Canada’s online legal magazine.

Summaries Sunday: SOQUIJ

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 : La Cour supérieure peut rendre une ordonnance de sauvegarde concernant 2 des 3 enfants des parties; elle ne peut le faire à l’égard du cadet, qui est né après le 29 juin 2025, puisque seul le Tribunal unifié de la famille possède cette compétence.

Intitulé : Droit . . . [more]

Posted in: Summaries Sunday

Summaries Sunday: Supreme One-Liners

As a supplement to our Sunday Summary each month, Supreme Advocacy LLP in Ottawa presents Supreme One-Liners, a super-short descriptive guide to the most recent decisions at the Supreme Court of Canada. Supreme Advocacy LLP offers its more comprehensive weekly electronic newsletter, Supreme Advocacy Letter, summarizing all Appeals, Oral Judgments and Leaves to Appeal granted.

Leaves to Appeal Granted

Professions: Mandatory New Lawyer Oath
His Majesty the King in Right of Alberta v. Wirring, 2025 ABCA 413 (42224)

Constitutionality of new lawyer oath.

  . . . [more]

Posted in: Summaries Sunday

Scope of Employment

Copyright has several rules which apply automatically. If an employee creates a work in the scope of employment, and absent an agreement to the contrary, the employer is the first owner of the copyright in the work.[1] The Ontario Court of Appeal had occasion to focus on what is meant by the words ‘in the scope of employment’ in Nexus Solutions Inc. v. Krougly, 2026 ONCA 199.

At trial, the Court held that the employer, Nexus Solutions, did not establish that the software in question was created by Krougly ‘in the scope’ of employment, even though Krougly secretly . . . [more]

Posted in: Intellectual Property

Book Review: How to Account for Trauma and Emotions in Law Teaching

Several times each month, we are pleased to republish a recent book review from the Canadian Law Library Review (CLLR). CLLR is the official journal of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL/ACBD), and its reviews cover both practice-oriented and academic publications related to the law.

How to Account for Trauma and Emotions in Law Teaching. Edited by Mallika Kaur & Lindsay M. Harris. Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar, 2024. ix, 214 p. Includes index. ISBN 9781035307043 (hardcover) US$130.00.

Reviewed by Alexia Loumankis
Reference and Research Librarian
Bora Laskin Law Library, University of Toronto

In How to . . . [more]

Posted in: Book Reviews, Thursday Thinkpiece

Wednesday: What’s Hot on CanLII? – July 2026

Each month, we tell you which five English-language cases and French-language cases have been the most viewed* on CanLII in the previous month and we give you a small sense of what the cases are about using summaries sourced from the case text, CanLII-published AI-generated summaries of the case, or anonymized excerpts from the case text.

For this past month, the five most-consulted English-language decisions were:

1. Ramsden v. Peterborough (City), 1993 CanLII 60 (SCC)

Summary from case:

This appeal concerned the constitutional validity of a municipal by‑law prohibiting all postering on public property. The issue was whether the . . . [more]

Posted in: Wednesday: What's Hot on CanLII

Canada’s Proposed Financial Crimes Agency: It’s About Time!

I have a vivid memory of being told I was callous for suggesting that an individual who was drafting a Statement of Claim to recover lost funds should instead report their losses to the authorities – they would likely never see their money again. To be fair (to me), they probably never did. That individual’s son convinced them to invest their savings, roughly $14,000, with his friend, a young 20-something crypto-investment “genius” who offered to use his know-how to make them rich, for free (no fees), while offering a 100% guarantee of returns. Sounds exciting! Except, that this situation resulted . . . [more]

Posted in: Practice of Law

It Depends on How You Ask the Question: The True Number of Unrepresented Accused in the Ontario Court of Justice

This paper is part of a larger, multi-year project looking at representation, efficiency and outcomes in Ontario’s provincial court[1]. As outlined in an earlier Slaw piece on this project (“Using Representation Pathways to Explore Court Data”, October 2025), several parts of this research are ongoing. The paper highlights the “representation pathways” idea, which is being explored as a methodological tool and as a way of better understanding the experience of accused persons in the provincial criminal court system.

The research is being carried out using an appearance-based database from the Ontario Court of Justice (OCJ). The data . . . [more]

Posted in: Justice Issues

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 more than 80 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. Canadian occupational health & safety law 2. Employment & Human Rights Law in Canada 3. Legal Post Blog 4. Know How 5. ABlawg.ca

Canadian occupational health & safety law
Do you know what you don’t know? Workplace hazard disclosure and the limits of owner liability under the . . . [more]

Posted in: Monday’s Mix

Summaries Sunday: SOQUIJ

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 : Bien que le droit d’être jugé dans un délai raisonnable prévu à l’article 11 b) de la Charte canadienne des droits et libertés s’applique à une personne accusée d’outrage au tribunal en matière civile, les principes établis dans l’arrêt R. c. Jordan (C.S. Can., 2016-07-08), 2016 CSC . . . [more]

Posted in: Summaries Sunday

Summaries Sunday: Supreme One-Liners

As a supplement to our Sunday Summary each month, Supreme Advocacy LLP in Ottawa presents Supreme One-Liners, a super-short descriptive guide to the most recent decisions at the Supreme Court of Canada. Supreme Advocacy LLP offers its more comprehensive weekly electronic newsletter, Supreme Advocacy Letter, summarizing all Appeals, Oral Judgments and Leaves to Appeal granted.

Appeals

Constitutional Law/Courts: Review of Delegated Powers
Democracy Watch v. Canada (Attorney General), 2026 SCC 28 (41576)

Clarifications re courts’ jurisdiction as to legality of delegated power exercise.

Civil Litigation: Spoliation of Evidence
SS&C Technologies Canada Corp. v. Bank of New York Mellon Corp . . . [more]

Posted in: Summaries Sunday

The Hidden Economics of the Vanishing Apprenticeship

Two columns ago, I followed the money through a law firm’s student recruitment program and found nearly $500,000 a year in lawyer time and expenses before a single billable hour was worked. Last column, I followed that same money into the delegation of actual work and found that firms were quietly losing much of it back through vague instructions, overworked memos, and write-downs nobody quite wants to talk about.

This column follows that same money to where it gets spent – on the reps junior lawyers used to log before anyone trusted them with something that mattered. Those reps are . . . [more]

Posted in: Legal Education, Legal Marketing, Practice of Law

Again, Why? the Big Picture of the Alberta Regulated Professions Neutrality Act

In my previous column on the Alberta Regulated Professions Neutrality Act,[1] I focused on subtle details of the Act and the important implications of those details for how the Act worked and what it did.[2] In this column, I focus instead on the major flaw of the Act, which flaw is glaringly obvious but seems to have received relatively little attention and prompted relatively little pushback outside the legislative assembly.[3] Nothing in this column is revolutionary or imaginative or even particularly original. But it is worth emphasizing nonetheless. While the Act has implications for many regulated . . . [more]

Posted in: Legal Ethics

3li_EnFr_Wordmark_W

This project has been made possible in part by the Government of Canada | Ce projet a été rendu possible en partie grâce au gouvernement du Canada