Each Monday we present brief excerpts of recent posts from five of Canada’s award­-winning legal blogs chosen at random* from seventy recent Clawbie winners. In this way we hope to promote their work, with their permission, to as wide an audience as possible.

This week the randomly selected blogs are 1. Vancouver Immigration Law Blog  2. Henry J. Chang’s Canada-US Immigration Blog 3. Canadian Securities Law  4. National Magazine Blog  5. Library Boy

Vancouver Immigration Law Blog
What To Do About 20,000 High Risk International Students? – Government Policy Making and it’s Important Implications

Based on the most recent publicly-available . . . [more]

The tort of intrusion upon seclusion continues to grow and find application in new settings and circumstances, which is what we would expect for a tort created less than 5 years ago.

In Complex Services Inc v Ontario Public Service Employees Union, arbitrator Surdykowski sided with the employer in finding that this new tort dealt with non-legislated and non-contractual rights to privacy. These rights would necessarily be limited in the unionized context.

This holding was summarized in United Food & Commercial Workers, Local 206 v G & K Services Canada Inc as follows,

94. ..An employee does not have

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.

CONSTITUTIONNEL (DROIT) : La Loi de 2013 sur la succession au trône adoptée par le Parlement fédéral en 2013 est constitutionnelle.

Intitulé : Motard c. Canada (Procureure générale), 2016 QCCS 588
Juridiction : Cour supérieure (C.S.), Québec, 200-17-018455-139
Décision de : Juge Claude Bouchard
Date : 16 février 2016

CONSTITUTIONNEL . . . [more]

Federal Court published a decision regarding the government’s policy when to reconsider or re-open an application. In his decision, Justice Phelan came down hard on the government’s inflexible guidelines as they lack “common sense and fairness”. This is a very significant decision for immigration practitioners and lawyers who make requests to Visa Officers or other government officials to have their matters reconsidered.

The facts of Lim v. Canada are relatively simple. The Applicant applied for Canadian citizenship, an Officer requested more information via letter but the letter was not received. The application was deemed abandoned and the file closed. When . . . [more]

A little while ago, I gave a presentation to the National Judicial Institute‘s annual family law conference on the more important innovations in family justice introduced in British Columbia over the past decade, and in preparing my paper I realized something that struck me as terribly important. Of the nine or so changes with the biggest impact on family justice — which included things like the introduction of mandatory judicial case conferencing in 2002, the release of the report A New Justice System for Children and Families in 2005 and the introduction of Canada’s most progressive family law legislation . . . [more]

The latest edition of the CBA National, the magazine of the Canadian Bar Association, had a feature story on a topic that’s started to gain attention recently in Canada.

The legal profession is undergoing an era of profound change, influenced by technology, new business structures, globalization, and the high cost of justice. New skills and tools are needed by graduates in order to succeed. Law grads need to be problem solvers. But are law schools keeping up? Are they reflecting the realities of the legal profession?

On the CBA National article, legal futurist Jordan Furlong says the answer is . . . [more]

On March 8, 2016, the Ontario government gave royal assent to the Sexual Violence and Harassment Action Plan Act (Bill 132) to amend various statutes with respect to sexual violence, sexual harassment, domestic violence and other forms of abuse. The Act aims to make workplaces, campuses and communities safer and more responsive to the needs of survivors and to complaints about sexual violence and harassment. . . . [more]

Each Thursday 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.

Write a Wikipedia Article for Law School Credit—Really?

John C. Kleefeld, Associate Professor, College of Law, University of Saskatchewan and Katelyn Rattray, Articling Student, Race & Company LLP.

65 J Legal Educ 597 (2016) © Association of American Law Schools

Excerpt: from the Introduction and Parts I-III | [Footnotes omitted. They . . . [more]

Active adjudication is an approach to dispute resolution that puts more emphasis on the role of the adjudicator in focusing the issues in dispute and the process for resolving those issues. It stands in contrast to the classic adversarial model of dispute resolution that puts more emphasis on the parties shaping the matters in dispute and the evidence required to prove their case. Active adjudication has many advantages for access to justice. I have written about this before. Active adjudication can result in shorter processes as well as levelling the playing field, to some extent, for self-represented parties.

The . . . [more]

Everyone seems to agree that law school new graduates are not practice-ready, but there continues to be disagreement about how ready they should be at that stage of their careers. This discussion has been going on for at least 30 years, and the debate continues to rage. The latest edition of the National sets it all out, highlighting the challenges inherent in changing the law school curriculum, along with some law school innovations that have taken hold. This topic was also the focus of a recent CBA Futures workshop entitled Transforming Legal Education in Canada: a Workshop to Inspire . . . [more]

Tomorrow I am speaking with law students at Robson Hall as part of a Do Law Differently launch event hosted by the MLSA and Canadian Bar Association. I’ve been invited to talk about my own career path, about lessons I’ve learned and what I look for when hiring.

I’ve prepared my 20 minute talk and can tell you it is full of optimism and hope for a new kind of legal profession that holds to old-school values like integrity and honour and generosity while boldly facing a new economic order that mostly values faster, better, cheaper.

Frankly, I’m not feeling . . . [more]

It’s been said that whoevers owns the dominant narrative in the courtroom wins.

How do you make sure that your story becomes the dominant story?

In Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die: Made to Stick, Chip Heath and Dan Heath provide six simple elements for creating narratives that stick. These elements are:

1. Simple
2. Unexpected
3. Concrete
4. Credible
5. Emotional
6. Stories

Simple:

To keep a story simple find the core of the theory. A great compact theory can be summed up in one statement and is profound. The most profound of theories are those that a person can spend an entire . . . [more]