Eric M. Adams

Human rights at work: Physical standards for employment and human rights law.

This review focuses on the human rights dimensions of creating and implementing physical standards for employment for prospective and incumbent employees. The review argues that physical standards for employment engage two fundamental legal concepts of employment law: freedom of contract and workplace human rights. While the former promotes an employers right to set workplace standards and make decisions of whom to hire and terminate, the latter prevents employers from discriminating against individuals contrary to human rights legislation. With reference to applicable human rights legislative regimes and their judicial interpretation in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, this review demonstrates the judicial preference for criterion validation in testing mechanisms in the finding of bona fide occupational requirements. With particular attention to the Supreme Court of Canada decision in Meiorin, this review argues that an effective balance between workplace safety and human rights concerns can be found, not in applying different standards to different groups of individuals, but in an approach that holds employers to demonstrating a sufficient connection between a uniform physical standard of employment and the actual minimum requirements to perform the job safety and efficiently. Combined with an employers duty to accommodate, such an approach to lawful physical standards for employment conceives of worker and public safety and workplace diversity as emanating from a shared concern for human rights.

Errors of Fact and Law: Race, Space, and Hockey in Christie v York†

Christie v York has pride of place among decisions wrongly decided in Canadian legal history. Fred Christie and two friends were on their way to a hockey game when they entered the York Tavern at the Montreal Forum, seeking a beer before the game, and the York denied them service on the grounds of race. Or so the facts tell us. As it turns out, a significant error has long been woven into the story of Christie v York. What were Christie and his friends doing that night at the Forum? This article reveals that they were not attending a hockey game. The real facts, long hidden from view, involve a hot summer night, the Canadian Olympic boxing trials, Joe Louis, American race riots, and a local black boxer. And yet, even in error, hockey matters in the case, especially in Justice Henry Daviss famous dissent. Recasting Christie as a case that turns on the judicial construction of facts, this article highlights the importance of real space and circumstance in creating notions of identity, belonging, and equality. While Christies errors of law have been the principal source of interest among legal scholars to date, this article argues that Christies facts, both real and imagined, provide a far richer contribution to the legal history of the complex relationship among race and space and law.

Running from a Bear: Coordinate Constitutional Interpretation in Canada

This essay reviews Dennis Bakers Not Quite Supreme: The Courts and Coordinate Constitutional Interpretation (McGill-Queens University Press, 2010). Bakers book should surprise those legal scholars too keen to dismiss coordinate constitutionalism as irrelevant or misdirected. While Baker’s ultimate claim may fall short, his book offers an intriguing account of Canada’s constitutional separation of powers and hints at the productive possibilities of coordinate interpretation. Baker’s Not Quite Supreme may not quite convince but it nonetheless contributes important ideas to the ongoing debate among disciplines about democracy, judicial review, and the Charter.