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The rule of law has become a big idea in economics. But it has had its difficulties

Dr. Smith said the "dogmatism" of his testimony stemmed partly from a view early in his career that he was on the prosecution's side.

Other witnesses have indicated that pathologists are supposed to maintain a scientific neutrality.

"I honestly believed it was my role to support the Crown attorney. I was there to make the case look good," he said. "It took me a long time, years, to acknowledge my role was not to make the Crown's case Â… but to be much more impartial."

Dr. Smith was certified as a pediatric pathologist, but confirmed that he received virtually no training in forensic pathology: applying the science to criminal and other legal matters.

"It was self-taught, it was minimal," he said of his knowledge of the field. "In retrospect, I realize it was woefully inadequate."

He also said he was "profoundly ignorant" of the proper way to present his opinions in court. The outside experts were highly critical of his court testimony.

Winnipeg Transit driver William Bordynuik was in bed when his sleep turned into a nightmare.

But the eight people that burst into his home, ordered him to the floor and handcuffed him weren't bogeymen -- they were Winnipeg police officers armed with a search warrant and looking for cocaine.

Bordynuik says not only was there never any cocaine in his home, police themselves would have realized that if they had investigated before breaking through his door on Dec. 28, 2006.

In fact, the only white substance police found during the search -- a clear bag with white round stuff in it -- turned out to be nothing more than mothballs.

Now Bordynuik, who has no criminal record, is suing the unknown Winnipeg police officers and former chief Jack Ewatski for damages.

Bordynuik said the raid has caused him to suffer post-traumatic stress disorder, nervous shock, depression, sleep loss and a personality change.

"This guy is an upstanding citizen," Martin Pollock, Bordynuik's lawyer, said.

"Where's the surveillance here? They could do wiretaps. It appears they didn't. What kind of information did they have?"

The lawsuit, filed in Court of Queen's Bench last week, also claims police kept yelling 'where are the drugs?' even though Bordynuik replied he didn't even know what cocaine looks like.

David Brown and Dana Chatwell found their family home alone behind the barricades -- on the native-controlled side -- during acrimonious and ongoing confrontations over disputed Six Nations land near Hamilton.

Life in their isolation has meant having to present a "passport" to natives when leaving or returning to their house, having their car searched by masked men at barricades, being refused access to their property, having no mail or garbage removal and enduring threats, noise and their house being ransacked.

All the while, police refused to intervene, including ignored 911 calls, they said.

In a $10-million lawsuit against the provincial government and the Ontario Provincial Police, the couple claims the refusal to enforce the law caused Ms. Chatwell to abandon her in-home business, Mr. Brown to lose his job and their teenaged son to live elsewhere.

"If the OPP cannot go on that property and the [native] chiefs can't discipline these protesters, when the sun goes down behind my home, where does that leave my family?" asked Mr. Brown, yesterday.

The Caledonia land dispute saga took a violent new twist last week, when natives from the Six Nations reserve used wooden beams to beat Sam Gualtieri, a construction contractor working one kilometre away from the Douglas Creek Estates property, which native protesters have occupied for the last 18 months. Unlike the protesters, Mr. Gualtieri was doing nothing illegal. His only crime was renovating a house for his daughter and her fiance. But native thugs have proclaimed that anyone working in the area must get their approval (i.e., pay protection money) first. As in all situations where a central authority refuses to apply the rule of law, mafia-like groups have rushed into the vacuum and proclaimed themselves a law unto themselves.

Mr. Gualtieri's brother claims the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) officers on the site "stood there, and they did not intervene" while the beating took place. We don't know whether this is true. But it is certainly credible given the precedents over the last year and a half. Since the crisis began, Dalton McGuinty's government has been petrified of taking decisive action, lest the Toronto media compare his actions to those of Mike Harris's government during the Ipperwash Crisis of 1995. At numerous points during the Caledonia standoff, the OPP has been ordered to sit on their hands despite numerous provocations by native protesters.

An Alberta common-law couple failed to convince the Supreme Court of Canada on Thursday to consider whether the man can legally contract out of his parental duties toward the woman's child, who was conceived through artificial insemination because the man did not want a baby.

The court, by convention, did not give reasons for declining to grant leave to appeal in the closely watched case of John and Jane Doe.

The refusal to consider the appeal means the Calgary couple is bound by a decision last February in the Alberta Court of Appeal, which ruled against the couple crafting a contract absolving John Doe of parental responsibility.

Police used computer experts to obtain confidential material, and are also believed to have approached Number 10's internet suppliers to gain access to government email records.

Scotland Yard became suspicious that potentially vital information was being withheld after it twice asked Downing Street for all emails, letters and other material relating to the system of awarding peerages. Concerns grew among officers that there had been a cover-up.

They were deeply frustrated by the "very slim" file of documents that was handed over — and decided to obtain further evidence by their own devices, senior sources close to the inquiry have revealed.

It is understood that John Yates, the Metropolitan Police assistant commissioner leading the investigation, authorised officers to use all lawful and legitimate means to discover whether information was being withheld.

Despite the FSA's solid support of Bowland and its insistence that no rules had been broken, the Department of Health bowed to the commission's diktat. On October 16 it rushed through a statutory instrument, the Curd Cheese (Restriction on Placing on the Market) Regulations 2006, to take immediate effect. Section 3 read "No person shall place on the market any curd cheese manufactured by Bowland Dairy Products Limited".

Never before, it is believed, has a statutory instrument been issued in Britain directed at closing down a single named company (breaching the ancient principle of British law that "the law must be blind", i.e. it must be general in application, not directed at any specific individual or body).

When Lord Willoughby de Broke recounted this chilling story last week, eloquently supported by others, including Lord Greaves, a Lib Dem who lives near Mr Wright's plant, peers were visibly horrified. The only defence that Lord Warner, as junior health minister, could muster (apart from seriously misrepresenting the terms of Vesterdorf's judgment) was to plead that failure to implement the commission's decision "would constitute a serious breach of the UK's obligations under the EC Treaty". For truth, justice, the rule of law and Britain it was a black day.

The problem is, the local officers are having a hard time doing their regular jobs. Area residents have lost respect for the OPP. They saw the videotape of reclamation OPP officers standing by while television cameramen were assaulted and robbed by natives in the Canadian Tire parking lot near the barricades. The constable says the OPP's unforgivable lack of action that day was the result of a number of factors: The officers were outnumbered; they were from across Ontario and didn't work as a team; and they didn't know what protocol to follow. So the public, he says, has a right to question the OPP's ability and desire to uphold the law.

Just try to give a speeding ticket to a non-native in Caledonia right now, the officer says. The speeder is likely to say, "You're only doing this to me because I'm not native. The natives are speeding all over the place in their pickups and nobody is giving them tickets."

It's hard to argue with that when it's true, the officer says.

"I think, quite honestly, their complaints have some merit." For instance, on Wednesday night, about 50 teens got into a donnybrook in front of the McDonald's.

The official word from OPP spokesperson Constable Paula Wright is police aren't sure what the melee was about. The unofficial word from witnesses is that it was a racially motivated dispute between native and non-native youths.

At 10:20 p.m. reclamation officers were sent to the scene because the local officers were tied up at another call. They too headed over as soon as they were free and were joined by Six Nations Police.

One youth -- a native boy -- was separated from the rest and spoken to by police because he had been the victim of much punching and pushing. A witness says other native teens mistook the police gesture as a sign that the boy was in trouble and used cellphones to call other native youths to the scene.

As the native youths became more agitated, OPP officers had to use pepper spray to control some of them.

A crowd of disheveled villagers was waiting when Chen Guangcheng stepped out of the car. More women than men among them, a mix of desperation and hope on their faces, they ushered him along a dirt path and into a nearby house. Then, one after another, they told him about the city's campaign against "unplanned births."

Since March, the farmers said, local authorities had been raiding the homes of families with two children and demanding at least one parent be sterilized. Women pregnant with a third child were forced to have abortions. And if people tried to hide, the officials jailed their relatives and neighbors, beating them and holding them hostage until the fugitives turned themselves in.

Chen, 34, a slender man wearing dark sunglasses, held out a digital voice recorder and listened intently. Blind since birth, he couldn't see the tears of the women forced to terminate pregnancies seven or eight months along, or the blank stares of the men who said they submitted to vasectomies to save family members from torture. But he could hear the pain and anger in their voices and said he was determined to do something about it.

For weeks, Chen has been collecting testimony about the population-control abuses in this city of 10 million, located about 400 miles southeast of Beijing, beginning in his own village in the rural suburbs, then traveling from one community to the next. Now he is preparing an unlikely challenge to the crackdown: a class-action lawsuit.

"What these officials are doing is completely illegal," Chen said. "They've committed widespread violations of citizens' basic rights, and they should be held responsible."

Substitute Parliament for James I, and the Supreme Court for Sir Edward, and you have much the same debate today. Critics of the Charter wonder why the Supreme Court should have "the last word" on laws that Parliament has passed. But they might as well wonder the same about any law, since all laws, though they are passed by the legislature, have effect only as interpreted and applied by courts.

I said at the end of my last column that interpreting the law was the courts'' job. But why should that be? Why shouldn't parliament be able to say what its own laws mean -- all laws, not just the Charter? Why should we leave it to some unelected judge in Medicine Hat or Chicoutimi to say what they mean? For that matter, why do we need written laws at all? We elected the government. Why can't it just get on with governing? If we don't like it, we can toss it out at the next election.

Because we insist our governments be held to certain standards, even between elections. We want their discretion to be limited, not unlimited, and so we insist that they put their intentions in writing, in law, so that we can see precisely what they are doing, and whether it is consistent with what they had previously said they would do -- or, to the extent of the inconsistency, whether this represents a deliberate change of policy, or mere arbitrariness or incoherence.

The consequences of today’s decision are not difficult to predict, and promise to be harmful. So-called “urban renewal” programs provide some compensation for the properties they take, but no compensation is possible for the subjective value of these lands to the individuals displaced and the indignity inflicted by uprooting them from their homes. Allowing the government to take property solely for public purposes is bad enough, but extending the concept of public purpose to encompass any economically beneficial goal guarantees that these losses will fall disproportionately on poor communities. Those communities are not only systematically less likely to put their lands to the highest and best social use, but are also the least politically powerful. If ever there were justification for intrusive judicial review of constitutional provisions that protect “discrete and insular minorities,” United States v. Carolene Products Co., 304 U.S. 144, 152, n. 4 (1938), surely that principle would apply with great force to the powerless groups and individuals the Public Use Clause protects. The deferential standard this Court has adopted for the Public Use Clause is therefore deeply perverse. It encourages “those citizens with dis-
proportionate influence and power in the political pro-
cess, including large corporations and development
firms” to victimize the weak. Ante, at 11 (O’Connor, J., dissenting).

Those incentives have made the legacy of this Court’s “public purpose” test an unhappy one. In the 1950’s, no doubt emboldened in part by the expansive understanding of “public use” this Court adopted in Berman, cities “rushed to draw plans” for downtown development. B. Frieden & L. Sagalayn, Downtown, Inc. How America Rebuilds Cities 17 (1989). “Of all the families displaced by urban renewal from 1949 through 1963, 63 percent of those whose race was known were nonwhite, and of these families, 56 percent of nonwhites and 38 percent of

Over two centuries ago, just after the Bill of Rights was ratified, Justice Chase wrote:

“An act of the Legislature (for I cannot call it a law) contrary to the great first principles of the social compact, cannot be considered a rightful exercise of legislative authority … . A few instances will suffice to explain what I mean… . [A] law that takes property from A. and gives it to B: It is against all reason and justice, for a people to entrust a Legislature with such powers; and, therefore, it cannot be presumed that they have done it.” Calder v. Bull, 3 Dall. 386, 388 (1798) (emphasis deleted).

Today the Court abandons this long-held, basic limitation on government power. Under the banner of economic development, all private property is now vulnerable to being taken and transferred to another private owner, so long as it might be upgraded–i.e., given to an owner who will use it in a way that the legislature deems more beneficial to the public–in the process. To reason, as the Court does, that the incidental public benefits resulting from the subsequent ordinary use of private property render economic development takings “for public use” is to wash out any distinction between private and public use of property–and thereby effectively to delete the words “for public use” from the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment. Accordingly I respectfully dissent.

--
Any property may now be taken for the benefit of another private party, but the fallout from this decision will not be random. The beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms. As for the victims, the government now has license to transfer property from those with fewer resources to those with more. The Founders cannot have intended this perverse result. “[T]hat alone is a just government,” wrote James Madison, “which impartially secures to every man, wh

It was a decision fraught with huge implications for a country with many areas, particularly the rapidly growing urban and suburban areas, facing countervailing pressures of development and property ownership rights.

The 5-4 ruling represented a defeat for some Connecticut residents whose homes are slated for destruction to make room for an office complex. They argued that cities have no right to take their land except for projects with a clear public use, such as roads or schools, or to revitalize blighted areas.

As a result, cities have wide power to bulldoze residences for projects such as shopping malls and hotel complexes to generate tax revenue.

Local officials, not federal judges, know best in deciding whether a development project will benefit the community, justices said.

I doubt we have enough Mounties to make Moose Jaw drug-free, let alone the whole country. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized there was something more fundamentally disturbing about Commissioner Zaccardelli's message than its mere factual status. He seemed to be saying, after all, that the sacrifice of four young men's lives on these terms was regrettable, but justifiable and noble. With respect to the demands that that moment placed upon him, I think the whole idea is offensive.

The truth is that those cops were at the Roszko farm to carry out the most mundane police duty imaginable: to help a bailiff repossess a truck. The texture of every police officer's life is woven from crummy little tasks like this -- which, attended to day by day, painful increment by painful increment, sustain the decrees of justice and preserve us all in our property, our personal liberty, and the network of capitalist linkages that keep us fed and clothed and fat and happy.

That debts will be honoured is the sort of reciprocal expectation we rely on, unthinkingly, every minute of our lives. On mercifully rare occasions, we resort to the law to make it work. And in enforcing the notion of honouring freely assumed obligations, policemen do something truly honourable. How crass is Mr. Zaccardelli's dream of a "drug-free Canada" compared with the simple vision of a civil society where people pay what they owe. Those four constables deserved better from their commander.

Additional members of a scandal-plagued Toronto police drug squad will be charged with Police Act disciplinary offences as a result of the findings of an RCMP-led task force.

The corruption-related offences are expected to be filed this spring -- at least 15 months after they were recommended by the task force.

"The Toronto Police Service will seek to lay charges," confirmed Staff Inspector George Cowley, the senior prosecutor in its professional standards unit. He said the filing of the charges has been delayed for procedural reasons.

RCMP Assistant Commissioner John Neily was asked to lead an internal Toronto police task force in July, 2001, to probe allegations that officers in a now disbanded squad stole money and drugs and assaulted suspects during raids in the late 1990s.

The allegations led prosecutors to stay or withdraw charges in more than 200 drug cases.

In the past four months, six Muslim women living in Berlin have been brutally murdered by family members. Their crime? Trying to break free and live Western lifestyles. Within their communities, the killers are revered as heroes for preserving their family dignity. How can such a horrific and shockingly archaic practice be flourishing in the heart of Europe? The deaths have sparked momentary outrage, but will they change the grim reality for Muslim women?

Antanas Mockus had just resigned from the top job of Colombian National University. A mathematician and philosopher, Mockus looked around for another big challenge and found it: to be in charge of, as he describes it, "a 6.5 million person classroom."

Mockus, who had no political experience, ran for mayor of Bogotá; he was successful mainly because people in Colombia's capital city saw him as an honest guy. With an educator's inventiveness, Mockus turned Bogotá into a social experiment just as the city was choked with violence, lawless traffic, corruption, and gangs of street children who mugged and stole. It was a city perceived by some to be on the verge of chaos.

People were desperate for a change, for a moral leader of some sort. The eccentric Mockus, who communicates through symbols, humor, and metaphors, filled the role. When many hated the disordered and disorderly city of Bogotá, he wore a Superman costume and acted as a superhero called "Supercitizen." People laughed at Mockus' antics, but the laughter began to break the ice of their extreme skepticism.

Intimidation by organized crime and "bad guys" in the adult entertainment business led Human Resources Development Canada to establish a special fast-track entry program for foreign exotic dancers, according to a senior government official.

Bureaucrats at HRDC and Citizen and Immigration have known for years that many foreign dancers, mainly from Romania and Eastern Europe, were being trafficked by criminal syndicates and forced into prostitution at strip clubs in Canada.

Despite evidence from police and reputable organizations that the women were compelled into prostitution, HRDC officials would not shut down the labour-market program that exempted strip club owners from having to prove a scarcity of native-born dancers.

The insider, speaking on background, said Human Resources Minister Joe Volpe had to battle senior officials in his own department, who objected to ending the program as they were terrified organized crime would retaliate against front-line HRDC staff.

"There was a lot of concern because they are afraid of these guys. They are afraid of the guys that bring in the strippers because they are not nice guys," said the high-level official who played a role in Mr. Volpe's decision to cancel the stripper exemption on Dec. 15.

Belgium's most popular political party was banned as racist by the country's high court yesterday, fuelling concerns that the judicial branch is being used to eliminate political enemies.

The Vlaams Blok, a Flemish independence party promising to abolish Belgium as a nation, now cannot receive funding of any kind, and will have to disband.

Frank Vanhecke, the party's chairman, accused the ruling elite of using totalitarian tactics to stop legitimate political expression and vowed to take the case to the European Court of Human Rights.

"This is an attack on democracy and free speech. Our political opponents have changed the racism laws six times in a campaign to have us condemned. What they have done today is shocking," he said.

The party leaders plan to relaunch it next week with a new name, Vlaams Belang, or Flemish Interest, and a manifesto extolling women's rights, the secular state and the rule of law.

Analysts say attempts to muzzle the group have invariably failed, adding to its mystique as the victim of a reviled establishment that has saddled Belgium with a huge national debt and some of the highest taxes in the world.