Full Description
Courts today face a range of claims to redress historic injustice, including injustice perpetrated by law. In Canada, descendants of Chinese immigrants recently claimed the return of a head tax levied only on Chinese immigrants. Calling Power to Account uses the litigation around the Chinese Canadian Head Tax Case as a focal point for examining the historical, legal, and philosophical issues raised by such claims.
By placing both the discriminatory law and the judicial decisions in their historical context, some of the essays in this volume illuminate the larger patterns of discrimination and the sometimes surprising capacity of the courts of the day to respond to racism. A number of the contributors explore the implications of reparations claims for relations between the various branches of government while others examine the difficult questions such claims raise in both legal and political theory by placing the claims in a comparative or philosophical perspective.
Calling Power to Account suggests that our legal systems can hope to play a part in responding to their own legacy of past injustice only when they recognize the full array of issues posed by the Head Tax Case.
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
Contributors
Context and History
Mack v. Attorney General of Canada: Equality, History, and Reparation
David Dyzenhaus and Mayo Moran
Litigating Injustice
Avvy Go
Legal Discrimination against the Chinese in Canada: The Historical Framework
Constance Backhouse
Can We Do Wrong to Strangers?
Audrey Macklin
The Head Tax Case and the Rule of Law: The Historical Thread of Judicial Resistance to 'Legalized' Discrimination
John McLaren
Limits on Institutional Capacity to Address Injustice
The Limits of Constitutionalism: Requiring Moral Behaviour from Government
Mary Eberts
Delivering the Goods and the Good: Repairing Moral Wrongs
Catherine Lu
Rights and Wrongs, Institutions and Time: Species of Historic Injustice and Their Modes of Redress
Jeremy Webber
Redress for Unjust State Action: An Equitable Approach to the Public/Private Distinction
Lorne Sossin
Legal Theory and Gross Statutory Injustice
Gross Statutory Injustice and the Canadian Head Tax Case
Julian Rivers
The Juristic Force of Injustice
David Dyzenhaus
Private Right and Public Wrong
The Timing of Injustice
Lionel Smith
Mack v. Attorney General of Canada and the Structure of the Action in Unjust Enrichment
Dennis Klimchuk
A Brief History of Mass Restitution Litigation in the United States
Anthony J. Sebok
Time, Place, and Values: Mack and the Influence of the Charter on Private Law
Mayo Moran
Appendix I: Appellants' Factum
Appendix II: Mack v. Attorney General of Canada - Judgment of the Ontario Court of Appeal
Index
