here's the thing. When someone, for example, spends her lawyerly career writing op-eds in favour of migration and calling herself an activist, and then becomes a federal judge, and from that seat allows all sorts of undesirables to remain in Canada on weak grounds, people are free to draw a connection from A to B.
When a judge, for example, spends his lawyer years advocating fiercely for more race-based law, and then later throws out gun charges of black men on his (unsupported) assertion that police were racist during their arrests, people are free to question whether he's really a fair adjudicator.
When a judge, for example, says that a ban on drug trafficking is unconstitutional, and then *applauds* vigilante drug dealers for their self-proclaimed safe supply program — applauds them for supporting the business of organized crime and feeding the addictions of street people — that's beyond the pale. You're worried about democracy being poisoned? Worry about the judge who threw out Parliament's law against selling heroin because she felt it was "common sense" that it was supported by science.
I agree that it's not right to criticize a judge personally for impartially applying the law and coming to an unpopular decision (which they may even privately disagree with). But when their professional history, or their conduct in court, suggests allegiance to a cause that they happen to be ruling softly on, it will get noticed.
Bringing the administration of justice into disrepute is a two-way street, you know.
Kerry Sun retweeted
The Advocates' Society's position rests on a petitio principii --they assume a premise that is not granted: namely that judges make decisions on the facts & the law. The question of whether she did in this case is properly in dispute, due to Ms. Sarkonak's excellent journalism.
It has come to my attention that I have been denounced by @Advocates_Soc for criticizing judicial decisions — and yes, individual judges.
Here's the thing. When someone, for example, spends her lawyerly career writing op-eds in favour of migration and calling herself an activist, and then becomes a federal judge, and from that seat allows all sorts of undesirables to remain in Canada on weak grounds, people are free to draw a connection from A to B.
When a judge, for example, spends his lawyer years advocating fiercely for more race-based law, and then later throws out gun charges of black men on his (unsupported) assertion that police were racist during their arrests, people are free to question whether he's really a fair adjudicator.
When a judge, for example, says that a ban on drug trafficking is unconstitutional, and then *applauds* vigilante drug dealers for their self-proclaimed safe supply program — applauds them for supporting the business of organized crime and feeding the addictions of street people — that's beyond the pale. You're worried about democracy being poisoned? Worry about the judge who threw out Parliament's law against selling heroin because she felt it was "common sense" that it was supported by science.
I agree that it's not right to criticize a judge personally for impartially applying the law and coming to an unpopular decision (which they may even privately disagree with). But when their professional history, or their conduct in court, suggests allegiance to a cause that they happen to be ruling softly on, it will get noticed.
Bringing the administration of justice into disrepute is a two-way street, you know.
Kerry Sun retweeted
“Legal scholar Dave Snow has called Section 7 an ‘unconstrained’ mechanism for Canadian courts to shape public policy. Snow has also noted that Section 7 challenges are a substantial chunk of what the Supreme Court of Canada deals with each year. In any given year, roughly one third of cases on the Supreme Court docket are challenging some aspect of civil society deemed to be a violation of ‘life, liberty and security of the person.’”
nationalpost.com/opinion/fir…
—Dave Snow, senior fellow at MLI quoted in @nationalpost
Kerry Sun retweeted
How do you think this judge would feel if someone started distributing illegal handguns to women who didn't feel safe walking home from work? Would she strike down the relevant gun laws on the basis that it disproportionately harms women by depriving them of self-defence tools?
My column today is on the Charter right to sell hard drugs. I argue that Justice Catherine Murray should be removed from the bench.
She embraced far-fetched ideas about drug use to undermine a widely accepted prohibition on *drug dealing* and even applauded the dealers who stood before her in court. A person who praises unlawful, objectively harmful behaviour because she agrees with the activism behind it cannot be trusted to preside over a court.
nationalpost.com/opinion/jam…
The consequences of the Supreme Court of Canada's Charter jurisprudence strike again — applying s. 7 and s. 15 precedents, the B.C. trial court effectively held that prohibitions on drug trafficking were unconstitutional, because they didn't improve public health *enough*.
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BREAKING: Judge stays DULF convictions, finds drug trafficking ban unlawful
westernstandard.news/bc/brea…
The judgment is R. v. Kalicum, 2026 BCSC 1855 <bccourts.ca/jdb-txt/sc/26/18…>.
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Brown on the “unfortunate” decision in Canada (AG) v. Power, 2024 SCC 26:
“The reasoning … reveals a profound mistake borne of a no less profound misunderstanding of the separation of powers. …it goes beyond the judicial function of determining whether a law is constitutional.”
We are delighted to share the Hon. Russell Brown's 2026 UBC Constitutional Lecture @ubc_ccl @ubcokanagan on "Power, and its Separation" (link below).
“Parliamentary privilege is not an indulgence granted to Parliament at the expense of the Charter. It is part of our constitutional architecture that keeps legislative and judicial power separate.”