As a child living in remote Northern B.C., my dad had a dog sled team made up of several Siberian Huskies. Huskies are working dogs prized for their strength and endurance. They require significant exercise and mental stimulation. A Husky without a task is easily bored and can be destructive. In the summertime, my dad would harness his dogs to a small cart to keep them occupied and happy. Without their cart, they would howl their displeasure.

I’m afraid I might be a Husky. I love to work. I love setting tasks and completing them, whether I’m paid for it . . . [more]

Periodically on Thursdays, we present a significant excerpt, usually from a recently published book or journal article. In every case the proper permissions have been obtained. If you are a publisher who would like to participate in this feature, please let us know via the site’s contact form.

Rough & Messy Justice: A Train Heist, Murder & Misdeeds

Author: W. Keith Regular
Foreword by Hon. Peter W. L. Martin
Publisher: Durvile
Publication Date: May 1, 2025
True Cases Series, Book 12
ISBN: 978-1-990735-66-0 (pbk)
E-book and audiobook also available
6” x 9” | 288 Pages | B/W Photographs
Price: $35 . . . [more]

On December 18, 2024, the Supreme Court of British Columbia issued a decision in Clearview AI Inc. v. Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia, 2024 BCSC 2311. At its core, the case involved a challenge by a U.S.-based artificial intelligence (AI) company against a binding order from British Columbia’s privacy regulator. The company, Clearview AI, had amassed a large facial recognition database by scraping billions of publicly accessible images from the internet, many of which depicted individuals located in British Columbia, without obtaining their consent.

The decision is significant not only for its factual context, but for what . . . [more]

A case scheduled for fall 2025 before the Ontario Court of Appeal will presumably address the appropriate test for granting leaves to appeal (see Knauff v. Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario (Div. Ct.) (“Knauff“). The resulting decision should tell us whether parties seeking leave to appeal from the Divisional Court should follow West Whitby Landowners Group Inc. v. Elexicon Energy Inc. (Ont. CA) (“West Whitby”) or Davis v. Aviva General Insurance Company (Ont. CA) (“Davis“).

In West Whitby, a panel composed of Brown, Huscroft and Miller JJ.A. questioned whether Re Sault Dock Co. . . . [more]

This is a case of not closing the barn door after the horse is out, to use a pre-twentieth-century expression for a twenty-first-century issue. But, more precisely, I want to argue for propping the barn door open to enable the rest of the horses to run free after a good number have been questionably sold off.

Let me explain. Think of those sold-off horses as the research studies that at least three major research publishers – Taylor & Francis, Wiley, and Oxford University Press with more deals pending – have rented out to AI giants, such as Microsoft, for the . . . [more]

Every week we present the summary of a decision handed down by a Québec court provided to us by SOQUIJ and considered to be of interest to our readers throughout Canada. SOQUIJ is attached to the Québec Department of Justice and collects, analyzes, enriches, and disseminates legal information in Québec.

PÉNAL (DROIT) : Il existe une possibilité réelle que la juge de première instance n’ait pas examiné la question cruciale de savoir si l’accusé — un jeune homme de 17 ans souffrant d’une déficience intellectuelle et qui a tué sa mère — avait l’intention subjective requise pour commettre l’infraction de . . . [more]

The concept of “professional identify formation” came to the fore in 2007, when the report Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law[1] was published by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching . Commonly known as the Carnegie Report, it determined that preparation for the profession required three apprenticeships. The third of these was “concerned with providing entrants to the field effective ways to engage and make their own the ethical standards, social roles, and responsibilities of the profession, grounded in the profession’s fundamental purposes.”[2] This concept became known as “professional identify formation.”

Further defining professional

Several times each month, we are pleased to republish a recent book review from the Canadian Law Library Review (CLLR). CLLR is the official journal of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL/ACBD), and its reviews cover both practice-oriented and academic publications related to the law.

COVID-19, Law & Regulation: Rights, Freedoms, and Obligations in a Pandemic. By Belinda Bennett, Ian Freckelton & Gabrielle Wolf. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. vii, 674 p. Includes bibliographic references and index. ISBN 9780192896742 (hardcover) $165.00.

Reviewed by Marnie Bailey
Manager, Knowledge Services
Fasken Martineau DuMoulin LLP

COVID-19, Law & . . . [more]

Each month, we tell you which three English-language cases and French-language cases have been the most viewed* on CanLII in the previous month and we give you a small sense of what the cases are about.

For this past month, the three most-consulted English-language decisions were:

1. Afolabi v. Law Society of Ontario, 2025 ONCA 257

[102] The LSO has a duty to protect the public interest, maintain public confidence in the profession, and ensure the entry-level competence of incoming licensees. It is to be afforded considerable latitude in regulating the legal profession and in determining how the duty . . . [more]

The market for legal AI is teaming with options. Many of them are compelling. All of them are expensive.

What the companies offering these tools hope that you don’t notice is that free (or almost free) tools, like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are getting so good at basic legal research tasks that many lawyers looking to boost their productivity don’t need to look any further.

We highlight three ways to use these free tools to make research more effective — but we note that becoming a subscriber to one of them, for roughly $30 a month, will tend . . . [more]