This book aims to connect narratives associated with the past to the international regime that protects property and contract rights of foreign investors. The book scrutinizes justifications offered to sustain practices associated with colonialism, imperialism, civilized justice, debt, and development, revealing that a number of the rationales offered in support of investment law disciplines replicate those arising out of this discredited past. By revealing these linkages, the book raises concerns about investment law's premises. It would appear that the normative foundations for today's regime reproduces discursive practices that are less than compelling. The book argues that citizens deserve something more than historically discredited reasons to justify the exercise of power over them - something more than mere pretext.

In 1990, Supreme Court Justice Bertha Wilson proclaimed that the Canadian Charter of Rights 'is and must continue to be a vital force in molding the lives of Canadians.' In this collection of original essays commissioned by the Centre for Constitutional Studies, University of Alberta, legal and political scholars evaluate the impact of the Charter on life in Canada since 1982.

Other works have focused on the jurisprudence of the Charter -- its internal coherence or its implications for the role of courts. Charting the Consequences considers 'externalities' -- the effect of the Charter and its jurisprudence on non-constitutional aspects of the law and on the dynamics of legislative power, provincial politics, and social movements. Specific contexts are examined, including certain provinces, economic rights, taxation, First Nations, sexual orientation, social movements, private law, access to justice, and political science. Patterns become manifest across contexts. For one, the editors identify three strata of actors in society -- ranging from the powerful to the least powerful -- who are affected by the Charter in differing degrees. Secondly, they expose how the actors' influences on Charter interpretation are determined, in some measure, by the magnitude of their social and political power.

Charting the Consequences offers a fresh perspective on the Charter. It will generate new thinking and scholarship among lawyers, political scientists, and public policy makers.

Situated between two different constitutional traditions, those of the United Kingdom and the United States, Canada has maintained a distinctive third way: federal, parliamentary, and flexible. Yet in recent years it seems that Canadian constitutional culture has been moving increasingly in an American direction. Through the prorogation crises of 2008 and 2009, its senate reform proposals, and the appointment process for Supreme Court judges, Stephen Harper's Conservative government has repeatedly shown a tendency to push Canada further into the US constitutional orbit. Red, White, and Kind of Blue? is a comparative legal analysis of this creeping Americanization, as well as a probing examination of the costs and benefits that come with it. Comparing British, Canadian, and American constitutional traditions, David Schneiderman offers a critical perspective on the Americanization of Canadian constitutional practice and a timely warning about its unexamined consequences.

Are foreign investors the privileged citizens of a new constitutional order that guarantees rates of return on investment interests? Schneiderman explores the linkages between a new investment rules regime and state constitutions - between a constitution-like regime for the protection of foreign investment and the constitutional projects of national states. The investment rules regime, as in classical accounts of constitutionalism, considers democratically authorized state action as inherently suspect. Despite the myriad purposes served by constitutionalism, the investment rules regime aims solely to enforce limits, both inside and outside of national constitutional systems, beyond which citizen-driven politics will be disabled. Drawing on contemporary and historical case studies, the author argues that any transnational regime should encourage innovation, experimentation, and the capacity to imagine alternative futures for managing the relationship between politics and markets. These objectives have been best accomplished via democratic institutions operating at national, sub-national, and local levels.

The television spectacles of Oka and the Rodney King affair served to focus public disaffection with the police, a disaffection that has been growing for several years. In Canada, confidence in the police is at an all-time low. At the same time crime rates continue to rise. Canada now has the dubious distinction of having the second highest crime rate in the Western world.

How did this state of affairs come about? What do we want from our police? How do we achieve policing that is consistent with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms? The essays in this volume set out to explore these questions. In their introduction, the editors point out that constitutional order is tied to the exercise of power by law enforcement agencies, and that if relations between the police and civil society continue to erode, the exercise of force will rise - a dangerous prospect for democratic societies.