LAW, JUDICIARY, and CIVIL
RIGHTS
//LA LOI ET LES DROITS DE LA PERSONNE
See also related headings, including IMMIGRATION.
Items
in this section, unlike those of all other sections, have been given
primary grouping by year of publication and then have
been arranged
alphabetically within each year. This has been done for two reasons:
first, this is one of the largest sections of the
list and, more importantly,
in law chronological development is important in
relation to issues
of precedent.
The
reader might consider first examining the title Sexual Orientation and
Legal
Rights, listed under
Hurley in the Year 2000 Publications section, below.
The French title
is Orientation
sexuelle et garanties juridiques.
This work, under the imprint of the Library of
Parliament, Parliamentary Research
Branch, has been an annually updated overview of legal issues since 1992 and
provides a quite extensive list of citations to major
case law (57 items in the
2000 edition). It is quite readable by the legally less
experienced and is available
in its 2000 edition on the Internet at the
address given in the Hurley entry.
The
“Relevant statute(s)” and other annotations which
frequently appear with
entries have come primarily from the online Index
to Canadian Legal Literature.
The user should note that, although there are some citations to major court and
human rights tribunal judgements in this bibliography, a comprehensive investigation
was not conducted across all Canadian federal and more local jurisdictions. Please
ensure also that the case being studied has not been or is not being taken to a higher
court.
The user could also note that Kathleen Lahey’s Are We ‘Persons’ Yet? (University
of Toronto Press, 1999), listed elsewhere in this bibliography, provides an astounding
number of references to Canadian case law. See also Sexual Orientation Cases
in the YEAR 1997 subsection of the LAW section, below.
NOTE regarding same-sex marriage: By late June 2005, the courts
of eight provinces (all except
On June 28, 2005, Bill C-38, An Act respecting certain aspects of legal capacity for
marriage for civil purposes, passed the House of Commons. As of early July, the Bill
remains to clear the Senate and receive Royal Assent in order to become Canadian law.
In this list, citations to only the first three provincial court rulings on same-sex marriage
are given (see 2004 and 2003, below), because of time constraints in list preparation.
Introductory note added for 2008 update:
As will be seen below, the issue of same-sex marriage has received additional entries
for the period following the latest YEAR 2004 entries of the earlier edition.
See YEAR 2005 for reference to the Civil Marriage Act specifically.
The user is reminded of the legal review and bibliography of Mary C. Hurley, titled
Sexual Orientation and Legal Rights (Ottawa: Library of Parliament). This was first
noted by the compiler in the introduction to the LAW section of Gay Canada
(reproduced above) and was listed there in the Year 2001 and Year 2000 sections.
(See those sections for further comments). Hurley has provided subsequent revisions
(see, as one example, AMICUS records 30703400 and 32205092 for 2003
references. The latter of these two AMICUS records, for the electronic version, notes
“continuously revised.”). On August 25, 2008, compiler viewed the document, last
revised to 31 May 2007, at the following: