Research

Deference by courts to democratically elected legislature is at the heart of our constitutional democracy. This paper constructs a novel database of 249 cases involving the judicial review of legislation in Canada from the inception of the Charter to present. Deference increased sharply as the Charter was introduced, but has been steadily decreasing since 2000 after the McLachlin and Wagner courts. Deference is rising for the right to free expression, but declining for penal statutes and the right to equality. The recent fall in judicial deference can largely be attributed to certain Liberal appointees striking down more penal statutes due to both construing criminal rights more broadly and, as predicted by Irwin Toy, finding that the least intrusive means have not been taken. The justice-level data also provide insights on differences (or lack thereof) in judicial behaviour across sex and politics. One could conclude that Canada does, in fact, have de facto tiered judicial review.

Court congestion is among society’s oldest legal problems; protections from it are enshrined in constitutions around the world. This paper uses publicly available data on the duration of millions of criminal court cases over the course of two decades across Canadian provinces to analyze the performance of the criminal justice system using queueing theory. Our new approach to estimating the delay of criminal trials appropriately includes the time from the point the charges are laid to first appearance, which is not available in raw data. We find that the queue sizes and wait times are growing in many provinces, suggesting that the criminal justice system is approaching, or perhaps beyond, capacity. Using several different time series specifications, we find that the utilization rate and model-implied queue size co-move positively with the population in pretrial custody. The results suggest that court congestion, as measured by statistics from queueing theory, has explanatory power for the rising population in pretrial custody.

This paper develops a model in which housing incurs a property damage for which the tenant must sue in order to be made whole. The model is analyzed under both market rents and rent control regimes, as well as for tenants with limited wealth, bilateral (tenant) investment, coinsurance, and rent abatement. The model facilitates the evaluation of several policies, such as rent control, landlord-tenant laws, income redistribution, tenant insurance, and rent abatement. The model makes several predictions which are consistent with empirical findings in housing economics, such as how and why rent control decreasing investment in maintenance, why the poor occupy housing of worse condition, and how laws shifting liability onto the landlord increase the quality of housing for poor tenants as well as increase rent prices. It also nests classic hypotheses, such as the Calabresi’s efficiency of strict liability rules and the least cost avoider, in addition to clarifications on Friedman’s prediction that rent control decreases investment.

We study the consequences of landlord-tenant laws on quality and prices in the rental housing market. We use the staggered introduction of Canadian Residential Tenancy Acts to study the consequences of a landlord-tenant reform that reduced tenants' litigation costs and improved their bargaining power through mandatory contractual terms. To do so, we employ a the difference-in-differences approach to estimate the average treatment effect on a repeated-cross section of households, controlling for income and family structure in five cities. The estimates imply that the reform led to a decline of 2.2 percentage points in the probability of a major defect, with no measurable effect on rent prices or homeownership rates. The average treatment effects are concentrated within families with children who face greater costs to moving in response to property damage and are least sensitive to changes in the vacancy rate. The results are consistent with a stylized model in which a reduction in litigation costs allows the tenant to more cheaply recover on damages when moving costs are high, with second-generation rent controls limiting increases in rent prices charged by the landlord.