1. Objectifs

Intentions :
«This study seeks to fill an important gap in our understanding of the impact of the Court on the lives of women across Canada and to provide a glimpse into factors that impact decisions in family law cases.» (p. 332)

Questions/Hypothèses :
«Given that Quebec civil law historically has reflected traditional gender norms (Songer 2008), we might expect Quebec justices to be less pro-female than their colleagues from other provinces in family law cases. Similarly, cases originating from Quebec may be decided differently than cases originating in other provinces.» (p. 336)

2. Méthode

Échantillon/Matériau :
«The data come from the High Court Judicial Database, and include the universe of family law cases decided by the Supreme Court from 1982 to 2008. The time period includes cases arriving at the Supreme Court with the adoption of the Charter of Rights, and simultaneously, the date of the first female appointment to the Supreme Court in 1982.» (p. 338)

Type de traitement des données :
Analyse de contenu
Réflexion critique

3. Résumé

«Overall, women fare very well in family law cases that reach the Supreme Court of Canada. Justices vote in favor of female litigants nearly 74 percent of the time in the cases that eventually are decided by the Supreme Court. These results obviously might not be indicative of how women fare in the lower courts in family law cases, but they do suggest that the Supreme Court uses its error correction role to reverse lower courts in favor of female litigants when the lower courts have erred or misinterpreted law. Female litigants often win as defendants and when their cases are being reversed, and this could potentially be the result of the justices intervening especially when women are disadvantaged as underdogs, economic or otherwise, in the lower courts. Specific justice characteristics, case characteristics, and case types all impact the likelihood justices will vote in favor of a female litigant. […] Overall, we can conclude that justice gender plays a role in pro-female voting, albeit one that is conditioned on party affiliation.» (p. 343-344) As for the case of Quebec, authors found that «the results indicate not much difference in votes favoring females from the baseline category. The variable is not statistically significant. The predicted probabilities show that cases originating from Quebec have a 72.4 percent probability of being decided in favor of a female litigant.» (p. 341)