Big Ideas
Big Ideas
Understanding legal rights and responsibilities allows citizens to participate more fully in society.
Laws can maintain the status quo and can also be a force for change.
A society’s laws and legal framework affect many aspects of people’s daily lives.
Laws are interpreted, and these interpretations may evolve over time as a society’s values and worldviews change.
Content
Learning Standards
Content
the Constitution of Canada and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms
structures and powers of the federal and provincial courts and administrative tribunals
- Sample topics:
- discriminatory laws and reform processes
- importance of independence of the judiciary and lawyers
- case and common law
- role of deterrence and denunciation in the correctional system
- victims’ rights and the Canadian Victims Bill of Rights
- rights of the accused
- appeals process
- small claims
key areas of law such as criminal law, civil law, and family, children’s, and youth law
- Sample topics:
- Criminal Code
- burden of proof (reasonable doubt versus balance of probability)
- the importance of checks and balances to prevent wrongful convictions
- Young Offenders Act
- Youth Criminal Justice Act
Canadian legislation concerning First Peoples
- Sample topics:
- treaty processes
- 1763 Royal Proclamation
- Indian Act
- Truth and Reconciliation Commission
- Constitution Act, 1982
- right to self-determination/self-government
indigenous legal orders and traditional laws in Canada and other global jurisdictions
- Sample topics:
- Tlicho Nation laws in place names
- Gitksan oral histories and traditions
- Gitksan decentralized decision making
- alternative dispute resolution processes, including restorative justice
- historical relationships between peoples as a basis to negotiate treaty boundaries
- Cree reciprocal legal responsibilities and obligations within kinship networks
- Tsimshian injury law and patriarchal resolution
- matrilineal and patrilineal kinship networks
Canada’s correctional system and principles of rehabilitation, punishment, and restoration
- Sample topics:
- provincial and federal correctional institutions
- educational opportunities in correctional institutions
- career training opportunities in correctional institutions
- funding structures and financial costs of incarceration
- correctional institutions for youth
- levels and types of incarceration between and within correctional institutions
- community responses to crime
- supportive reintegration of paroled offenders into society, risk assessment, and monitoring options
structures and roles of global dispute resolution agencies and courts
- Sample topics:
- International Court of Justice
- World Trade Organization
- United Nations
- trade disputes and agreements
- global initiatives on climate change
Curricular Competency
Learning Standards
Curricular Competency
Use Social Studies inquiry processes and skills to ask questions; gather, interpret, and analyze legal concepts, issues, and procedures; and communicate findings and decisions
- Sample activities:
- Examine and explain how to resolve a legal issue in an area of civil law, such as rental agreements, employment, or separation.
- Investigate which legal resources are available in the community to help people deal with a selected legal issue, including how to represent themselves in court or in front of a tribunal.
- Research alternative methods and strategies to resolve conflicts before they become legal problems.
- Assess different types of evidence and how to determine bias, reliability, and relevance in a source of evidence.
- Conduct a mock trial or debate to judge a legal case or issue.
Assess and compare the significance and impact of legal systems or codes (significance)
- Sample activities:
- Assess the significance of the Constitution Act, 1982, and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to human rights in Canada.
- Analyze the role of global dispute resolution institutions and agencies in international human rights and economic development issues.
- Assess the role of the judiciary as a constitutional check on legislative power.
- Analyze the role of the International Court of Justice (the World Court) at The Hague in cases involving human rights abuses.
- Determine the importance of key legal principles, cases, social forces, and events in the evolution of law.
- Assess the impact that a law, court decision, or legal principle has on legal structures and/or the lives of citizens.
- Assess the impact of social and/or political forces on the development of law.
Assess the justification for differing legal perspectives after investigating points of contention, reliability of sources, and adequacy of evidence (evidence)
Analyze continuities and changes in legal systems or codes across jurisdictions (continuity and change)
- Sample activities:
- Compare and contrast different views on the role of the correctional system in Canada.
- Analyze how and why laws, justice system structures and practices, legal precedents, and legislative agendas change over time.
- Analyze forces that reinforce continuity and factors that have both short-term and long-term effects on legal systems and the administration of justice.
Assess the development and impact of legal systems or codes (cause and consequence)
Explain and infer multiple perspectives on legal systems or codes (perspective)
- Sample activities:
- Analyze whether Canadian laws regarding the rights of minority groups evolved because of, or in spite of, popular support for change.
- Analyze legal principles such as fairness, justice, equality, the presumption of innocence, and the rule of law by examining a variety of legal issues, controversies, and cases.
Make reasoned ethical judgments about legal systems or codes (ethical judgment)
- Sample activity:
- Investigate ways the legal system has been used in the past to maintain inequalities.
Make reasoned ethical judgments about controversial decisions, legislation, or policy (ethical judgment)
- Sample activities:
- Assess cases in which the legal system has made rulings on human rights, and evaluate the extent to which these decisions advanced or infringed on the rights of those affected.
- Consider how laws affect society and how society affects laws.
- Examine the roles of the different branches of government in the development of law in Canada and how laws affect or accommodate different groups.
- Consider the interactions between various sides in trials and other legal disputes.