It takes four days for the public to turn away from news of a mass shooting in the United States (US). Within those four days, there will be up to eight more mass shootings and hundreds more gun-related deaths with little news coverage. Meanwhile, lack of effective laws and poor enforcement allow “crime guns” to filter through porous US borders to neighbouring countries.

After each mass shooting, gun control advocates demand that governments “do something.” US and Canadian legislators take piecemeal measures as they twist in hot winds of polarized uproar that pits “gun rights” against “gun control.” Strikingly . . . [more]

Bad news and tragedy surround us. The challenges appear to be enormous. Daunting. How do we hold ourselves up and make a difference in these times?

I believe that hope, grounded hope, is a necessary starting point.

Grounded hope emerges when we look at reality straight on, stand firm, and determine to believe that a better future is a possibility worth striving for.

This form of hope is an expression of “liberatory consciousness,” the framework developed by Barbara Love:

“Liberatory consciousness is a framework used to maintain an awareness of the dynamics of oppression characterizing society without giving

Law societies and other professional regulatory bodies around the world have begun to recognize their professions’ roles in addressing and adapting to climate change. Unfortunately, the Law Society of British Columbia (the Law Society) missed an opportunity to do so last month. My West Coast Environmental Law colleagues Erin Gray, Staff Lawyer and Kaymi Yoon-Maxwell, Summer Law Student, report below on what happened and the worrying implications.

Climate resolution fails at Law Society meeting

On June 22, at its 2022 Annual General Meeting (AGM), the Law Society membership – which is all lawyers in BC – failed to pass Resolution . . . [more]

In a recent decision, the Federal Court was asked to instruct the Canadian patent office on the proper framework for assessing whether inventions are patentable subject matter. The court held that the three part test proposed by the Intellectual Property Institute of Canada (IPIC) that includes asking whether the construed claim as a whole consists only of a mere scientific principle or abstract theory that should be rejected as unpatentable, or a patentable practical application that may employ a scientific principle of abstract theorem.

This decision, Benjamin Moore & Co. v. Canada (Attorney General), 2022 FC 923, arose . . . [more]

What is the most important part of your job? Can you answer that question immediately, or do you struggle to articulate just one aspect that is the most important? Did you choose the part that is the most important for you or the most important for your organization as a whole, or for your clients/students/library patrons?

Last week I was challenged to reassess the tasks that make up my job. As a law librarian at an academic institution in the third year of this pandemic, my team can be susceptible to the same feelings of burnout that are plaguing workers . . . [more]

When it comes to intellectual property, the question of integrity more often comes up around the ownership of the work than on the quality of the property itself. Yet in my work on scholarly communication, I have made the case to consider how the concept of intellectual property arose, long before such an idea existed in law, out of an intense consideration of a work’s intellectual qualities or properties. It was through a long history of scholarly inquiry into such properties, dating back in the West to medieval monasticism, that we have come to take for granted that a text . . . [more]

Early this year, Justice Little of the Federal Court released the much-awaited decision in Ocran v. Canada (Citizenship and Immigration), 2022 FC 175 (CanLII). I am not aware of any study permit judicial review litigation that attracted the attention of Canadian immigration lawyers as much as Ocran. The notoriety of this judicial review litigation was based on the fact that it was a test case that the Department of Immigration, Refugee and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) sought to use to obtain judicial approval for its use of the controversial Chinook software in processing of immigration applications. That approval . . . [more]

Chris Corrigan’s recent blog post is entitled “We grow through what we go through”. It is a fascinating reminder that learning about change is not enough to result in transformative changes in how we think and behave, especially in emergent, complex and dynamic environments (think justice system for example). Instead, he says:

If I want to learn to think differently I need to put myself in situations where the constraints afford me different possibilities to act differently.

He explores this idea using his own experience of learning to play jazz. You can watch and listen to others playing . . . [more]

“Customer service is the new marketing, it’s what differentiates one business from another.”
– Jay Baer, Author

Every legal marketer will tell you that they have two sets of clients – internal lawyers as well as the firm’s clients. For those of us working at larger firms, at any given time, our clients can also include Human Resources, IT, Knowledge Management, Finance, and so on. Similar to lawyers with demanding clients, legal marketers cannot predict the requests that will come in on any given day. But after a few years in these roles, many tend to master how best to . . . [more]

The announcement, applicable to England and Wales, of the alpha launch of Find Case Law, from the National Archives, is a significant step forward in giving greater access to case law and making judgments available freely for re-publication under a new copyright regime, the Open Justice Licence. For free access to cases from both Irish jurisdictions, Scotland, the European courts and the Commonwealth, the British and Irish Legal Information Institute (BAILII) remains a key source. Find Case Law is and will probably always be incomplete, requiring access to all the other available sources of primary legal materials, but that . . . [more]

Yes, Virginia, there is an administrative law.

But what is it?

…It is now recognized. But it is not quite accepted. It fits no antique mould. Not knowing just what it includes, the legal profession has never felt quite at ease with it nor quite known how to handle it.

Albert Abel, “The Dramatis Personae of Administrative Law”, 1972

“Administrative law is not for sissies — so you should lean back, clutch the sides of your chairs, and steel yourselves for a pretty dull lecture. There will be a quiz afterwards.”

Justice Antonin Scalia, “Judicial Deference to . . . [more]

In November 2021, the Child and Youth Law section, the Family Law section, and the Ethics and Professional Responsibility Subcommittee of the Canadian Bar Association (“CBA”) submitted a proposal for two amendments to the Model Code of Professional Conduct to the Federation of Law Societies of Canada. The CBA recommended that the Model Code include a section for non-adversarial advocacy as well as distinct standards for the practice of family law. To be sure, there are unique qualities to family law, but the question is whether family law is so different that distinct professional rules are required for lawyers. In . . . [more]