Democratic Rule of Law Under Attack

The book analyzes in depth contemporary precedent setting US and Canadian landmark High Court and lower court rulings responding to attacks on the judiciary’s independence. The cases analyzed include (a) (in Chapter one) a US Supreme Court ruling in which the High Court capitulated to the Executive’s call to undercut the 'separation of powers' between the judiciary and the Executive, (b) (in Chapter two) various Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) cases in which limits on the voting rights of individuals from different groups of Canadian citizens were struck down as unconstitutional but the restriction on Canadian child citizen voting upheld (i) in the Court's commentary (orbiter dicta) as an inherent internal limit on the scope of the voting right and through (ii)  the SCC's declining to hear a child Canadian citizen voting case,  (c) (in Chapter three) Canadian cases are examined involving use of the s. 33 Canadian Charter notwithstanding clause that overrides certain Canadian Charter rights and freedoms, (d) (in Chapter four) the United States Supreme Court case involving President Trump's Executive Order reinterpreting the citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution so as to deny US birthright citizenship to children born in the US to undocumented migrants or to lawful temporary US visitors, and (e) (Chapter five) a Canadian Supreme Court of Canada case in which the Court rejected the Government's claim of immunity from paying damages for passing a clearly unconstitutional law that caused harm to an individual. These cases in the various chapters are used as key examples to undergird the broader discussion in the book on the court’s scope and sources of authority in a democracy and the judiciary’s role in upholding democratic institutions, principles and values domestically and internationally.