Documents found
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2095.More information
This note analyses the origin and evolution of the concepts anddefinitions used in the language questions included in Canadiancensuses from 1901, the year of the first census to ask questions onlanguage, to 1961. The note first examines the origin of languagequestions : why it was decided to ask such questions in Canada in1901 ? What were the international as well as domestic influencesthat may have motivated their inclusion in the censusquestionnaire ? This is followed by a detailed analysis ofconcepts and questions on the knowledge of official languages andmother tongue. To do this, we used many sources : thequestionnaires themselves, the instructions given to enumerators, theanalytical documents and other writings published by statisticalauthorities, and the 1901 to 1951 census micro-data files which wereuseful for providing some more technical details.
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2097.More information
Recently, international commercial law has been marked by an extraordinary fact, which was the negotiation and the extinction, almost in stealth of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). When negotiating the Agreement, the sponsors of the ACTA presented it as the right covenant to fight the exponential growth of counterfeiting goods in international business. Notwithstanding, ACTA raised up unprecedented controversy that led to its rejection by the European Parliament on July 4th 2012; instead, the United States that negotiated the ACTA in the form of a “Sole Executive Agreement” have never definitively ratified it. Does the rejection of the ACTA mean international commercial law will now lack safeguards against counterfeiting?This paper aims at examining the legal means, in international contract law, devoted to protect a buyer against the sale of counterfeiting goods that he reasonably thinks do not infringe any third party's intellectual property right, whereas the vendor of such goods knows they do. Drawing on the civil laws of Quebec and France is a mean to support the arguments set in this paper, because international law generally has its best field of expression in national area.
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2099.More information
The article offers a critique of the judgment of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on the jurisdictional immunity of the State delivered on 3 February 2012. Opposing the Federal Republic of Germany to Italy, the case concerned Germany's immunity before the Italian courts following the perpetration of grave violations of international humanitarian law by the German Reich against Italian and Greek citizens during World War II. The ICJ decided the case in favour of Germany, the majority of the Court stating that the Republic of Italy had violated its obligation to respect the immunity recognised to Germany under international law. We first introduce the rule of State immunity. We then describe the facts of the case, the arguments of the parties and the Court's decision. A two-part analysis of the judgment follows: first, de lege lata, we argue that the majority judgment is founded on a positivist approach reflecting the current state of customary international law as concerns state immunity; second, de lege ferenda, we query whether violations of norms of jus cogens should give rise to an exception to State immunity, when no alternative remedies are available to the victims. Finally, we believe that it is unlikely for such an exception to emerge in the foreseeable future in view of current State practice, and that the ICJ judgment could slow down, or even ossify, any evolution of the law on the subject. With this article, we wish to pay tribute to Professor Jacques-Yves Morin, whose classes inspired us to pursue an academic career in international law.
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2100.More information
In 1219, trial by jury replaces trial by ordeal to adjudicate criminal liability. The lack of reasons given to sustain the jury's verdict mirrors the practice of the ordeal (also called God's judgment) and endures to this day in common law countries such as England, the U.S. or Canada, despite an ongoing controversy. Our thesis here is that we can learn much about this “black box” practice through perusing the historical continuity between these two forms of trial, the new and the old.How does trial by jury relate to trial by water (or by fire)? Procedural similarities are striking. Both represent the dramatization of a public “ordeal”; both rely on proceedings attuned to the interests of the parties instead of those of an all-powerful State; both imply a certain role for the judge in terms of the construction of the truth, and the nature of this truth. But how do these similarities help explaining why the truth of the verdict continues to be today what it has always been: without given reasons and very difficult to upset through an appeal? In other words, what we explore here is how the rise and fall of the medieval judgment of God can contribute to a better understanding of the modern institution of the jury in England and Canada, including the lack of reasons still characterizing its verdicts.
Keywords: Jury, verdict, motivation, ordalie, histoire comparée, Jury, reasons for verdict, ordeal, comparative history