Seminar Overview
The law of sentencing in Canada has—without much fanfare and with too-little commentary—undergone a significant conceptual shift in recent years. Most clearly reflected in the Supreme Court of Canada’s 2023 decision in R v Hills, Canadian sentencing law has embraced as its lodestar an approach that is best described as “individualized proportionality.” This approach elevates the individual offender’s experience of punishment as the animating concern in arriving at a fit sentence. And though the acceptance and embrace of this approach is clear in the doctrine, its implications are still to be fully explored. In this talk, Professor Berger will bring together this new paradigm for sentencing with a perennially difficult problem in sentencing courts: how to deal with the mental illness of the offender. His argument will be that, given this new approach, mental health should be relevant to sentencing in ways far more common and fundamental to the determination of just sentences than it has been in the past. It should no longer be approached as a question solely of the responsibility of the offender at the time of the offence; rather, mental health must now be treated as relevant to sentencing “beyond mitigation.” But so doing, he will suggest, has the potential to unsettle the system in interesting and important ways.
Seminar Presenter, Benjamin L. Berger
Benjamin is a Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School of York University. An award-winning teacher and researcher, and a prominent voice in the study of criminal law and sentencing in Canada, he is a Member of the College of the Royal Society of Canada and held the York Research Chair in Pluralism and Public Law. He served as law clerk to the Rt. Honourable Beverley McLachlin, former Chief Justice of Canada, and holds an LLM and JSD from Yale University, where he studied as a Fulbright Scholar. Professor Berger has published over 80 academic articles and book chapters on criminal and constitutional law and theory, the law of evidence, the law of sentencing, law and religion, and legal history. He is the author or editor of eight books, and his work on sentencing has been extensively cited and relied upon by Canadian courts, including the Supreme Court of Canada.
Registration Fee
$57.50 ($50.00 + HST) HST # R108086463
CPD Credit 1.5 hours
To register for this seminar, please click here.