When I was at law school, many years ago, Stephen Lewis visited as a speaker.

At the time he was Canadian ambassador to the UN. He flew up from New York for the afternoon.

There are two things I still remember about his talk.

The first is a humerous anecdote about his experience at law school. He told of how he went to the library to research an assignment and when, after some difficulty, he found the volume that contained the key case for the topic, the relevant pages had been torn out. This convinced him to quit law school, . . . [more]

If you haven’t noticed by now, there’s a Federal election going on. How and where to Canadian lawyers fit into this equation?

A new study in the Journal of Legal Analysis examines the political leanings of American lawyers by using the Database on Ideology, Money in Politics, and Elections (DIME) to track the financial contributions of lawyers to political campaigns. The contributions were then matched using an algorithm to lawyers listed in the Martindale-Hubbell Legal Directory. The result was a “CFscore” to identify the political leanings of the contributor, who could be identified based on their position the legal system. . . . [more]

Many local public libraries as well as law libraries are actively involved in access to justice initiatives.

In a recent post entitled Justice at your library? on the website of PLE Learning Exchange Ontario, Michele Leering, the Executive Director with the Community Advocacy & Legal Centre in Belleville, Ontario, writes about one such project, the Librarians & Justice partnership in southeastern Ontario.

She also provides a link to a page about PLE for librarians [PLE = public legal education]:

“Library staff in Ontario are ideally placed to serve as key intermediaries in distributing legal information and referrals to library

This is an update regarding the Quebec Bar Association’s controversial suspension of its recently elected bencher, Me Lu Chan Khuong (see our past blog posts here and here). To summarize, the bar association’s board of directors suspended Khuong after it went public that in 2014 she had been arrested on suspicion of shoplifting two pairs of jeans at a Simons store in Laval. Khuong sued the bar for $95,000 in damages and filed a safeguard order to be reinstated to her position as president of the bar.

Additional allegations surface

Now, the bar has countered with its own lawsuit . . . [more]

The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Chevron Corp. v. Yaiguaje concluded that a real and substantial connection to the Canadian court is not necessary to enforce a foreign judgement. This decision may be significant in signalling that Canadian courts will more willingly enforce the judgments of foreign courts.

The respondent plaintiffs in this case characterized the facts as follows:

This case is not about preventing potential damage. It is about paying for the remediation of massive environmental contamination.

The contamination in question involved the oil-rich Lago Agrio region of Ecuador. The plaintiffs, representing 30,000 indigenous Eduadorian villagers, filed suit in . . . [more]

I have had the good fortune of being involved in a number of groups and initiatives aimed at improving access to justice and reforming family law processes over the last several years – from pro bono advice clinics and rosters, to public legal information websites and Wikibooks, to the reconstruction of court rules and legislation – and have recently become plagued by the feeling we’re getting something wrong, that there’s something more fundamental at play I’m overlooking. Partly this stems from the observation in Meaningful Change for Family Justice: Beyond Wise Words (PDF) that despite the innovations and . . . [more]

Are we actually making progress toward the outcome of increased access to justice?

Dan Lear doesn’t think so. As he noted in an ABA Legal Rebels blogpost this week, to date the evidence in the U.S. points to the ineffectiveness of access to justice initiatives. In his post Lawyers need to move beyond access to justice to close the “legal services” gap, Lear notes that this lack of progress is due in part to the fact that solutions are complex and challenging to implement.

He suggests that an important, though small step in the right direction would begin with . . . [more]

“Time and tide wait for no man” (Geoffrey Chaucer). Or for no lawyer [male or female]. 

Change is afoot in the legal profession, and lawyers are trying to figure out how to react to it. But the legal industry isn’t the only profession facing change.

Jonathan Reese of Colorado State University-Pueblo recently wrote about changes in the education sector on The Kernel. He describes the introduction of MOOCs and flipped classrooms as a form of “professional suicide.” The premise behind both of these is the responsibility for learning shifts to the students, who watch video lectures on . . . [more]

A few years ago I was doing some work for a professional association on guidelines for dealing with litigants without counsel and I was struck by the extent to which some legal professionals regard litigants without counsel as interlopers who gum up the finely tuned, well-oiled machine that is their justice system. Some of the same attitudes are evident in the research on lawyers’ and judges’ perceptions done by Nicholas Bala and Rachel Birnbaum in 2012 and by the Canadian Research Institute for Law and the Family in 2013. By way of illustration, respondents to a follow-up national survey of . . . [more]

The Chief Justice’s speech in Calgary, which I mentioned here last week, illustrated that despite all of our efforts to address access to justice the problem is getting worse, not better:

The cry for access to justice is rising from what was once a dull murmer to a crescendo.

She noted that the courts and government share some of the responsibility for the solution, but lawyers play an important role too, especially in pressuring these other actors to take action.

The Canadian Bar Association launched a campaign in Calgary, #whataboutalex, to humanize the struggle for access to justice. Kim Covert . . . [more]

One of my favourite Valentine’s Day cartoons shows a lawyer dumping a box of randomly-addressed cards into a mailbox hoping to drum up some business for himself. The Ashley Madison hack is that in real life, and what a surprise it is!

Heads have already begun to roll; the ever-reliable BuzzFeed reports that Josh Duggar (yes, that Duggar) has confessed to a membership and has published staff rapporteur Ellen Cushing’s blow by blow confrontation, via text, with her cheating ex. The revelations, of course, don’t stop there. The Canadian Press, in an article posted on CBC’s website, says . . . [more]

This past weekend Chief Justice Beverly McLachlin addressed CBA members at the legal conference in Calgary, Alberta. A complete copy of the speech is available here via National Magazine, and my live broadcast via Periscope is available here.

She addressed her continuing concerns about access to justice, but focused on the change already underway in the profession. She told a lawyer joke, which she admittedly refrains from doing,