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The Impact of Legal Mobilization and Judicial Decisions: The Case of Official Minority-Language Education Policy in Canada for Francophones Outside Quebec

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Troy Q. Riddell
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Abstract

The article investigates the impact of legal mobilization and judicial decisions on official minority-language education (OMLE) policy in the Canadian provinces outside Quebec, using the “factor-oriented” and “dispute-centered” theories of judicial impact developed by U.S. scholars. The Canadian Supreme Court's decision in Mahé v. Alberta (1990), which broadly interpreted Section 23 of the Charter of Rights to include management and control of OMLE programs and schools, along with federal funding to the provinces to implement OMLE policy, are important to explaining OMLE policy change as predicted by the factor-oriented approach. The dispute-centered approach, on the other hand, helps us understand how the Charter of Rights and judicial decisions shaped the goals and discourse of Francophone groups in the policy process and, more instrumentally, provided opportunity structures that Francophone groups exploited effectively. The article concludes that both approaches to explaining judicial impact could be accommodated within an institutional model of judicial impact that construes institutions as state actors, as sets of rules, and as frameworks of meaning and interpretation. Such an approach would allow for the development of a more comparative model of judicial impact.

Type
States, Courts, and Publics
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 38 , Issue 3 , September 2004 , pp. 583 - 610
Copyright
© 2004 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

The author would like to thank the Social Sciences Humanities Research Council (Canada) and the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research, McGill University, for helping to fund the research for this project. The author would also like to thank Christopher Manfredi, F. L. Morton, the journal's anonymous reviewers, and the editor of this volume, Kim Lane Scheppele, for their helpful comments and suggestions.

References

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