In “Sitting on the Bench,” a sketch from Beyond the Fringe, the British comedy review of the 1960s, Peter Cook played a character named E.L. Wisty, a miner. Wisty claims that he could have been a judge but “never had the Latin for the judgin’.” One reason he regrets his fate is that sitting on the bench would have been safer than mining, because of “the absence of falling coal.” True, perhaps, but as Andrew Petter demonstrates in The Politics of the Charter: The Illusive Promise of Constitutional Rights, judges may be exposed to a metaphorical pummelling, in this instance strong criticism of how they have interpreted the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the adverse effect this interpretation has had upon Canadian politics.
Because of the structure of the book, that assessment is offered more than once. The first five of its ten chapters appeared (one each year) as journal articles between 1985 and 1989; the second five (again, one per...
David E. Smith is co-editor (with John C. Courtney) of The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Politics (Oxford University Press, 2010) and author of Federalism and the Constitution of Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2010).
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