A Canonical module characterization of Serre's (R₁)

In this short note, we give a characterization of domains satisfying Serre's condition $(\mathrm{R}_1)$ in terms of their canonical modules. In the special case of toric rings, this generalizes a result of the second author (K. Yanagawa, Dualizing complexes of seminormal affine semigroup rings and toric face rings, J. Algebra 425 (2015).) where the normality is described in terms of the "shape" of the canonical module.