As Chief Justice Morawetz enters his 5th year as head of the Ontario Superior Court, it is both appropriate and necessary (given the court’s acknowledged culture of complacency) to ask “how well is he overseeing court operations?” Answering this question with the tools and data presently available is challenging, as Ontario lacks a history of accountability (or transparency) from either the judiciary or the court itself. Yet as the old truism goes, “you can’t improve what you don’t measure.”

i) The Role and Importance of the Superior Court

Canada’s system of parliamentary democracy has three branches, . . . [more]

“Zeus granted Tithonus immortality but not youth. When hateful old age was pressing hard on him, with all its might, and he couldn’t move his limbs, much less lift them up, then she thought up this plan, a very good one indeed – she put him in her chamber, and she closed the shining doors over him.”

– Hymn to Aphrodite, Homer

Many of us have traded away our health for wealth. The consequence is an early death and, perhaps worse, painful old age. I have noticed, now in my second decade of dastardly discourse, how my colleagues and I . . . [more]

Introduction

The recent Bencher election for the Law Society of Ontario (the “LSO”) was a heated and political affair. Candidates presented themselves for election, publicized platform commitments, communicated with electors by email and pamphlet, and even, controversially, organized themselves into competing slates. It had the look and feel of the kind of election we are all familiar with for federal, provincial, or municipal office. One of the differences, however, is that those other elections all have meaningful campaign finance legislation that regulates money in politics. While By-Law 3 sets out in detail some aspects of LSO elections, it is silent . . . [more]

Many important questions on the use of generative AI for legal research remain unanswered. Legal citation is the focus of this post for three primary reasons: 1) ChatGPT has been trained on materials that were published prior to September 2021 and the format of the main citations used by law students (case law, legislation, books, and articles) have not changed in this time, nor are they likely to in the future; 2) it provides a low-cost opportunity for students to interact with ChatGPT and better understand how it interprets prompts; and 3) legal citation is a skill typically taught through . . . [more]

Background

By contrast with the fair dealing user’s right in Canada, the United States copyright law provides a fair use exemption. Since the reader might encounter US commentary of decisions addressing the fair use right the following comments are provided to introduce the fair use exemption.

The Canadian fair dealing user’s right has some superficial similarities to the United States fair use exemption. Under the US copyright law, “a copyright holder cannot prevent another person from making a “fair use” of copyrighted material.”^[1]

The US Supreme Court describes the fair use doctrine as “an “equitable rule of reason” that . . . [more]

The law is a helping profession. Outsiders might scoff, but all of us in the industry know this to be so.

Ask a thousand lawyers what they value about their work, and most will draw a connection to helping. One bankruptcy lawyer told me that what motivates him is helping people to make a fresh start. Business lawyers have spoken with passion about helping their entrepreneurial clients. Personal injury lawyers have told me how much they care about helping injured persons recover and rebuild their lives.

What is meaningful to lawyers about their work is, in a word, service.

What . . . [more]

Yesterday marked the ten year anniversary of my first regular Slaw column. I don’t think I could have guessed I would still be writing it after so much time, and it’s gratifying to hear when people say that they read my pieces. Having a venue where I can write regularly has been a gift for me as I enjoy being able to work out what I think on a subject and writing provides that space.

Slaw fills a gap for a communal interdisciplinary publication that is not filled by more orderly venues. It is thanks to Simon Fodden’s vision and . . . [more]

By David Lundgren, University of Toronto student Researcher in partnership with the NSRLP

In Canada, self-represented litigants (SRLs) are generally disadvantaged from the onset of their case and throughout the legal process. Litigants are often driven to self-representation by financial constraints or a lack of available resources. Cultural and linguistic barriers, mistrust of the justice system, and negative socioeconomic factors also influence their decision to self-represent. These considerations manifest negatively in SRL experiences and persist throughout cases. In court, self-represented litigants tend to fare worse; they are misperceived as vexatious and misinformed, or simply made to feel they do not . . . [more]

Keep your eye on a fascinating project underway in England & Wales, where the Legal Services Board (overseer of all legal regulators there) has launched a “programme of work” devoted to ethics, professionalism, and the rule of law. These are subjects overdue for a critical reconsideration, given how much the world has changed in the last 15-20 years, and other countries certainly will benefit from the LSB’s work here.

It’s worth taking note, however, of the tone of the LSB’s early forays into this topic. A blog post from the Board’s regulatory policy manager, which makes several excellent . . . [more]

As I finished teaching my class, Foreign, Comparative and International Legal (FCIL) Research, this past semester, a couple of students asked me about ChatGPT and artificial intelligence (AI). Given the ubiquitous presence of these topics in everyone’s minds, I should have expected these questions. This is clearly what everyone is talking about and my students are no strangers to these conversations. As someone who works on legal research with sources in multiple languages and from a wide range of countries, I identify myself as agnostic when it comes to technology. In the end, I decided to share with my students . . . [more]

At a recent legal awards gala, one of the categories that caught my attention was the boutique law firm of the year. As we know, a boutique firm focuses on a specific area of practice, such as intellectual property, tax, or environmental law. Unlike firms that offer a wide range of legal services, boutique law firms provide a more narrow and specialized area of expertise.

The part that caught my attention was the scale of the firms up for the award. Firms ranged in size from under three lawyers to firms with over 100 lawyers. The focus of the award . . . [more]

My wife was assaulted by a stranger in downtown Toronto, in January of 2020. She was walking through the underground passage from the Eaton Centre into the Queen TTC station. A man suddenly ran up and kicked her in the leg. She was rattled, and her leg was bruised, but she got over it within a few weeks.

She was lucky. A few weeks later the same man attacked another woman, in the same mall. This time he approached his victim from the back and hit her on the head. This lady suffered a serious concussion, and couldn’t work for . . . [more]