Policy Change, Courts, and the Canadian Constitution aims to further our understanding of judicial policy impact and the role of the courts in shaping policy change. Bringing together a group of political scientists and legal scholars, this volume delves into a diverse set of policy areas, including health care issues, the regulation of elections, criminal justice policy, minority language education, citizenship, refugee policy, human rights legislation, and Indigenous policy.

While much of the public law and judicial politics literatures focus on the impact of the constitution and the judicial role, scholarship on courts that makes policy change its central lens of analysis is surprisingly rare. Multidisciplinary in its approach to examining policy issues, this book focuses on specific cases or policy issues through a wide-ranging set of approaches, including the use of interview data, policy analysis, historical and interpretive analysis, and jurisprudential analysis.

Emmett Macfarlane is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Waterloo. He is a regular contributor to Maclean's, the Globe and Mail, and the Institute for Research on Public Policy's Policy Options.

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"The case studies in this text are fascinating and provide insight into how changes in public policy have (or have not) come into effect."

<em>Canadian Law Library Review</em>

"Why, when, and how courts make policy is not only grist for law faculties and practitioners. Public policy effects change in Canada – and occasionally that change is truly uncharted…The questions posed in this book are fundamental."

Literary Review of Canada, Vol 27, no. 2