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 seventy 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. David Whelan  2. Michael Spratt 3. Canadian Legal History Blog  4. ABlawg.ca  5. Western Canada Business Litigation Blog

David Whelan
Revising a Pressbooks E-book

The Pressbooks e-book add-on for WordPress is brilliant. Whether you use their hosted service or roll your own with their open source plugin, it is an easy way to take one piece of content and make it available in multiple ways. You can present information as an e-book that is Web-based or downloadable as a PDF or epub and other e-book formats. I’ve now created a couple of e-books with it and it was time to go back and revise one. …

Michael Spratt
Criminal defence lawyers oil the machinery of justice, and we pay for that privilege

The wheels of our criminal justice system move slowly — and the wheels should move slowly. Justice must be dispensed carefully and deliberately since mistakes can destroy lives. But a deliberative process is too often a convenient and lazy excuse for dependence on antiquated processes — our justice system is stuck in the 1980s. If you don’t believe me, let me send you a fax of my casebook. …

Canadian Legal History Blog
Canadian Legal History at the ASLH conference

Next week, the American Society for Legal History is meeting in Toronto at the Fairmont Royal York, for its annual conference! The programme is available on the ASLH website, along with other useful information. The whole programme looks great, and there will be a number of panelists speaking on Canadian legal history subjects. Sadly, a number of them will be on at the same time, but it was ever thus. …

ABlawg.ca
A Supreme Folly

Last August, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that, in future, only candidates who are “functionally bilingual” in French and English will be recommended for positions on the Supreme Court of Canada. With the information released subsequent to the nomination of Malcolm Rowe to the Court, we now have some sense of what this means. …

Western Canada Business Litigation Blog
Setting the Rules for Televising Trials in BC

On September 9, 2016, the B.C. Supreme Court issued the first decision to consider the court’s new practice directive concerning the often contentious question of whether to permit a trial to be recorded for broadcasting. In British Columbia, like other provinces in Canada, trials and other court proceedings are not typically recorded for the purpose of media broadcasts. …

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