The Law Commission of Canada’s research initiative Charity and Law in Canada explores how Canadian law defines, supports, and regulates charitable activity. The project is divided into three parts: a historical inquiry (“Looking Back”), an assessment of current legal challenges (“Looking Around”), and an examination of future directions for reform (“Looking Ahead”). The first phase focuses on the legal and institutional history of charity in Canada, including the evolution of charitable concepts across common law, Quebec civil law, and Indigenous legal traditions.
Prof. Dedek, as an Associate of the Law Commission of Canada, will contribute to Part I of the project—“Looking Back: Tracing Charities in Canada and Charity in Canadian Law”—under Category 1, which explores the historical and contemporary understanding of charity across Canada’s legal traditions. His contribution, with the working title “Agape, Caritas, Love: The Roots of ‘Charity’ in the Western Legal Tradition,” examines how concepts such as charity, benevolence, mercy, and beneficence have historically been treated as extralegal, standing apart from the domain of justice. It traces how legal traditions in the West developed a framework in which charitable action was viewed as a matter of individual conscience or religious virtue rather than legal obligation, and explores the long-term consequences of this separation for the legal treatment of charity today.