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Monday’s Mix

Each Monday we present brief excerpts of recent posts from five of Canada’s award-winning legal blogs chosen at random* from forty-one recent Clawbie winners. In this way we hope to promote their work, with their permission, to as wide an audience as possible.

This week the randomly selected blogs are 1. SOQUIJ | Le Blogue  2. University of Alberta Faculty of Law Blog  3. Library Technician Dialog  4. Off the Shelf  5. BC Injury Law And ICBC Claims Blog

SOQUIJ | Le Blogue
«Mieux vaut encore subir l’injure que la commettre» (Socrate)
Le 5 février 2010, le Journal de Montréal (Corporation Sun Média) a publié une chronique intitulée «Qui est malade? Le fonctionnaire ou la fonction publique?», signée par Gilles Proulx. Dans son texte, celui-ci a utilisé les termes «effrontément», «tartuffe» et «apparatchik» à l’endroit de la présidente du Syndicat de la fonction publique du Québec (SFPQ), Lucie Martineau, et a accusé cette dernière de faire du chantage auprès du premier ministre du Québec. Ce texte a été publié alors qu’elle négociait une nouvelle convention collective et que ses membres avaient été informés du fait que le gouvernement désirait abolir leur banque de congés de maladie accumulés. . . .

University of Alberta Faculty of Law Blog
More Tragedy in Bangladesh
Only a few months ago, in November, I wrote about the Tazreen fire, which killed 112 garment workers outside Dhaka in Bangladesh. This week, another garment factory building outside Dhaka collapsed after cracks were discovered in the concrete walls. Despite orders to evacuate, workers were told it was safe to go back to work. In fact, as garment worker Fatema Khatun Munni tells the CBC’s Carol Off, when she tried to leave the building due to concerns for her own safety, she was bullied back to work. As the NY Times reports, there is “plenty of blame to go around”, including on the building owner, the owners of the companies operating in the building, the local police and the individual manager who ordered Ms Munni back to her desk, but some of the blame must fall on the corporations based in Europe and North America who contract with suppliers in Bangladesh to produce cheap clothing for European and North American consumers. . . .

Library Technician Dialog
Study with Ebooks
You need training for ebooks? It’s so easy to use. That is a typical response to researching with ebooks. This is not an article about leisure reading of ebooks. Fundamentally the process of studying or researching ebooks is a different process than leisure reading. Students and researchers need to annotate or add sticky notes to the text. There is some ability to do that with ebooks. Often lawyers need specific pages of text so they can match it to another document. So librarians work with “pinpoint citations” or matching to page or paragraph in a judgment. People want save and print chapters too. They may not always be reading on an ereader. Legal ebooks either don’t have page numbers or the page numbering is unique to the electronic version and not synching with the print book. Clearly this is a problem if you are trying to print pages 1 to 10 as instructed. . . .

Off the Shelf
Stylistic Flair – A time and place?
In a post from a few weeks ago, I lamented the lack of flair in legal writing. Although it’s certainly not a “need-to-have”, it’s certainly a “nice-to-have”. Throughout legal education and practice, you will likely have to read many, many decisions, and most of them are – to not put too fine of a point on it – dry as dust. The legal arguments may be compelling, significant, and of lasting importance, but the prose less so. It is human nature to want to be entertained, even when reading dry legal writing. This is, of course, why Lord Denning has proven to be so enduring and popular. His judgments were colourful, informative, and yes, entertaining. . . .

BC Injury Law And ICBC Claims Blog
Subjective Soft Tissue Injuries And Judicial Scrutiny
Last year I criticized the often recited judicial passage stating that ““…the Court should be exceedingly careful when there is little or no objective evidence of continuing injury and when complaints of pain persist for long periods extending beyond the normal or usual recovery…” and pointing out that these comments should no longer be used given Supreme Court of Canada’s reasons in FH v. McDougall. Reasons for judgement were released this week by the BC Supreme Court (Prince v. Quinn) addressing a Court’s role when dealing with subjective injuries. Mr. Justice Williams provided the following comments which, in my view, would do well to substitute the above passage in the context of a chronic soft tissue injury case: . . .

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*Randomness here is created by Random.org and its list randomizing function.

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