Phil Epstein Assumes Jay McLeod’s Mantle

I missed the Carswell announcement just before the holidays that the weekly newsletter that Professor Jay McLeod published on family law has now become Epstein & Madsen’s This Week in Family Law. The great thing about McLeod’s family law scholarship was the personal voice, the willingness to articulate a strong and sometimes ideosyncratic view of where Canadian family law was going. Simply having an intelligence wrestling with the issues, rather than doing a paraphrase of judgments was welcome in itself.
Let’s hope that Phil will be as willing to stick his neck out.

His manifesto is: “We intend to concentrate on commenting on cases that we think have some significance and further develop family law in this country. We do not intend to comment on every decision. We will look at cases that we think are taking the law in the wrong direction and we will hand out kudos where they are warranted. We will try to produce some hints for loss prevention for lawyers where the case makes it clear as to how the lawyers might have avoided the problem that arose. We will comment on different approaches taken by different judges in similar facts. We cannot be as witty or as pithy as Jay McLeod. We can, however, try to deliver in a timely fashion brief notes of all the important family law cases as they come off the press.”