Both Canada and the European Union feature multiple overlapping legal systems, each with independent sovereignty claims and distinctive cultural traditions. Courts in both settings have therefore been forced to reckon with ‘constitutional pluralism’.

In Canada, the contested relationship between Indigenous and settler legal orders has been mediated largely through s35, which recognizes Aboriginal rights, and s25 which shields them from the Canadian Charter. The resulting jurisprudence has focused on protecting cultural difference by creating limited spaces of autonomy within the Canadian state but has largely neglected questions of sovereignty.

In Europe, the relationship between European Union and member-state law has been mediated through an emergent judicial dialog which allows each court to maintain its sovereignty claim by making its acceptance of the other’s authority conditional. The resulting jurisprudence focuses on sovereignty without dealing as closely with questions of difference.

The two contexts therefore represent divergent approaches to shared conceptual and practical problems. To my knowledge, however, no scholarship has seriously compared the two. The following article takes a modest step towards filling this lacuna, introducing European thinkers to Canadian constitutional pluralism and vice versa before reflecting on some of the ways further comparative research can add depth to existing comparative literature, deepen our understanding of constitutional pluralism as a theory and, in particular, raise important questions about constitutional pluralism’s relationship to liberalism.

The constitutive idea centres on the proposition that, as a matter of social fact, law and wider social life each make up and, over time, dynamically shape, the other. This paper argues that we can draw upon designerly ways to make that the constitutive idea more available to scholars, as well as to the wider world. It first highlights the empirical, conceptual and normative dimensions of the constitutive idea. Next it introduces designerly ways, and some examples of how they have already been used at the intersections of legal and economic life. Finally, it identifies three specific problems (one empirical, one conceptual and one normative) arising out of scholarship that attends to the constitutive idea, and explains how we might adapt existing designerly practices to address them.

This article advances a law-and-economics critique of fractional-reserve banking, focusing on the legal taxonomy of bank contracts and the risk externalities of maturity transformation. We argue that the conflation of custody-like deposits with mutuum loans blurs property-rights boundaries and weakens liability discipline. Drawing on Austrian monetary theory, we link fiduciary media and demandable debt to pro-cyclical liquidity, run dynamics and the amplification of systemic risk. We reassess the real-bills doctrine and “demand loans,” showing why they do not neutralise run risk in practice and may obscure solvency–liquidity interactions. We then outline institutional reforms – 100%-reserve custodial deposits and a strict functional separation between custody and intermediation – together with market-based loss allocation. The article concludes with regulatory implications for lender-of-last-resort, deposit insurance, and capital/liquidity regimes consistent with risk reduction and legal coherence.

A large body of literature examines the drivers of individual attitudes towards international trade policies. This article contributes to this literature by exploring the role of border regions across the European Union (EU). Border regions offer a unique context for examining trade attitudes. Residency in either EU, non-EU, or maritime borders generates differential impacts on individuals’ support for distinct trade policies. Focusing on attitudes towards import duties and EU trade agreements, this article demonstrates that individuals in non-EU borderlands and maritime border regions are particularly supportive of lowering import duties, whereas support for extra-EU trade agreements is largely uniform across regions, with only a modest positive tendency among maritime residents. Broader sentiment on trade shows limited regional differences, chiefly between EU-border and non-EU-border residents. Including a battery of control variables drawn from the literature, the article leverages individual-level data at the most fine-grained level available in the EU to explore these dynamics relying on several regression models. This article speaks to both the literature on trade attitudes and border studies by offering a conceptualization of borders that distinguishes between EU borders, non-EU borders, and maritime borders, each of which has distinct implications for individuals’ trade attitudes.

In recent years, the controversy between legal positivists and their opponents has been reframed as a debate on whether ‘legal facts’—aka facts about the ‘content of the law’—are determined by social or moral facts. This new framing ought to be resisted, for two reasons. First, it is biased against legal positivism, by making it the default picture that the ‘content of the law’ is not a set of legal norms atomistically individuated—which is essential to positivism—but a set of ‘facts’ (“the fact that Jones legally ought to pay $35 to Smith”) which can then be grounded holistically in moral facts. Second, talk of ‘legal facts’ has been instrumental in the recent metaphysical turn in jurisprudence, especially in the growing literature on grounding and law. Jurisprudes—of all stripes—should resist it, as it impoverishes and obfuscates many important philosophical questions about law.

Some philosophers and legal theorists believe that certain fundamental normative phenomena cannot be adequately explained without appeal to second-order reasons—that is, reasons to act (or not to act) for certain reasons. Others are resistant to such an appeal. This resistance takes a robust form in the Credit Argument, which holds that, since we cannot act for a reason for a reason, the very idea of second-order reasons must be incoherent. In this paper, I do several things. Firstly, I clarify in just what sense the Credit Argument supposes it is not ‘possible’ to act for a reason for a reason. Secondly, I propose a novel typology of second-order reasons. Thirdly, using these insights, I demonstrate that the Credit Argument is weak at several points and should therefore be roundly rejected. This amounts to a partial defence of the appeal to second-order reasons in the explanation of fundamental normative phenomena.

This article analyzes the parliamentary debates over three Canadian federal laws (2021-2024) on medical assistance in dying (MAID). It explores the factors that influenced Parliament’s decision to expand MAID eligibility to include mental illness in 2021 and to subsequently defer that eligibility on two occasions in 2023 and 2024. We argue that the expansion of MAID to include mental illness was partly driven by a looming judicial deadline and the government’s desire to avoid future Charter litigation, while the deferrals were driven by the perceived lack of readiness from key stakeholders, especially the provinces. This case study identifies broader dynamics of judicial-legislative interaction that can affect policy outcomes, including governments’ attempts at “future-oriented compliance” to pre-empt litigation rather than merely respond to it. It also demonstrates both how judicial deadlines can constrain legislative choice in unforeseen ways and how sunset clauses can foster policy uncertainty.

Risk regulation has increasingly expanded in European digital policy, yet it is diverging from its roots, especially the precautionary principle. Rather than traditionally focusing on scientific evidence and knowledge, the European approach to risk regulation has been increasingly based on constitutional values such as the protection of fundamental rights and democracy. This article seeks to unravel the logic that has led the Union to move from an approach to risk more based on science to a model which considers constitutional values as parameters to assess and mitigate risks. By focusing on European digital regulation, primarily the GDPR, the DSA and the AI Act, this work underlines how the constitutional rationale of this transformation comes as a response to the intangibility of risks resulting from digital technologies and to imbalances of information and knowledge coming from the concentration of private power in the digital ecosystem. The primary argument is that risk regulation in European digital policy does not seek to rationalise uncertainty through science but to govern epistemological uncertainty through the instruments of constitutionalism, with the goal of addressing the impact of digital technologies on fundamental rights and imbalances of power.