To understand the benefits of competency-based learning, we must first understand what it is. Competency-based learning is like learning to ride a bike. The journey starts with a tricycle, where the rider first learns to pedal. Eventually, they graduate to a bicycle with training wheels. As confidence builds, the training wheels are raised and eventually removed. The novice rider wobbles and falls, scraping a knee. But they learn from each fall, getting back on the bike with increasing confidence and steadiness. Eventually, they can ride smoothly and consistently. Later, the rider may decide to try mountain biking, applying their prior . . . [more]

The number one issue facing scholarly publishing today is research integrity. The crisis is associated with paper mills selling authorships to fabricated papers; reviewer cabals colluding with special issue guest editors; predatory journals, sans reviewers and editors, acting as auto-publish clubs; and papers rife with image and data manipulation. In response, publishers and editors are scrambling to retract thousands of corrupted papers, close complicit journals, and cease special issues. The publish-or-perish culture, often backed by cash incentives (now banned in China), can be blamed, as can publishers pushing papers through to capture open access fees. It all reflects how, in . . . [more]

In a prior post for Slaw, I argued that law schools should make AI more central to the curriculum. We should teach how to use AI effectively rather than resist it or pretend it isn’t there. To do this, we need to take a different approach, which might entail permitting the use of AI on some assignments and exams.

In this post, I want to address a strong counter-argument: encouraging law students and young lawyers to use AI too much, too soon will prevent them from developing the skills they need to do their jobs effectively—or even to be any . . . [more]

As a supplement to our Sunday Summary each month, Supreme Advocacy LLP in Ottawa presents Supreme One-Liners, a super-short descriptive guide to the most recent decisions at the Supreme Court of Canada. Supreme Advocacy LLP offers its more comprehensive weekly electronic newsletter, Supreme Advocacy Letter, summarizing all Appeals, Oral Judgments and Leaves to Appeal granted.

Appeal Judgment

Immigration: Inadmissibility and Removal; Standard of Review
Pepa v. Canada (Citizenship and Immigration), 2025 SCC 21 (40840)

Reasonableness standard of review in this immigration context.

Leaves to Appeal Granted

Commercial Leases: Termination
Aphria Inc. v. Canada Life Assurance Company, et al., 2024 . . . [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) : N’eussent été les 2 erreurs commises par la juge de première instance, lesquelles s’additionnent, l’appelant aurait été acquitté sous l’accusation de conduite dangereuse causant la mort, la preuve ne permettant pas d’étayer une déclaration de culpabilité; la Cour infirme celle-ci.

Intitulé : Bédard c. R., 2025 QCCA . . . [more]

Recently I visited the Vanderbilt Mansion in Hyde Park, New York.

For those of you who are movie buffs and enjoy American history, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had his family estate there and returned to Hyde Park on a regular basis to relax and recharge.

In fact, the Vanderbilts and the Roosevelts were neighbors and their estates are now part of the New York State Parks.

The era to which these families belonged was called the Gilded Age. I had heard of this time period before, however I never really focused on its real meaning until the tour guide explained it . . . [more]

Don’t include fake cases in court submissions. Don’t miscite cases for wrong propositions of law. Don’t refer to cases in court if you haven’t read them. This is the most basic of lawyering stuff. Probably too basic to even be included in an Advocacy 101 course. Yet, over the last two years, lawyers have made headlines for doing exactly these things. Their common partner in misadventure? Generative AI.

The landscape of AI-generated errors in court submissions

AI-related mishaps first came to the attention of the legal community (and the rest of the world) in May 2023 when an American lawyer . . . [more]

INTRODUCTION

In Hameed v. Canada (Prime Minister) (“Hameed (FC)”), Brown J. seized the opportunity to “encourage” the federal government to fill the too many judicial vacancies on the federal bench. In my Slaw post, “When a Judge Finds His Dream Case: Hameed v. Canada (Prime Minister)” (February 28, 2024), I suggested in not so many words that Brown J. was perhaps too eager to find a way to have an impact on the problem that Chief Justice Wagner had himself not only spoken about but had identified in a letter to then Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Now the . . . [more]

It’s pretty much impossible to get away from a discussion of how AI is going to affect legal practice these days. From AI tools that allow users to summarize documents to tools that create new precedents to tools that carry out legal research, it feels like there’s an AI tool for every part of the legal process. 

We’ve also seen the stories about legal research using AI gone bad: for example, this Federal Court case or this Ontario case. (There’s even a database of legal decisions involving AI hallucinations.) The problem in these situations is not that the lawyer . . . [more]

Perhaps, you say, it is akin to the hockey player, who skates with the puck again and again into the offensive zone, only to be met with a stick here, a shoulder there, caroming into the boards or sliding splayed out into the ice, but upon another foray sneaks one way around a stick while pushing the puck the other, then erupting forth past a shoulder, gathering the puck and looking up to find only a wide-eyed squid between heaven and hell. A sudden rise in heat, pressure transforming into euphoria, but not quite yet, the sensation of success and . . . [more]