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Pet or property? Free range or small cage? Cure for disease or cruelty by degrees? When it comes to the treatment of animals and the law, the answers to questions like these are often uncomfortable -- and complicated.In this session, we look comparatively at how the law regards the treatment of animals in agriculture, scientific experimentation, as wildlife, and as companions, exploring the protection (or lack of it) of their lives, welfare, and interests.While federal and provincial regulations do address issues such as the protection of endangered species, intensive farming practices, the transportation and slaughter of animals, animal experimentation, and animals used for entertainment (zoos, rodeos, and circuses) -- and do assign criminal penalties for animal cruelty -- the laws in Canada are less robust than we might think."We have an image of ourselves as the Boy Scouts of the world," says Vaughan Black, professor with the Schulich School of Law. "But when it comes to animal welfare and regard for the suffering of animals under the law, Canada is not comparable with other leading countries. We are, in fact, out of step with legislation in many industrialized democracies, including Sweden, the United Kingdom, and most of the European Union."Where other movements demanding social justice have, in the space of a generation, made some remarkable progress -- among them gender, race, sexual orientation, and the environment -- the same can't be said for animal welfare. As Professor Black points out: "Animal welfare simply hasn't achieved the successes of other movements. In fact, the situation is worse now than it was 70 years ago.""We currently don't recognize animal welfare institutionally with a 'Minister for Animals', for example. In the absence of such, we should at least be asking questions about what justice requires of us when it comes to the treatment and protection of animals and how we are to regard their welfare and suffering," says Black.

I take as my text a number of recent court decisions in tort actions, about thirty of them. What characterizes the judgments I examine here is that in them claimants have argued (generally, though not invariably, with success) that something in their culture, their religion or both entitles them to either a finding of liability where liability would not be justified in the absence of that cultural or religious make-up, or, more commonly, greater damages than they would be entitled to in the absence of their specific cultural background.I am not considering claims for loss of culture. In loss-of-culture cases, plaintiffs complain that what they have been deprived of is the language, skills, attitudes, and stories of their ancestors. These plaintiffs have most commonly been First Nations people, but loss-of-culture allegations have not been limited to these groups. (1) Such arguments have been advanced both in the courts (2) and also in the public reparations scheme for government compensation in respect of mistreatment at residential schools. Claimants in those suits maintain that that they do not have a culture or, rather, they lack the intellectual and cultural inheritance they should rightfully have. They may assert that the theft of their cultural legacy from them is a stand-alone cause of action. More plausibly, they aver that their loss of their cultural birthright and its traditional narratives should be counted as a harm, and perhaps even as a distinct head of damages, in the context of some traditional ground of civil liability -- for instance, negligence, battery or breach of fiduciary duty.

The Court Jurisdiction and Proceedings Transfer Act might easily have been two statutes rather than one. There could have been a pair of uniform acts, one delineating the territorial competence of the provinces' superior courts and the other implementing a regime for the cross-border transfer of court proceedings. After all, these two matters are neither logically interdependent nor especially tightly linked. Part 3 of the CJPTA, dealing with transfers of proceedings, is not confined to lawsuits where the initial court takes jurisdiction under Part 2. It applies regardless of whether the initial court bases its jurisdiction on the CJPTA or on some other legislation, such as a specialized family law statute. Indeed, it applies when the transferring court does not have territorial competence at all. While the matters dealt with, respectively, in Parts 2 and 3 of the CJPTA certainly fall within the broad domain of private international law, they are no more closely affiliated than other fields where the CJPTA's progenitor, the Uniform Law Conference of Canada ("ULCC"), elected to deal with matters in discrete statutes. For example, the ULCC chose to address cross-border enforcement by drafting separate uniform acts dealing with recognition of (1) Canadian civil judgments, (2) foreign-country civil judgments, (3) international arbitral awards, (4) foreign subpoenas, (5) foreign maintenance and custody orders, (6) foreign child welfare orders, and (7) foreign judgments based on a contract containing an exclusive forum-selection clause. In short, the ULCC has not been in the habit of drafting sweeping, comprehensive uniform acts but rather has elected to advance in increments. It has been a splitter, not a lumper.

If there is any lingering resistance to the central role that freedom of contract plays in private international law today, then this book by one of England's foremost scholars in the field should put an end to it; Agreements on Jurisdiction and Choice of Law (AJCL) is the most comprehensive descriptive account of court selection and choice of law terms in business contracts. Its focus is commercial activity, so there is next to nothing here on how the matter plays out in interfamily agreements, such as prenuptial contracts, and little on legislative interventions in the consumer sphere. It is centred on United Kingdom law, but there is also discussion of other Commonwealth jurisdictions (including Canada), several European countries and, to a lesser extent, the United States. Within those bounds, its highly readable coverage of the subject is exhaustive. In that regard AJCL is likely to be of great benefit to practitioners and, for that reason alone, deserves a wide readership.