Last week, I blogged about the fact that Ontario’s court schedules are finally online for viewing by the public. It is a small step; hopefully many more are to come.

Blogger and lawyer Addison Cameron-Huff brought to my attention the fact that the schedule website is protected by a CAPTCHA. The purpose of CAPTCHAs is to prevent automated access by search engines like Google and other similar webcrawlers.

I am not sure yet what to think about this. Cameron-Huff suggests it is a terrible development because the information should be made freely accessible to anyone who wants to use it. . . . [more]

Many people are only starting to get used to the idea of ODR – Online Dispute Resolution. ODR uses increasingly familiar things, like online communication and information sharing, and uses the internet to combine them with dispute resolution. But what is stopping us from combining ODR with our justice systems?

In his CBA Legal Futures Initiative report, Key Trends in the Marketplace, Professor Richard Susskind invited us to contemplate whether court is a service or a place. If we commit to the view that it should be a service, then ODR would seem poised to become a key delivery . . . [more]

April launched an exciting development for BC legal researchers and for the open law and open data movements. QP LegalEze, the BC Queen’s Printer’s deep and highly functional subscription service for current and some historical legislative information, is no more. Or, more accurately, it is by subscription no more.

All of its content and functionality now is available through BC Laws, the free site also offered by the Queen’s Printer:

BC Laws has been upgraded to provide enhanced searching and more content including historical legislation and related publications such as BC Gazette, full text Orders-in-Council, and Tables of Legislative

Ontario lawyer David Lepofsky, the 2014 Roy McMurtry Visiting Clinical Fellow, recently delivered a baker’s dozen of lectures on disability rights advocacy at Osgoode Hall Law School. You can view them all online using the playlist on Osgoode’s YouTube channel.

David’s lectures range across a wide variety of topics, from particular specific case studies, such as causing Toronto’s transit commission to announce subway stops, to “ethical lawyering in a global community.” . . . [more]

À Québec aujourd’hui et demain, au Château Laurier, a lieu le 22e Congrès annuel des conseillers en accès à l’information et en protection de la vie privée (programme). Me Chantal Bernier, Commissaire par intérim à la vie privée du Canada, a offert une excellente allocution d’ouverture ce matin. À retenir: le Commissaire à la protection de la vie privée (CPVP) du Canada aura bientôt des dents pas mal plus longues. . . . [more]

Access to justice is an ongoing problem across Canada and the call is out for lawyers to contribute to the solution.

Late last fall, the Canadian Bar Association’s Task Force on Access to Justice issued a final report, Envisioning Equal Justice. The Task Force set targets to bridge the growing gap between those who can afford legal services and those who are eligible for publically funded legal services (i.e. legal aid). One of those targets is that by 2020, all lawyers will volunteer legal services at some point in their career.

Around the same time, the Action Committee on . . . [more]

As a PhD student studying the use of knowledge technologies and access to justice strategies, I am following with interest the development of the Civil Resolution Tribunal (CRT) [Civil Resolution Tribunal Act, SBC 2012, c.25;] in BC – an online dispute resolution process which will provide an alternative to the courts for small claims and strata property disputes. I want to share some thoughts regarding online dispute resolution processes and to pose the possibly provocative question: Are online dispute resolution processes necessarily access to justice strategies?

You might ask how an online process could not be . . . [more]

The British Columbia Civil Liberties Association recently filed a class action in Federal Court over the actions by Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC).

The statutory scheme under ss. 273.65, 273.68 and 273.7 under the National Defence A empowers CSEC to monitor communications for foreign entities, not Canadians, absent written authorization for unintended interceptions. Revelations earlier this year demonstrated that CSEC had monitored wireless devices at Canadian airports.

The claim seeks a declaratory relief of a finding of a violation of s. 8 of the Charter for the actions of CSEC. The claim takes particular issue with the collection of metadata, . . . [more]

Many clergy have complained of contemporary society’s loss of faith. Attendance at religious service is down. Faith in the Almighty is considered quaint, antiquated or – by the more rabidly atheist – downright stupid and offensive. Yet rare is the church where doomsday promises of Armageddon-induced hellfire have sparked a mass return to the foot of the altar. I therefore find it peculiar when Federal Justice Minister, Peter MacKay, bemoans Canadians’ loss of faith in the criminal justice system while in the same breath repeating his oft-made promise to rain a fury of new tough-on-crime hail from on-high upon the . . . [more]

Yesterday was Equal Pay Day in the United States, and while the statistics released by the Pew Research Centre on the pay gap between men and women in the U.S. showed progress in shrinking the gap over time, the evidence overall revealed a persistent difference.

Last month, on the day before International Women’s Day, the federal government announced seven judicial appointments. Only one of the appointees is a woman.

It is challenging to keep from becoming frustrated with a plodding pace of change that sometimes feels like one step forward, two steps back. I know I am not . . . [more]

A great video recently made the rounds in which a Canadian doctor handily defended the Canadian health care system when it was criticized by a partisan U.S. senator. While some in the U.S. may look northward to the Canadian health care system for inspiration, it is exactly the opposite when it comes to comparing the U.S. court system with Ontario’s.

In the U.S., court documents are easily accessible by PACER. PACER means “Public Access to Court Electronic Records”, giving access to over 500 million U.S. federal court documents, including a listing of parties involved in the litigation, . . . [more]

The Conservative government in Ottawa introduced the Canadian Victims Bill of Rights last week.

Canada is not the only country where such legislation is topical, and interestingly conservative politicians are not the only ones promoting it.

The Victims’ Task Force, founded by the UK Labour Party, will be meeting victims groups and justice representatives in London today. The Labour Party has committed to a “radical change in approach”. If a law is passed it will be the first in Britain’s legal history.

On both sides of the Atlantic and on both ends of the political spectrum, the same conclusion . . . [more]