Dirty Laundry: Judicial Appointments in Canada

The issue of the appointment of judges is not a freestanding problem. Rather, as Adam Dodek and I have argued, it is part of a larger public policy puzzle, the challenge of designing an appropriate regulatory regime for judges. Any description, analysis, assessment or critique of judicial appointments processes necessarily requires the development and deployment of some conceptual framework. Sometimes such a framework is implicit or taken for granted. However, in our opinion, it is better if we can make that framework—that paradigm—explicit because we can then more clearly understand the nature of the evaluative process in which we are engaged. In response to this challenge of articulating a conceptual framework for regulating judges, Dodek and I have developed a heuristic which we characterise as a regulatory pyramid.