Here’s a pair for your ears.

I enjoy injecting sound into the stream of fillips from time to time, because sound has no intrinsic meaning — unlike the words we wield every day — and despite or because of that it can be beautiful and intriguing.

Today you get to compose, or at least to set free a small program that will run its musical course and either fall into repetition or modulate into endless variation, rather like the Game of Life I pointed to a great many years back and that demonstrates how complexity can emerge from a very . . . [more]

Either limit the regulatory monopoly or provide for the efficient and effective delivery of legal services for all legal problems

Access to justice and legal services is a central challenge both for society and for the legal profession. The extent to which members of the public are unserved, under-served or inefficiently served is a difficult issue for lawyers being both a challenge to existing practice and an opportunity for innovation.

As suggested in earlier columns, it seems to me that this access question raises central ethical questions. If there are some legal services which are not provided by lawyers[i] . . . [more]

Legal researchers too often overlook law reform commission reports as sources of vital information and analysis.

Law commissions consult widely with stakeholders, sometimes compare how other jurisdictions have dealt with the same problem and they frequently dig into the history of an issue.

Here are a few reports released in the past few weeks.

• British Columbia Law Institute Report Proposes Franchise Act : The report recommends that British Columbia become the 6th Canadian province to adopt franchise legislation. The report analyzes franchise legislation in force in Canada, the U.S., and elsewhere, and contains a detailed legislative proposal with commentary. Alberta,

. . . [more]

On July 1, 2014, in a final judgment that cannot be appealed, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in the case of S.A.S v. France (application no. 43835/11), validated French Law no. 2010-1192, which prohibits concealment of one’s face in all places open to the public in France and found that the law does not violate the applicant’s rights under the European Convention on Human Rights.

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.

Editors note: This week’s thinkpiece was timed up to publish concurrently with Judy Gaskell’s review of the same book. Slaw wishes to thank Carole Levitt and Judy Davis for extending such a significant excerpt, along with Judy Gaskell for her review.

INTERNET LEGAL RESEARCH ON A BUDGET

by Carole A. Levitt and . . . [more]

This month I chose to write a brief book review of an extremely useful new book – Internet Legal Research on a Budget: Free and Low-cost Resources for Lawyers by Carole A Levitt and Judy K. Davis (2014, 321 pages, $89.95USD). Published by the Law Practice Division of the American Bar Association, the main focus of the book is on United States law. However several of the chapters, such as that on Foreign, International and Comparative Law, could be relevant for any legal practice. I am reviewing the print edition of the work and cite to it, but an ebook . . . [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. Tsilhqot’in Nation v. British Columbia, 2014 SCC 44

[1] What is the test for Aboriginal title to land? If title is established, what rights does it confer? Does the British Columbia Forest Act, R.S.B.C. 1996, c. 157, apply to land covered by Aboriginal title? What are the constitutional constraints on provincial regulation of land under Aboriginal title? Finally, how are broader public . . . [more]

In February 2011, Legal Help Centre (“LHC”) first opened its doors to the public. Since then, more than 5000 individuals have been served through the Centre’s drop-in clinics. The sole criteria to access LHC’s drop-in clinic services is household income <$50,000 per year, ensuring that those who are ineligible for Legal Aid but cannot afford private legal services have a place to go for information and support.

The LHC’s pro bono legal clinic model is unique in Canada in two key ways:

• LHC was started by and continues to be supported by two universities – the University of Manitoba and

. . . [more]

On June 9 2014 the Law Society of Alberta suspended Kristine Robidoux for four months after she admitted to violating her duties of confidentiality and candour to her client, provincial Conservative party candidate and former journalist Arthur Kent. Robidoux was legal counsel to Kent’s election team in the 2008 Alberta provincial election. She was also Kent’s agent and the Conservative party’s quadrant chair for five of the electoral constituencies in Calgary. During that time Robidoux had e-mail correspondence with Don Martin, a journalist, in which she gave Martin information about problems with the Kent campaign and, in part based on . . . [more]

Today is the payment deadline for the $3,164 fee levied by the Law Society of Upper Canada to fund its controversial new Law Practice Program, an alternate pathway to licensing for those unable or unwilling to secure articles. Regular readers of Slaw will recall that when the fee was announced in February, law students rallied against it – a petition calling for a more just and equitable model of funding the experimental program garnered more than 800 signatures.

While a few sympathetic benchers spoke up at Convocation in favour of the petition, the Law Society took no action. The chair . . . [more]

You may be tired of hearing about CASL, and tired of getting the consent requests that people were sending out before July 1. The pre July 1 scramble was done because sending an email to request consent is now itself considered spam. But we may still see requests, which can be sent if the recipient fits into one of the exceptions.

In hindsight, I wish I had kept track of the number of consent requests I got, how many of those were not technically compliant with CASL, and how many were from entities I’d never heard of that were . . . [more]

The Federal Court has a primary role in hearing intellectual property proceedings in Canada (See Where Should You Launch Your Intellectual Property Case?). Changes to the composition of the Federal Court, including the number of judges and prothonotaries, have a significant effect on the enforcement of intellectual property in Canada. Several changes are being made to the role of the prothonotaries as well new appointments for judges in the Federal Court.

These changes affect the Court’s ability to manage its workload. The Federal Court has a Practice Notice indicating that where possible, the Court will endeavour to have the . . . [more]