Thursday, March 19, 2015

History of Aboriginal Rights


The Osgoode Society's legal history blog notes Queen's Law School prof Mark Walters' new paper "The Aboriginal Charter of Rights,"  on the Royal Proclamation of 1763, downloadable from SSRN.
The author considers the evolving legal status of this historic document within Canadian constitutional law, concluding that as a source of positive law it is more or less a dead letter, but as a source of unwritten legal principle that continues to shape the Crown Aboriginal relationship in Canada, the Proclamation is still very much alive over 250 years after it was issued.
 
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