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.

Modern Law, Modern Hammers: Canada’s Witchcraft Provision as an Image of Persecution

Natasha Bakht, Associate Professor, University of Ottawa Faculty of Law and Jordan Palmer, PhD Candidate, University of Ottawa Faculty of Law
(2015) 35 Windsor Review of Legal and Social Issues 123

Excerpt: pp 123-125, 131-143

[Footnotes omitted. They can . . . [more]

In conducting the public function of granting Patents, CIPO’s actions are often called into question in private disputes, as well as by individual applicants. Although the “high stakes” of patent litigation may often create novel arguments to invalidate a particular patent, broader policy consequences ultimately arise as to how to temper CIPO’s independent administrative functions with the ability of third parties to raise administrative noncompliance as a ground of patent invalidity. The court’s predilection to review, at the request of individual applicants, administrative type decisions regarding fees, may be contrasted with judicial reluctance to revisit CIPO’s actions once a patent . . . [more]

It’s that time of year again – The Law Society of Manitoba is calling for nominations for the Richard J. Scott Award, an honour presented annually to “an individual who advances the rule of law through advocacy, litigation, teaching, research or writing.”

Richard Scott is Manitoba’s longest serving Chief Justice, having been appointed to the Court of Queen’s Bench in 1985 and elevated to Associate Chief Justice later that same year, and then promoted to Chief Justice of the Court of Appeal in 1990. He retired from the Bench in 2013 and has since returned to legal practice as counsel . . . [more]

Law sometimes hinges on subtle distinctions that are not obvious, and can lead to surprising results. The meaning of the word “use” for trademark purposes, for example.

A key principle of trademark law is that a business must actually “use” its trademark to keep its trademark registration alive, or to enforce its trademark rights against others.

But the legal concept of “use” for trademark purposes is narrower than most would suspect, and can result in a surprising loss of trademark rights for a business.

For example, a trademark on the side of a building, or on a business card, or . . . [more]

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

For this last week:

1. Meads v. Meads, 2012 ABQB 571

[1] This Court has developed a new awareness and understanding of a category of vexatious litigant. As we shall see, while there is often a lack of homogeneity, and some individuals or groups have no name or special identity, they (by their own admission or by descriptions given by others) often fall into the following . . . [more]

In six preceding articles I have described the idea behind becoming a very highly valued five-tools project manager, ready to manage each of the five progress factors:

• Manage the project, starting with the project charter.
• Manage the client, starting with the Conditions of Satisfaction.
• Manage time, starting with the Off Switch.
• Manage money, starting with budgets.
• Manage the team, starting with assigning tasks accurately.

The fifth tool deals with the most important asset on your team. It’s an asset that goes home at night, an asset that defines the biggest difference between project success and failure.

And it’s the asset . . . [more]

Reading Susan Munro’s post about some of the interesting products and services she learned of at the CALL conference got me thinking. Susan noted:

Countervailing forces (for example, the common use of Google as a first stop for all kinds of research) pull us away from deep-dive research. I keep hearing about the legal research habits of law students and newer lawyers: they start with Google and often go no further.

It is interesting to step back and think about what patterns exist for legal research. If most often a legal research need is fulfilled by a surface scrape, what . . . [more]

This past spring, I designed and taught an upper-­year course at the Allard (i.e. UBC) School of Law called “Access to Justice and the Modern Litigant.” For three hours each Thursday afternoon, my students and I discussed the deepening crisis in access to justice for working and middle-­class Canadians. We explored the philosophical foundations of the common law, traced the evolution of the concept of equal access to justice, and considered different sociological analyses of how ordinary Canadians interact with the civil justice systems built to serve them. We also reviewed the history of public legal services in Canada, and . . . [more]

Here are excerpts from the most recent tips on SlawTips, the site that each week offers up useful advice, short and to the point, on technology, research and practice.

Research

Canada Day Tribute
Shaunna Mireau

Happy 148th birthday Canada. There is a nice history of Canada day outlined at this federal government website that was updated in June of 2014. It reminds us of some facts. I share those blow that relate to finding the law of Canada Day…

Practice

Inbox Zero: Unsubscribing (And the Next-Best Option)*
Garry Wise

Where do all these email alerts, newsletters, updates, sales pitches . . . [more]

A controversial Private Members Bill that will have a direct impact on unions across Canada is currently working its way through Parliament. Bill C-377, which was passed by the Senate last week, will require unions to essentially open their financial books to the public.

Included in the Bill is a requirement for unions to disclose: a yearly balance sheet indicating their assets, liabilities, income and expenditures; the details of all transactions over $5,000, including the name and address of each party, a statement regarding the purpose of the transaction, and a description of each transaction; a statement indicating the total . . . [more]

There’s an interesting article in the recent issue of AI Magazine called “Truth Is a Lie: Crowd Truth and the Seven Myths of Human Annotation.” AI Magazine is considered the “journal of record for the AI community” and is a product of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. It’s a “delayed open access” journal which is nice because that means the articles are openly available 15 months after they’ve been published.*

One reason this article caught my attention is because I’ve been thinking about Kevin Lee’s comment on my post a couple of weeks . . . [more]

Friends and colleagues of Michael Silverstein recently gathered at MacLean House in Toronto to share reminiscences and a musical tribute in his memory. Michael passed away on May 6, 2015, at age 63.

Michael was best known to the legal research community as the “interpreter” of the Canadian Abridgment. Beginning with the co-authoring in 1989 of the Guide to Research Using the Canadian Abridgment, Michael became known as the expert on the structure and content of one of the most byzantine publications that ever saw the light of day. Over the following decades he guided its restructuring and and . . . [more]