Byron Sheldrick – författare

Understanding Law for the Social Sciences provides students with essential tools to study Canadian law from various disciplinary perspectives. It introduces key legal principles and concepts, ensuring that social science students build a strong foundation to engage confidently with legal topics. The book focuses on legal doctrines, helping students understand how these doctrines are applied by lawyers, judges, and legal scholars. To achieve this aim, it begins with chapters that cover the sources of law, legal reasoning, and statutory interpretation. Subsequent chapters introduce substantive areas of law, including constitutional law, criminal law, administrative law, contract law, tort law, property law, labour law, and environmental law. For each of these areas, the text not only outlines core concepts and terminology but also illustrates how legal controversies intersect with public debates, state authority, self-governance, and public policy.Designed as an introduction to law and legal concepts, Understanding Law for the Social Sciences prepares undergraduate students to engage with legal matters that they might further examine in law school or explore in social science graduate study. While the book is especially beneficial for political science students due to its focus on public policy, its broad scope offers valuable insights for anyone interested in understanding the role of law in society.

Understanding Law for the Social Sciences provides students with essential tools to study Canadian law from various disciplinary perspectives. It introduces key legal principles and concepts, ensuring that social science students build a strong foundation to engage confidently with legal topics. The book focuses on legal doctrines, helping students understand how these doctrines are applied by lawyers, judges, and legal scholars. To achieve this aim, it begins with chapters that cover the sources of law, legal reasoning, and statutory interpretation. Subsequent chapters introduce substantive areas of law, including constitutional law, criminal law, administrative law, contract law, tort law, property law, labour law, and environmental law. For each of these areas, the text not only outlines core concepts and terminology but also illustrates how legal controversies intersect with public debates, state authority, self-governance, and public policy.Designed as an introduction to law and legal concepts, Understanding Law for the Social Sciences prepares undergraduate students to engage with legal matters that they might further examine in law school or explore in social science graduate study. While the book is especially beneficial for political science students due to its focus on public policy, its broad scope offers valuable insights for anyone interested in understanding the role of law in society.

Strategic litigation against public participation (SLAPP) involves lawsuits brought by individuals, corporations, groups, or politicians to curtail political activism and expression. An increasingly large part of the political landscape in Canada, they are often launched against those protesting, boycotting, or participating in some form of political activism. A common feature of SLAPPs is that their intention is rarely to win the case or secure a remedy; rather, the suit is brought to create a chill on political expression.Blocking Public Participation examines the different types of litigation and causes of action that frequently form the basis of SLAPPs, and how these lawsuits transform political disputes into legal cases, thereby blocking political engagement. The resource imbalance between plaintiffs and defendants allows plaintiffs to tie up defendants in complex and costly legal processes. The book also examines the dangers SLAPPs pose to political expression and to the quality and integrity of our democratic political institutions. Finally, the book examines the need to regulate SLAPPs in Canada and assesses various regulatory proposals.In Canada, considerable attention has been paid to the ""legalization of politics"" and the impact on the Charter in diverting political activism into the judicial arena. SLAPPs, however, are an under-studied element of this process, and in their obstruction of political engagement through recourse to the courts they have profound implications for democratic practice.