It is my intent to consider the ways these decisions are reasoned through a qualitative case study focusing on comparative examples. I will compare specific cases in two ways, first by looking at how the judgements compare to other judgements written by the same judge, and secondly by how the judgement compares to judgements that were not anonymous or unanimous but were decided on similar sections of charter or other relevant law. The first of these criteria will be the most difficult, given that the intent of “By the Court” decisions are to appear as anonymous judgements, but that does not mean it is impossible to determine who it was who actually wrote judgements. For this I will be relying heavily on Peter McCormick’s “Nom De Plume: Who …show more content…
There are a number cases that fall under section 12, but I intend to compare it to R. v Brown (2002) given it looked at similar constitutional issues while also being written by Justice Major, as R v Latimer was according to McCormick. Though it does not cover the exact same constitutional issues (Section 12 versus section 11 and 13) they are similar enough to make the comparison. United States v. Burns covers an issue of extradition to the United States which covered several constitutional issues. For this case I intended to compare it with Reference Re Ng Extradition given the similarities in constitutional issues, specifically Charter sections 1, 7, and 12. In addition I will be looking at R v Henry (2005) as that case was written specifically by Binnie, who McCormick suggests wrote the United States v Burns decision, and it covers similar but not identical issues in regards to criminal …show more content…
The reasoning for this is separate for each case. With the Supreme Court References, given that not all the judges agreed and there was one dissenting opinion on the Nadon case, I do not feel that it meets the intent of my paper to include it despite it otherwise looking like a good example. With the Senate references case, there is no applicable court case I could find that handled similar issues, and thus a strong comparison would not be able to have been made. There is value in researching the number of failed references cases the Harper government posed to the Supreme Court that while interesting does not fit within the scope of this