I’m not one much for the hype around royal babies, who as of now remains unnamed, but this one has some special significance for Commonwealth nations. The birth of the baby girl yesterday to Prince William and Kate Middleton signals the first royal born since the enactment of new succession laws in the U.K.

The Succession to the Crown Act 2013 ended the centuries-old practice of primogeniture. This can be traced in law to the Act of Settlement 1701, which states,

The Princess Sophia, Electress and Duchess Dowager of Hanover, Daughter of the late Queen of Bohemia, Daughter of

One Sunday each month OnPoint Legal Research provides Slaw with an extended summary of, and counsel’s commentary on, an important case from the British Columbia, Alberta, or Ontario court of appeal.

Sampley v. Sampley, 2015 BCCA 113

Areas of Law: 

Family law; Parental abduction; Hague Convention

~An appellate court will not disturb the factual findings underlying a chambers judge’s order under the Hague Convention, in the absence of palpable or overriding error or the application of the wrong legal test or principle.~

BACKGROUND:  The Appellant, Michelle Sampley, and the Respondent, Matthew Sampley, were married in Alberta in 2010. 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) : Dans une affaire de complot suscitant un débat sur l’exception au ouï-dire des actes manifestes de coconspirateurs, le tribunal conclut qu’il est permis de mettre en preuve les paroles et les gestes des coconspirateurs, malgré l’absence de certains de ceux-ci lors de certains échanges, pour autant que . . . [more]

For the next while the Friday Fillip will be a chapter in a serialized crime novel, interrupted occasionally by a reference you might like to follow up. Both this chapter of the book and the whole story up to this point can be had as PDF files. You may also subscribe to have chapters delivered to you by email.

MEASURING LIFE
 
Chapter 9
Crawl

Lawyers need to find information, the faster the better. As the years go by, your electronic files expand and your ability to retrieve information quickly can suffer. I’ve already looked at desktop search by itself and want to look at search that incorporates your e-mail this time around. A search tool that digs into your inbox and, potentially, everything else on your computer, can eliminate the need to repeat searches in more than one place.

Search Your Email

All of the e-mail clients I’ve used have included search. Most, like Microsoft’s Outlook or Mozilla’s Thunderbird, will search your local . . . [more]

Our non-Ontario readers will be thrilled that in an hour the polls close and you won’t have interminable discussions about Ontario’s election and its implications. This post responds to and builds on Mitch’s prescient post from 18 months ago, and Alice Woolley and Alan Cliff’s posts which dealt with the Ontario Benchers’ Election which wraps up today at 5 PM

My focus isn’t on the substantive issues that Alice focused on yesterday but rather on an underlying governance issue that no-one appears to be talking about. It’s about convocations, cabinets and the tyranny of geography

What are the most . . . [more]

In Keenan v Canac Kitchens, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice concluded that two workers were owed termination notice by their employer because they were not independent contractors as the employer tried to argue, but rather dependent contractors as the evidence showed. Therefore, the employer did owe them termination notice. . . . [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.

Balancing Privacy and the Open Court Principle of Family Law: Does De-Identifying Case Law Protect Anonymity?

Sujoy Chatterjee
Dalhousie Journal of Legal Studies, Volume 23 (2014)

Excerpt: pp 97-103

[Footnotes omitted. They can be found in the original via the link above]

Analyzing the Open Court Principle

The open court principle is a . . . [more]

Prior to the election of Law Society of Upper Canada benchers on April 30, 2015, the Ontario Trial Lawyers’ Association posted on its website a list of benchers who opposed the introduction of Alternative Business Structures. The website stated: “OTLA urges all association members and other eligible licensed lawyer to vote for the following candidates opposed to ABS” (OTLA Bencher Election Voting Guide). At the time some commentators, including me, were quite critical of the OTLA for this approach (“ABS issue dominating bencher vote”)

In this column I want to expand on those criticisms. Not because . . . [more]

Later this week the American Bar Association will publish The Relevant Lawyer: Reimagining the Future of the Legal Profession, a collection of essays on the future of the profession. It includes two chapters written by members of Slaw.

Details of how to get the book itself are here. We’ll publish a full review in Slaw shortly.

. . . [more]

In this new sharing economy, we are sharing our homes through services like Airbnb, sharing our cars through services like Uber and sharing our meals through social dining services like EatWith.

Those with ideas, whether original or crowd-sourced share them and ask that we support the implementation of those ideas by sharing our dollars through crowd funding.

Day to day, we share our lives through Facebook, our photos through Instagram, what we’ve read through links on Twitter, our CVs through LinkedIn and our music through SoundCloud.

It makes me wonder: What’s next? What’s left that’s not already been shared? . . . [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. R. v. Ram, 2015 ONCJ 200

[1] A judge commencing a trial knows little or nothing about the case and relies on counsel to present evidence and submissions. This essential aspect of our adversarial system means it is inappropriate, not to mention difficult, for the judge to second guess the conduct of counsel during the trial. In fact, a good judge . . . [more]