The 1998 Agreement between the Nisga'a people of Northern BC, the federal government, and the government of BC, is a treaty protected under s. 35 of the Canadian Constitution. Existing s. 35 jurisprudence allows treaties to be infringed by government so long as the government can justify the infringement under the Sparrow test. In the one significant court case dealing with the Nisga'a Agreement, it was assumed that this jurisprudence applied. In this paper, the author argues that the Sparrow test ought not to be applied in the context of modem treaties such as the Nisga'a Agreement. Modem treaties, negotiated between equal parties in the light of Charter protection, should not be interpreted according to the special rules that have been developed for interpreting pre-Charter agreements. In order to achieve the reconciliation purpose of treaty making, modern treaties should be respected and courts should intervene as little as possible. On the express wording of the Nisga'a Agreement, the parties intended it to be a full and final settlement. The courts should give effect to that intention.
On October 10, 2014, the Oklahoma State Penitentiary opened its doors to the media to reveal a new state-of-the-art death chamber and announced that it had created an efficient execution facility. To complement the improvements to the prison architecture and the punishment technology, the Oklahoma legislature amended the state's execution protocol to formulate effective procedures delineating what it considered appropriate pharmacology to render a constitutional execution. This advance in design and regulation, however, has not prevented subsequent maladministration by various members of the Department of Corrections' execution teams. On January 16, 2015, Charles Warner was executed with the prison receiving and using the wrong drugs. On October 16, 2015, due to further operational mistakes, the District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma declared Richard Glossip's case to be administratively closed. To investigate these systematic failings, a Multicounty Grand Jury was convened and it considered evidence from stakeholders in the execution process. Its Interim Report provided damning findings, which demonstrate that the death penalty is still struggling for institutional legitimacy. The continuation of botched executions, inappropriate alterations to the protocol, and the claims of punishment experimentation on non-consenting human subjects is contributing to a growing lack of confidence that Oklahoma can maintain a humane form of capital punishment through lethal injection. These unacceptable circumstances occurred primarily as a result of the uncomfortable relationship between the purported "science" of lethal injection and the "constitutional law" of lethal injection, and therefore a clear interpretation of the intellectual interplay of these two disciplines is required. Both the procedural review parameters provided by the principles of comity and finality, and the scientific methodologies of atomism and holism for determining the epistemology of the pharmacology, will prove illuminating. There are compelling questions concerning whether the adjudicative process can produce sound reasoning for assessing the death penalty. We are left with the situation in which there are still, and perhaps always will be, ardent circumstances challenging the constitutionality of Oklahoma's lethal injection.
ABSTRACT: The partition of Ireland in 1921 drew heavily on the census data of 1911 to determine how the boundary between North and South was to be demarcated. The intention was to ensure a numerical advantage for the Protestant population in the new Northern Ireland, sufficient to ensure a permanent unionist majority. The publication of the data from the 2021 census in Northern Ireland and the 2022 census in Ireland allows for an assessment of how the demography has changed over the past 100 years, and the extent to which the changed ratio of Catholics and Protestants calls into question the longer-term viability of Northern Ireland as a polity. The article goes beyond the Catholic–Protestant binary to look at the growth in numbers of those with other faiths and those with no religion, and the impact of secularisation on the island of Ireland.
