After noting that French Canadians put up passively with the Stamp Act “Carlton had to deal with the problem of the law: the French liked the swiftness and low cost of court access under the French system, but it was a different law, governed by French precedent, which was irritating in itself and practically incomprehensible to the administration in Quebec and difficult to obtain. The substitution of English criminal law had been popular with the public, as it instituted habeas corpus and put an end to the rack and interrogation under torture. London sent legal officers to go back to make a recommendation, and this issue dragged on for a few years, but Carlton became convinced that Quebec needed to devise its own Civil Code, to keep what was familiar, incite pride, and emancipate the province from recourse to French precedents.”

Conrad Black Rise to Greatness: The History of Canada from the Vikings to the Present

This week on Juno News with Melanie Bennet I discussed my crusade against photo-radar speed tickets as a breach of the social contract and the rule of law.

In my latest Epoch Times column I say our homes used to be our castles and still should be.

In my latest Epoch Times column I ridicule the government for thinking the solution to the taxman riding roughshod over citizens’ rights is to get him bigger boots.

In my latest Epoch Times column I say Canadian authorities’ feeble justifications for cancelling concerts because they don’t like the singer or the lyrics show just how little they understand free speech… or even think about it.

In the Epoch Times I summarize my C2C Journal argument against photo radar and encourage everyone to fight these frivolous tickets. If they’re really a safety measure the state will happily spend more collecting them than it actually collects. But if they’re a cash grab that cost more than they rake in, it will stop. As it should.

In my latest C2C essay I explain why people hate photo radar: it’s a brazen violation of the rule of law and the social contract to fine citizens for normal behaviour.

“The flexibility of the ius gentium facilitated the transmission of Roman law to medieval and modern states. It was a happy accident that while the chaos of barbarian invasion was mutilating the legal heritage in the West, the Code, Digest, and Institutes of Justinian were collected and formulated in Constantinople, in the comparative security and continuity of the Empire in the East. Through these labours, and a hundred lesser channels, and the silent tenacity of useful ways, Roman law entered into the canon law of the medieval Church, inspired the thinkers of the Renaissance, and became the basic law of Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Hungary, Bohemia, Poland, even – within the British Empire – of Scotland, Quebec, Ceylon, and South Africa. English law itself, the only legal edifice of comparable scope, took its rules of equity, admiralty, guardianship, and bequests from Roman canon law. Greek science and philosophy, Judeo-Greek Christianity, Greco-Roman democracy, Roman law – these are supreme inheritance from the ancient world.”

Will Durant Caesar and Christ