The MLJ continues its mission in this Volume of “preserving the voices of distinguished jurists from this province,” and strives to publish high-quality scholarship in maintaining its standing as an exceptional law journal. Here are a couple of statistics that the MLJteam is particularly proud of from our SHRCC application this year:

• The MLJ received 7 Supreme Court of Canada citations in 2024-25.
• We are a diamond open-access journal, with content available through a CC-BY-ND creative Commons license. The MLJ is available through Alberta OJS, CanLII, Lexis Advance Quicklaw, HeinOnline, Google Play, Amazon and through com.

Overview of the latest Issues

Issue 1 is a retrospective on the career of the Honourable Chief Justice Richard Chartier. It begins with his oral history and features a series of remarks made at his retirement gala, including his own comments and those by fellow jurists, the Honourable Justice Freda Steel of the Manitoba Court of Appeal and former Chief Judge of the Provincial Court (2016-2023), Honourable Judge Margaret I. Wiebe. The issue concludes with a comprehensive analysis of Chief Justice Chartier’s jurisprudence by Court of Appeal researchers, Melanie Bueckert and Michael Rice, and a final word on the jurisprudential developments in civil procedure overseen by the Chief Justice, written by Dr. Gerard Kennedy, a former assistant professor at UM Law, currently an associate professor serving as Associate Dean of Graduate Studies at the University of Alberta Faculty of Law.

The second issue is a continuation of the MLJ’s The Current Legal Landscape series. It deploys a “range of methodologies to address some of the most fundamental issues in our legal system.” Included is an article on access to justice in Manitoba from the legal practitioners’ view by Gerard Kennedy, and UM Faculty of Law’s Director of Access to Justice & Community Engagement, Natasha Brown. The issue continues with an article co-authored by the Honourable Justice Malcolm Rowe of the Supreme Court of Canada on the role of appellate standards of review in the Canadian legal system. Justice Rowe’s article is followed by a word on lawyer incivility in family law by Deanne Sowter, a doctoral candidate at York University’s Osgoode Hall Law School. It concludes with an oral history of the Honourable Chief Justice Marianne Rivoalen, the first woman to head the Manitoba judiciary.

Issue 3 is another continued project, this time furthering the Underneath the Golden Boy project on legislative development in UM’s home province. It features two articles from a recent UM Law graduate, Anna Evans-Boudreau [JD/25], on Manitoban sustainable development legislation and the complexities of working within the field of freedom of information or access to information in all three levels of government, the second of which she co-wrote with Kevin Walby, Associate Criminal Justice Professor at the University of Winnipeg. Dalhousie’s Schulich School of Law assistant professor, Andrew Flavelle Martin, also provides two articles in this issue on the public perception of lawyers in public service through the lens of the hit television series, The West Wing, and on legal ethics for government lawyers in light of several provisions in the Law Society of Nunavut’s Code of Professional Conduct that are unique to that province. It concludes with an article from Dr. Ilia Roskoshnyi, a recent Postdoctoral Fellow at UM Law, on artificial intelligence and the future of the legal profession.

Robson Crim is entirely responsible for Issues 4-6 and is edited by Dr. Richard Jochelson, Dean of UM Law, and Associate Professor Brandon Trask. The Issues are comprised of 13 articles on topics ranging from a critique of the Riot Act to the reasonable expectation of privacy in the artificially intelligent surveillance state. Articles are provided by members of the Crown Prosecution services of Manitoba and Ontario, graduates from the Faculties of Law of Western University and University of New Brunswick, and professors from UM, University of Saskatchewan’s College of Law, and Dalhousie’s Schulich School of Law. These contributions, whether by practitioner, student, or professor—as with submissions to all of the MLJ’s dimensions—undergo a rigorous double-blind peer-review process.

The seventh and final issue of Volume 47, written entirely by Alvin Esau, examines the private lives and public careers of the men who carried out capital punishment by hanging in the early 20th Century. Esau’s book follows seven of post-confederation Canada’s hangmen, detailing research that tends to show the pseudo-psychopathy, scandalous lives, and obnoxious personalities linked to the heavily stigmatized profession. It is a unique perspective on the hangmen themselves, rather than those who were hanged, authored by a true scholar in the field of Canadian true crime, which the MLJ is delighted to publish.

As always, the Executive Editors-in-Chief would like to thank the student-editorial teams at the MLJ and its Robson Crim dimension for their tireless work in ensuring Volume 47 is as academically rigorous and useful as ever. Without their exceptional support, this journal would not have been possible.

Thank you to:

The MLJ Student Editors Fall 2024 to Summer 2025

• Avery Alexiuk 
• Andrew Bergen
• Serena Bevilacqua
• Simi Bhangoo
• Steven Csinsca
• Travsis Dech
• Joshua Dondo
• Yomna Eid
• Larissa Einarson
• Siena Mcilwraith-Fraticelli
• Apara Grace
• Kennedee Hills
• Brayden Juras
• Andreas Kastellanos
• Jayden Kyryluk
• Nicholas Ly
• Lauren Martin
• Sebastian Meiers
• Mathew O’Connor
• Heather Peterson
• Vilciya Rajput
• Carter Ross
• Daniel Rosenthal
• AubrieAnn Schettler
• Nawal Semir
• Selene Sharpe
• Vanessa Smith
• Dawn Steliga
• Jordan Wagner

Special thanks goes to Digital Editor, Lily Deardorff, for her coordination of Student Editors and guidance through the production process.

Issues of MLJ Volume 48, are currently becoming available in pre-print, and aims to continue to deliver readable and innovative legal commentary of the highest quality to communities both locally and globally.

-Prairie Town by R. Bachman

Randy Bachman, Burton Cummings, and Neil Young famously grew up in Winnipeg, a mid-sized Canadian city in Treaty 1 territory with a burgeoning arts scene. Contemporary Winnipeg is home to a multitude of musicians of all genres, and the city is not only culturally diverse, but also boasts the highest per capita urban Indigenous population of any Canadian city.

In spite of the tremendous musical and cultural diversity in this place, music education in Winnipeg schools tends to be relatively uniform. School music offerings are performance-oriented and consist mainly of concert band, choir, instrumental jazz, and guitar programs in senior high contexts, and general music, instrumental, or choral programs for younger grades. While students in Winnipeg schools reflect the musical and cultural diversity of the city, music teachers generally do not. The majority of music educators are of European descent and have completed a Bachelor of Music degree during which they engaged in private classical or jazz instrumental or voice study and participated in similar ensembles to the ones they now teach in schools. Music teachers’ remarkably uniform experiences as music learners and music teacher candidates result in the reproduction of a Euro-derived pedagogy focused on the performance of specific musical work rather than allowing students to create their own music or to engage with the musical practices of local musicians.

Desautels Faculty of Music associate professor Dr. Jody Stark wants to do something about this situation. Stark has received over $60 000 from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) to develop and pilot a local music pedagogy that responds to and incorporates various ways people make and enjoy music in Winnipeg, Canada. Stark plans to engage in a collaborative research project with a group of music educators and community collaborators including local Indigenous and settler musicians and representatives of various local cultural institutions and organizations. Together, the group will create and test out a decolonizing pedagogical framework for local music education on the land, and with the popular, contemporary, and traditional musics, of Treaty 1 territory..

Stark notes, “Through the process of doing this research, out team will have the chance to think about how to ethically bring diverse musical practices and musicians into the Winnipeg music classroom, but also to notice and explore the barriers to decolonizing and Indigenizing music education. Schools are colonial social structures with often invisible assumptions about teaching, learning, people, and the world, and this makes change challenging. By developing and piloting a framework for a local music pedagogy, our team will not only explore how best to undertake school-community musical partnerships, but we will also have the chance to notice and wrestle with some of these challenges.”

The results of this innovative project will allow the research team to contribute to the knowledge base of music teachers, university-level music teachers and teacher educators, policy makers in schools and community arts organizations, and artists seeking to engage youth and children. Plans are underway to offer in-person and online workshops, articles for music educators, community musicians and music education researchers, and for the team to create a podcast for other music educators interested in exploring a local approach to their teaching.