Recently, NSRLP participated in the 2024 National Pro Bono Conference, held in Montreal. The two-day event brought lawyers, academics, community workers and judges together to discuss issues of access to justice – and to identify and share initiatives aimed at tackling the multitude of challenges associated with a lack of access to justice.

In reflecting on that experience, what remains evident is that if we are to take these problems seriously, it is necessary to engage a variety of stakeholders in their resolutions. This requires the cooperation and commitment of government, the profession, the judiciary, those working in access to . . . [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) : Un ajournement des procédures engagées en vertu de l’article 515 C.Cr. de plus de 3 jours francs sans le consentement du prévenu ne peut, selon l’article 516 (1) C.Cr., être accordé, à moins que le poursuivant n’établisse une «juste cause», au sens de l’article 11 e) de . . . [more]

For many legal practitioners, the thought of a visual contract is terrifying. Afterall, without all the flowery legalese, how will a court know how to interpret the contract? Except that the traditional approach to contract drafting is changing as drafters increasingly focus on clarity. Clarity can come in many forms: plain, uncomplicated language, white space and the strategic use of informational design like fonts, underlining, and highlighting to illustrate important elements. The hold-up to greater adoption appears to be based on risk and concern about a court’s interpretation, which often means that contracts are written by lawyers for other lawyers . . . [more]

Since the publication of the ADR Institute of Canada’s Med-Arb Rules in 2020, Med-Arb has become much more widely accepted as an integrated dispute resolution process in Ontario. Despite this many counsel and parties still have a significant degree of resistance to its use. In the best-known form of med-arb, a single neutral acts as both mediator and arbitrator. The process only transitions into arbitration if the mediation fails; in that case, the med-arbitrator conducts the arbitration and issues a binding decision.

This process offers time and cost efficiencies over stand alone mediation and arbitration and guarantees an outcome, it . . . [more]

If you glance at the news, it feels as if the world is on fire—both literally and figuratively. Climate change wreaks havoc across continents, pandemics challenge our healthcare systems, wars and conflicts displace millions, and the erosion of democratic principles shakes trust in institutions worldwide. At the same time, misinformation spreads faster than facts, nationalism competes with global cooperation, and the international community often seems paralyzed by political gridlock.

In this whirlwind of challenges, one thing is clear: we need legal minds who can think globally and act locally. That’s why I believe we should all be teaching Comparative Law, . . . [more]

PREFACE

This is the second part of a post placing LEAF’s recent report, What It Takes: Establishing a Gender-Based Violence Accountability Mechanism in Canada (“What It Takes” or “LEAF report)” on gender-based violence (GBV) in the context of historical efforts to address GBV (albeit fragmentary references) and more recent developments: the 2021 Joint Declaration for a Canada Free of Gender-Based Violence, signed by Canada, the provinces and the territories, leading to the 2022 National Action Plan to End Gender-Based Violence (“National Action Plan”, “NAP” or “NAPGBV”), the 2019 Final Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous . . . [more]

As a person who articled and practiced with a provincial government, and now teaches at a law school that defines itself in part by “the Weldon tradition of unselfish public service”, I encourage my students to consider a career of legal practice in the public service – but to do so with their eyes open. While I have written elsewhere about how government practice is different than other legal practice,[1] here I want to discuss the important but sometimes overlooked difference between the concepts of “social justice” and “public service”.

There is plenty right, and nothing wrong, with 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) : Les conclusions du juge de première instance concernant la violation des articles 9, 11 a), 11 c) et 11 d) de la Charte canadienne des droits et libertés, en lien avec l’exécution d’un mandat d’arrestation visé, ne sont pas fondées, et il y a lieu d’annuler . . . [more]

People-centered approaches have quickly become the norm in access to justice. By the term norm I mean essentially the same thing as the use of the term in sociology, a widely accepted expectation or rule of behaviour – a way of doing things. People-centricity has escaped the fate of becoming either a mot du jour or a term widely accepted but deemed nothing new, greeted with the assertion; We have always done that. We just didn’t have a name for it. This escape from the ordinary lies in its roots in the legal needs literature and in a fortuitous turn . . . [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. Professional Institute of the Public Service v Treasury Board, 2024 CanLII 106287 (CA LA)

[1] The Professional Institute of the Public Service (Institute) is the bargaining agent for the Commerce and Purchasing (CP) Group. Treasury Board is the employer for the Core Public Administration (CPA), which includes the CP Group and its . . . [more]

In 2022, Justice Mandhane introduced the tort of family violence to address the injuries committed during the course of a marriage. A year later, in 2023, the Ontario Court of Appeal overturned this new tort in the decision Ahluwalia v Ahluwalia, 2023 ONCA 476. This matter is now being appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada.

In the article “’Weaponizing’ The Tort of Family Violence? Myths, Stereotypes, Lawyers’ Ethics and Access to Justice”, Deanne Sowter and Jennifer Koshan, argue that recognizing the tort of family violence is an important step towards compensating the harms of intimate partner . . . [more]