This news story caught my eye yesterday: an elderly woman in British Columbia is suing her children for parental support. Ms. Anderson is asking that her two children each pay her $750 a month to make ends meet.

Most provinces in Canada have some legislative obligation for children to support their parents. For example, the Civil Code of Quebec stipulates that:

585. Married or civil union spouses, and relatives in the direct line in the first degree, owe each other support.

A few decisions in Quebec have been rendered under this section; however, it is clear that this provision does . . . [more]

I was part of the Apple IIe generation – we installed them in the school I worked at in the 1980’s. They seemed great, but somehow the DOS computers that started to creep in seemed to allow us to do more in the background, and the techies decided that this was the way to go. I learned some Unix along the way, and that helped me create some smart databases in 1990 in my library, but I soon joined the crowds. My first computer purchase was a Windows PCc, and for more than 20 years I stuck with PCs. I . . . [more]

To what extent should judges be involved in mediation?

The Chief Justice of Ontario addressed this thorny issue in The Advocate’s Journal, Winter 2010. He considers it from the perspective of the public, the bar and the bench, provides a brief history of judicial involvement in settlement discussions, adumbrates the arguments for and against judicial mediation, and asks whether it is a reality or a fantasy.

There are so many issues.

How would it be different from the pretrial rule which is designed “to provide an opportunity for any or all of the issues in a proceeding to be settled . . . [more]

The Fall 20011 issue of LAWPRO Magazine features an article called Let’s Get Talking, in which LAWPRO canvassed a number of people inside and outside the legal profession on the topic of client engagement and communication. What we learned is that there is often a problem with the way lawyers communicate with their clients. Communication is integral to the client experience, and a bad customer experience often defaults into an allegation of communication failure (the source of almost half of LAWPRO claims costs).

The end of the article features a summary of tips from the experts we spoke to . . . [more]

One of the most fundamental of human rights is the right to participate in the making of the laws that govern you; and the basic right behind that is the right to vote. This might seem so clear to us now that it needs no mention, but equally clearly that hasn’t always been the case, one of the glaring illustrations being the relatively recent nature of women’s suffrage. Canada allowed women the vote only in 1917; the United States in 1920; France in 1944; and Switzerland in 1971. (There’s a good chart on Wikipedia that let’s you sort by country, . . . [more]

My last column focussed on customer and service provider concerns that arise with various aspects of long term outsourcing relationships. I now want to discuss structuring specific provisions to take those concerns into account. This week’s posting will look at price adjustment provisions and the one to follow will discuss change management.

The price adjustment provisions of long term outsourcing arrangements need to respond to the concerns of the customer and the service provider. For the customer, these concerns are based on the worry that, after a few years, the customer will be paying too much for its outsourcing services: . . . [more]

The Association for Chinese Canadian Lawyers in Ontario (ACCLO) hosted a CLE session on September 17, 2011, on “Tips and Tricks from the Trade,” featuring Sean Zhang of Blakes, Jeffrey Lem of Davies, Roslyn Tsao of Epstein Cole LLP, and Madam Justice W. Low of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice.

Notes from the sessions follow. . . . [more]

All of the papers from the 2007 Brooklyn Law School symposium on law, science and truth “Symposium: A Cross-Disciplinary Look At Scientific Truth: What’s The Law To Do?” as published in (2008) 73 Brooklyn Law Review are are available for downloading in one pdf here.

I recommend them (for whatever that’s worth).

Any Canadian lawyer-type reading any of those pieces should also read Mr. Justice Binnie’s “Science in the courtroom: the mouse that roared” (2007) 56 UNB LJ 307. The article is available on Carswell/Westlaw and can be found here and here.

He has more to say about science . . . [more]

We all seem to be part of social networks these days, indeed it is proving more and more difficult to avoid them. Movies are being made about social networks, devices are being marketed based on their social network capabilities, the phrase itself is becoming ubiquitous. I heard the following item this week and had to look into it more. It seems that in Switzerland (and Switzerland is a veritable font of information for Slaw), Guinea Pigs (amongst others such as budgies and goldfish) have been identified as a “social species” that are protected by law. That is, in . . . [more]

At least according to this poll, conducted by private US research firm Harris Interactive. The poll includes some interesting numbers on the current (general) geographical distribution of e-readers, plans of consumers to purchase e-readers, and some broad numbers on the effects of e-readers on reading habits.

This report does not state how many people were polled, does not reveal standard measures of significance, and notes that the respondents were selected from “among those who have agreed to participate in Harris Interactive surveys” so your mileage may vary. Still, the results don’t seem unexpected to me.

The mixed results on . . . [more]

The following post just went live on the VLLB, but it’s appropriate for the legal research community here at Slaw too. One of Stem’s clients, Quickscribe, has announced the relaunch one of BC’s most treasured legislative research tools, the BCLD. In the narrative below, you’ll find a brief history of the collection’s origin, custodianship, and how members of our West Coast law library community contributed to its digital rebirth.

The British Columbia Legislative Digest: A Brief History

The British Columbia Legislative Digest (BCLD) was conceived of in 1979 by librarians at the BC Courthouse Library, now Courthouse Libraries BC . . . [more]

Writers and publishers are continuously facing a changing landscape.  The Writers’ Union of Canada has developed 12 core demands for the digital age. Interesting list for authors in negotiations with their publishers.

1. Copyright legislation shall ensure the protection of intellectual property and appropriate compensation for rightsholders.
2. Exceptions to copyright shall be minimized.
3. The publisher shall split the net proceeds of ebook sales equally with the author.
4. The author shall retain all e-rights not specifically granted to the publisher or producer and shall have the approval of any modifications made to the work.
5. The publisher shall not exercise or sublicense ebook