Author Description

"In this text, James Youngblood Henderson explores the crisis of interpretation that eventually confronted the courts in the constitutional guarantee of Aboriginal rights to First Nations. He examines how the Supreme Court of Canada has struggled in attempting to develop the underlying principles and theory of Aboriginal rights, in defining the nature and content of Aboriginal rights, while ignoring the relation of First Nations jurisprudence to Aboriginal rights. The author's approach is not only to review the Court's guidelines and holdings as informed by the constitutional traditions of legal positivism and legal reasoning, but also to explore understandings and operations within the sui generis framework and analysis articulated by the Court in addressing constitutional issues. Henderson takes an interpretative approach in presenting a vision of Aboriginal rights from a First Nations law and jurisprudence perspective, a perspective that may offer some resolution to the many intricate issues of interpretation and definition and shows how First Nations jurisprudence strengthens the underlying unity of the sui generis framework for Aboriginal rights and resolves issues in the judicial analysis of these rights."--Pub website.