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Keywords

Canada. Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms; United States. Supreme Court--Influence

Document Type

Article

Abstract

Chief Justice Dickson has suggested that Canadian jurists should consult American authority in Charter cases, but with care. The authors look at how the Court has followed this advice in its own criminal decisions rendered prior to March 1989, in which American authority is cited in less than 50 percent of the cases. The authors conclude that, in some significant areas, the Court has interpreted the interests of the accused more broadly than the American Supreme Court does and has on occasion done so without citing divergent U.S. precedent. The effect of sections 1 and 24(2) of the Charter on this trend remain to be seen.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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