Every week we present the summary of a decision handed down by a Québec court provided to us by SOQUIJ and considered to be of interest to our readers throughout Canada. SOQUIJ is attached to the Québec Department of Justice and collects, analyzes, enriches, and disseminates legal information in Québec.

PROCÉDURE CIVILE Ayant fait l’objet d’une dénonciation sur les pages Facebook et Instagram «Dis son nom», créées dans la foulée d’une vague de dénonciations d’actes à caractère sexuel, le demandeur n’obtient pas la permission d’intenter de manière anonyme son action en injonction et en dommages-intérêts contre les.

Intitulé : T.M. . . . [more]

Each Friday, we share the latest job listings from Slaw Jobs, which features employment opportunities from across the country. Find out more about these positions by following the links below, or learn how you can use Slaw Jobs to gain valuable exposure for your job ads, while supporting the great Canadian legal commentary at Slaw.ca.

Current postings on Slaw Jobs:

• Legislative Affairs Specialist (Full-time) | Remote/within commuting distance to Victoria, BC
  (Ecojustice)
• Research Resources and Inclusivity Initiatives Librarian (Full-time) | Ithaca, New York
  (Cornell University Law Library)
• Legal Content Developer (Full-time) | Toronto, ON
  (CLEO – Community Legal Education Ontario)

January 4, 2021, marked exactly one year since the first published reports of a disturbing new virus in Wuhan, China.

That virus, COVID-19, has touched us all in the past year on personal and professional levels. We’ve all had to accept individual restrictions for the public good, and to adjust to new ways of doing things.

It’s also true that in the legal profession at least we’ve been able to find some silver linings in these trying circumstances. For example, the pandemic pressed the accelerator on justice system modernization that groups such as the CBA have been advocating for years. . . . [more]

Alisa Lazear’s excellent column on peer-reviewed publishing made me think about another model of legal publishing, student-reviewed law journals. From my personal experience as a student member of one of these journals, and my current role offering support to law journals in my position as an academic law librarian, one of the most frustrating aspects of a student law journal is the lack of institutional memory. The journals find themselves doomed to repeat mistakes, the members are frustrated, and the experience is less pleasant than it could be. One of my former colleagues refers to the student-run law journals as . . . [more]

Collaborative practice is a dispute resolution process that is primarily used in family law, and it is currently unregulated in Canada. The forthcoming amendments to the Divorce Act include collaborative practice as a “family dispute resolution process” that a lawyer ought to “encourage” her client to consider, where “appropriate”. This suggests to me that a process that has for the last 30 years has been largely community-based, has finally come into its own – into the federal scope of the Divorce Act and therefore into the collective conscience of all Canadian family lawyers. This begs the question of whether it . . . [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. C.M. Callow Inc. v. Zollinger, 2020 SCC 45 (CanLII)

[197] The requirement that parties not lie is straightforward. But what kind of conduct is covered by the requirement that they not otherwise knowingly mislead each other? Absent a duty to disclose, it is far from obvious when exactly one’s silence will “knowingly mislead” the other contracting party. Are we to draw . . . [more]

About a million years ago…wait, that was just 2020.

Back in 2011-2012 I was invited to collaborate with colleagues on Legal Information Specialists: A Guide to Launching and Building Your Career with colleagues from the Canadian Association of Law Libraries. At the time, Annette Demers asked contributors to gather some quotes from our colleagues about the value they considered in having a Legal Information Specialist team member. As uncomfortable as it was, I asked colleagues to write something. My colleague James T. Casey, QC who was then Managing Partner of Field Law wrote this which appears on page . . . [more]

It was recently reported in the Law Times that lawyers’ mental health is worsening during the pandemic. Similarly, the American Bar Association released a study (conducted pre-pandemic) showing that judges are experiencing severe stress.

The National Judicial Stress and Resiliency Survey showed that:

• almost 4 out of 10 judges reported stress from fatigue and low energy.
• 1 in 5 judges met at least 1 criteria for depressive disorder (such as not having initiative, preoccupation with negative thoughts, work is no longer meaningful, can’t wait for the day’s work to end and depressed mood).

The National Task Force Report made recommendations . . . [more]

Here are excerpts from the most recent tips on SlawTips, the site that each week offers up useful advice, short and to the point, on practice, research, writing and technology.

Research & Writing

More Redundancies
Neil Guthrie

Lawyers find it difficult to use one word when they could use two. Here are some further examples. Forward progress: All progress is forward-looking; that’s why it’s progress. Null and void: The two elements mean the same thing, so there is no need to use both. … . . . [more]

I would not have thought that in the relatively safe and narrow information publishing world with which I am familiar, I would ever encounter special interest, external interference and attempts to limit editorial freedom, other than, obviously, in giving and receiving training controls, rules and processes for the job and for other obviously legitimate and legally-compliant reasons. I have experienced it though, not for the first time, but most recently in my capacity as the editor of an information and communications periodical. It should be stressed that the publication in question does not overtly or primarily cover legal matters . . . [more]

On December 3, my new report titled Whistleblowers Not Protected: How the Law Abandons Those Who Speak Up in the Public Interest in Alberta was published by the Parkland Institute. The report looks at whistleblowing in a broad sense, meaning anyone who either publicly or anonymously discloses information that is in the public interest.

The report considers not only the gross deficiencies of Alberta’s whistleblower protection legislation but also looks at the need for both anti-SLAPP legislation, and a journalist shield law to protect confidential news sources.

The week before the report, a major controversy erupted in Alberta politics over . . . [more]