Suchergebnisse

This essay examines the Japanese judiciary's approach to statutory interpretation of tax legislation in Japan. Its goal is to provide a positive, rather than normative, analysis of current Supreme Court of Japan (SCJ) tax jurisprudence. The analysis demonstrates that SCJ justices generally employ a literal approach when interpreting tax legislation, but with due regard to the objective and purpose of specific statutory provisions. This does not mean that SCJ justices constrain their reasoning based on an originalist approach to statutory interpretation. The analysis instead demonstrates that they make their own judgments, taking into account both the plain meaning of the provisions at issue as well as the objective and purpose of the legislation.

In its recent decisions in Tsilhqot'in Nation and Grassy Narrows, the Supreme Court of Canada has significantly altered the position of Indigenous peoples within the structure of Canadian federalism. This article sets out to investigate the basis for the Court's jurisdiction to change this structure. Its approach is historical, as it covers judicial treaty interpretation from St Catherine's Milling to Grassy Narrows. By contextualizing the most recent change in light of the last 250 years of treaty making, we can see how the notion of Crown sovereignty has become entangled with the Westphalian model of the state (i.e., the state as a politically self-contained and legally autonomous unit for a single "people" or "nation") and how this entanglement has served to set the boundaries of treaty interpretation. By drawing out how these legal fictions continue to inform the way in which the courts have interpreted treaties, we can begin to explore the possibilities that have been hiding in plain sight. Namely, that the treaties (as documents of inter-societal law) present a conceptual challenge to the Westphalian model and its coupling together of the terms "nation" and "state." More specifically, the treaties challenge this coupling by pluralizing the idea of the nation, which, in turn, requires us to reimagine the structure of the state. This decoupling of nation and state brings us back to a deeper engagement with the idea of federalism in Canada. This means that the treaties are constitutional documents that offer us a way to reimagine both what Canadian federalism could be and how this particular case could assist in reimagining a post-Westphalian international order.

We offer a theoretical approach to federalism by defining a theoretical approach as a general account of the subject. It is general in that it applies in any political situation, at any time in history when political entities that are recognizable as nations existed. It is an account in being a systematic examination of the subject that is connected to the overall structure of analysis in one or more academic disciplines, in this case law and political science. Following this approach, we reach the conclusion that federalism must be understood as a matter of political identity. People's individual commitments in the political realm, their sense of who they are and where they belong, will determine the descriptive reality and the prescriptive necessity of federal arrangements. Adapted from the source document.