Is continuing legal education the professional equivalent of renewing your driver’s licence – requiring little of you beyond that you show up, pay your fee and get your picture taken?

That was one of the questions asked during Tuesday night’s Twitter chat this week, where the discussion focused on the utility – or futility – of CLE.

While some participants made the argument that CLE is useful – Karen Dyck, for example, says lawyers will often have an “Aha!” moment that will send them back to the office to implement lessons learned. Sara Cohen says CLE is essential, “especially for . . . [more]

Things are more complicated than you imagine — at least I find that to be so.

I mean: there are more than 250 species of bumble bees alone; bees are more genetically related to ants than they are to wasps; and some bees are blue.

Hell, complexity is itself complex: it’s there whether you take the short or the long view. Drop back and not only are there 258 species of bumble bee, but thirteen whole families of bees, of which apidae, the family to which bumbles belong, is only one — and one shared by a host of . . . [more]

Legal information is boring. As much as you may enjoy reading a court case, a legal article or conducting legal research, the experience cannot realistically be compared to listening to a song or planning a vacation. Browsing a legal resource will never entertain you more than searching YouTube or TripAdvisor. Exceptionally, isolated masterpieces here and there spark a certain degree of buzz and then the tide of uninteresting data takes over again.

Legal information professionals and users should not feel singled out though, because legal information is not the only boring information out there.

But why is it that legal . . . [more]

♫ Digital, criminals you’ll make meals in cyber-crime Let’s all plan ahead, 2 times, I keep the chimes to a great mind… ♫
Lyrics and music by GZA, Inspectah Deck, Killah Priest.

LawPro, the Lawyers’ Professional Indemnity Company (LAWPRO) has announced that they will be providing a $250,000 sublimit coverage for eligible cybercrime losses in the 2014 policy year. LawPro is a wholly Canadian owned insurance company that provides professional liability insurance to lawyers in Ontario and TitlePLUS title insurance coast-to-coast. LAWPRO is headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The cybercrime coverage appears to have been prompted by cyber attacks in . . . [more]

Earlier this month I was invited to the Law Society of Upper Canada’s Alternative Business Structures symposium. It was a bringing together of international speakers, thinkers and interested parties to discuss the possibility of allowing Alternative Business Structures (ABS) in Ontario – read: allowing outside investment in legal services providers, as is permitted in the UK and Australia.

Kudos to Benchers, Susan McGrath and Malcolm Mercer for organizing the event.

For those of us who were there, the consensus seemed to be that if ABS was allowed in Ontario the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse would not descend upon our . . . [more]

Although the Parti Québécois government has yet to table any legislation regarding it's proposed Charter of Quebec Values, and has not provided any firm date as to when it expects to do so, on October 9, 2013, a Québec solidaire member of the national assembly tabled private member's Bill 398, Charter of Quebec State Secularism in the assembly. This Bill conveys that party’s position and tries to provide a compromise to end the contentious debate sparked by the PQ’s proposal.

Section 649 of the Criminal Code makes it an offence for a juror to disclose “any information relating to the proceedings of the jury when it was absent from the courtroom that was not subsequently disclosed in open court.” This sweeping prohibition has prevented the public from knowing about the reasons for, and the process by which, juries go about making decisions. The concern addressed here relates to communications with the media by jury members following conclusion of a trial, a common feature of high profile cases in the United States. It is time to loosen these restrictions and let . . . [more]

Back when I knew everything the world was much simpler. Any topic, situation, challenge or choice could be easily placed into one of two categories. Category 1 consisted of matters where I was right and category 2 consisted of matters that didn’t matter.

Back when I knew everything there were no hard choices. Other people’s resources were best directed to ends of my choosing and my own resources were merely allocated between “now” and “soon”, possibly to “later”, but never to “never”.

Back when I knew everything there was no gap between . . . [more]

Each Thursday we present a significant excerpt, usually from a recently published book or journal article. In every case the proper permissions have been obtained. If you are a publisher who would like to participate in this feature, please let us know via the site’s contact form.

Canadian Federal Political Parties and Personal Privacy Protection: A Comparative Analysis
Colin J. Bennett & Robin M. Bayley
Commissioned by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada
Privacy Research Papers, March 2012

Excerpt chosen by Slaw.

[Footnotes are omitted. They are available in the full version via the hyperlink above.]

Federal and . . . [more]

Paul Daly has posted an interesting argument on his blog, Administrative Law Matters, relating to the legality — or perhaps correctness — of Prime Minister Harper’s appointment of Federal Cour of Appeal Justice Nadon to the Supreme Court. As everyone will likely know, the governing provisions are ss.5 and 6 of the Supreme Court Act, which read as follows:

5. Any person may be appointed a judge who is or has been a judge of a superior court of a province or a barrister or advocate of at least ten years standing at the bar of a province.

6.

. . . [more]

As we’ve discussed a number of times on Slaw, a good many hyperlinks break over time as their targets get moved or taken down. This link rot is particularly challenging in academia and in law, where cited authorities are an important component of one’s argument.

In a 16 page document available on SSRN three weeks ago, “Perma: Scoping and Addressing the Problem of Link and Reference Rot in Legal Citations,” Harvard professors Jonathan Zittrain and Kendra Albert:

. . . document a serious problem of reference rot: more than 70% of the URLs within the Harvard Law Review

. . . [more]

Each Wednesday we tell you which three English-language cases and which French-language case have been the most viewed on CanLII and we give you a small sense of what the cases are about.

For this last week:

1. Meads v. Meads 2012 ABQB 571
   

   [1] This Court has developed a new awareness and understanding of a category of vexatious litigant. As we shall see, while there is often a lack of homogeneity, and some individuals or groups have no name or special identity, they (by their own admission or by descriptions given by others) often fall into the following descriptions: Detaxers;

. . . [more]