Retired judges who return to court as counsel pose a serious threat to the perception of judicial impartiality, an issue that recently caught the attention of the Law Society of Upper Canada.

On January 28, the Professional Regulation Committee made a series of policy amendments to the Rules of Professional Conduct that deal with retired judges returning to practice.

Under the old Rule 7.7-1.4, judges who previously served on the Superior Court of Justice were permitted to appear in court as counsel after a three-year “cooling off” period. With the new amendments, retired Superior Court of Justice judges who want . . . [more]

It is disheartening how many lawyers in litigation practices persist in the view that self-representing litigants (“SRLs”) are a problem that needs a solution.

I’ve written about this here before (see Shifting the Burden) and really my views haven’t changed, except in that there is more evidence than ever before that the needs and motivations of those who “choose” to represent themselves in litigation are complex and that this choice is made at their peril and often at significant personal cost.

Why rehash an old story (and indeed it isn’t new)? Because I spent two hours of my day . . . [more]

Last week’s BC Provincial Court’s #AskChiefJudge Twitter Town Hall went off with nary a glitch, and even received some fanfare in the Vancouver Sun for its being the first (known) instance of a time when a Canadian chief judge has taken to Twitter to answer live questions. Dave Bilinsky and Colin Lachance both shared news of this last week.

It proved many things—one of them being 2010 really is a pretty long time ago.

The Courts’ Affair with Twitter Since 2010

Back in 2010 only a fraction of courts even held a Twitter handle—7% according to a CCPIO report of . . . [more]

An accused has a constitutional right to a fair trial and may raise concerns about race and discrimination if they identify it as an issue in their case. Furthermore, lawyers have an obligation to remind their client of this right. This very issue arose in R v Fraser (Fraser). In Fraser, a white student accused a Black high school teacher of committing “sexual improprieties”. The appellant raised concerns about racial bias both before and during the jury selection, but his lawyer nonetheless failed to tell Fraser that he had the right to challenge for cause. Upon . . . [more]

Infanticide as a criminal offence sprang about centuries ago, dating back to the 1600s. It was a crime that punished women, particularly poor women who sought to escape the oppressive stigma of having a child out of wedlock.

However, by the turn of the 20^th century, courts were often unwilling to convict women that murdered their babies. In response, England enacted the Infanticide Act.

In R. v. Borowiec, 2016 SCC 11, Justice Cromwell writes at paragraph 27:

The adoption of the Infanticide Act, 1922 was intended to remedy the fact that judges and juries were reticent to

I am a professional working woman. My mother was, until her retirement, a professional working woman. My daughter will, I expect, be a professional working woman when she completes her education.

Issues related to the (in)equality of working women therefore are of particular significance to me.

Yesterday was Equal Pay Day in the U.S. This is a day that marks the point in time each year when women in the workforce will have earned enough to catch up to the earnings of men in the previous year. Did you get that?

In the U.S., women need to work for more . . . [more]

On November 11, 1947, Winston Churchill said to the British House of Commons,

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…

The concept has been attributed to Churchill himself, but it’s clear he was quoting another unknown source. In the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, social scientists have explored with wonder . . . [more]

Lawyers like to think they’re unique.

This exceptionalism can explain in part our resistance to change, and our inability to adopt best practices from other industries. Sometimes it limits our ability to recognize that our challenges are part of larger societal trends which everyone is facing.

In The End of Lawyers?: Rethinking the nature of legal services, Richard Susskind explored alternative methods of providing legal services, while pointing to some of the many failings of the existing models of delivery. In Tomorrow’s Lawyers: An Introduction to Your Future, he goes further, and describes the types of new jobs . . . [more]

Although its use is of questionable significance in the age of the internet, many of us mark our public writing, including our public legal education materials, with a copyright statement asserting an exclusive right to control the use and distribution of our work. This is a fairly normal thing to do, and almost universal among legal aid providers; after all, when you’ve sweat blood over something, you want to keep it for yourself and you don’t want to discover someone else claiming it as their own or using it for their own purposes.

I certainly felt that way and my . . . [more]

I won’t comment much on the Ghomeshi verdict, other than to note that most of its detractors don’t appear to fully appreciate the nuance of the decision.

The animus exhibited by the complainants was mirrored by observers in the court room, and the crowd that gathered outside.

There was reason to be upset. Such incidents are rightly upsetting, but these feelings should not be directed towards the bench or the justice system.

The protections within our legal system, including our Charter rights, cannot be applied selectively, or withdrawn for individuals we don’t like, or we think are likely to . . . [more]

Data — big, open — is having a well-deserved moment among access to justice advocates. While access to justice problems don’t fall into neat quadrants as they might in the technology and business worlds, there is much that can be learned from the use of data to address real needs in other sectors. With new tools to address access to justice challenges comes a key turning point in the application of data to solve complex social problems.

A recent post by Margaret Hagan of Open Law Lab explores the access to justice opportunities available from public data. The potential . . . [more]

After engaging this afternoon in a discussion about a number of issues related to ongoing access to justice, I continued thinking about the barriers that stand between ordinary people with legal problems and their effective access to justice. Many of the obstacles are obvious and have been extensively studied (for example, see the ongoing work of Dr. Julie MacFarlane on the experiences of self-representing litigants). But not all barriers to access to justice are readily apparent.

Initially, this was just going to be a mental list, formed as part of a conversation with myself (I engage in those entirely . . . [more]