What makes a law school great? What should a law school curriculum seek to accomplish in light of the school’s obligations to its students, its university, the pursuit of knowledge, the profession, and society as a whole? What should a law school strive to be?

Every law school has to answer these questions one way or another, and events of the last few years – the crises of American legal education and Canadian articling, and global and technological shifts in the legal services market – have given them greater urgency.

In this column I want to share my own law . . . [more]

Rumors of the book’s death have clearly been exaggerated, and another lament is not needed. Still, I’m finding the books on my desk and shelves noticeably altered by the digital age of Kindles and iPads. My books have assumed a weight, for example, when I’m packing for trip, that I can’t recall them having had before. And sometimes when I turn the page, I have to pause over the extravagance of having had that page printed, assembled, bound, and shipped for me to read but once, perhaps adding a note to its luxuriant margin. Can it be that what remains . . . [more]

It can be uncomfortable to talk about money. When handling real estate purchases and domestic contracts, however, lawyers can’t afford to accept purchase funds on a “no questions asked” basis.

Why not? Because if purchase funds come from somebody other than the prospective owner, the doctrine of resulting trust presumes that, regardless of who is on title, the owner holds the property in trust for whoever advanced the funds.

In this article from the February 2015 issue of LAWPRO Magazine, Lisa Weinstein (VP, TitlePLUS) explains how to reduce the risk of a claim related to a trust vs. gift . . . [more]

Christine M. Stouffer, Director of Library Services at Thompson Hine LLP in Cleveland, has a nice article in the February issue of the AALL Spectrum. It’s called, “Closing the Gap: Teaching ‘Practice-Ready’ Legal Skills,” and talks about the “widening gap between legal education and real-world legal practice skills” and the role that law librarians can play in narrowing that perceived gap.

Stouffer touches on the January 2014 report from the American Bar Association Task Force on the Future of Legal Education. She provides a good review of this report and I would recommend reading this . . . [more]

Each Monday we present brief excerpts of recent posts from five of Canada’s award­-winning legal blogs chosen at random* from sixty 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. Pensions & Benefits Law 2. Clicklaw Blog 3. LSUC Treasurer’s Blog 4. IPilogue 5. Canadian Appeals Monitor

Pensions & Benefits Law
C.D. Howe Paper: The Taxation of Single-Employer Target Benefit Plans – Where We Are and Where We Ought To Be

Jana Steele, Ian McSweeney, Barry Gros and Karen . . . [more]

Wikipedia defines link rot as “the process by which hyperlinks on individual websites or the Internet in general point to web pages, servers or other resources that have become permanently unavailable.” Link rot is common throughout the online world. It is particularly troubling, however, when it occurs in legal materials where researchers seek to find important items that are no longer at the cited URL.

One early project to combat this problem began in 2007. The Chesapeake Digital Preservation Group “features government, policy, and legal information archived from the Web through a partnership between state and academic law libraries.” This . . . [more]

Despite the interdisciplinary nature of law, lawyers rarely turn to medicine to look for the intersection between the two fields.

The exceptions to this would be the endless debate about work-life balance. For example, The CBA Futures report makes several references to health and wellness for lawyers as part of a sustainable practice.

Another intersection would be the recent focus by the Ontario Bar Association’s initiative, Opening Remarks, to promote conversations about mental health in the profession. This is an initiative led by the OBA President, Orlando Da Silva, based on his own experiences with depression.

Occasionally there are . . . [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) : À la lumière de la jurisprudence québécoise et canadienne, la Cour impose à X, reconnu coupable de conduite dangereuse ayant causé la mort de l’un de ses amis, une mise sous garde en milieu fermé de 6 mois assortie d’une probation de 18 mois ainsi qu’une interdiction . . . [more]

On one Sunday each month we bring you a summary from Supreme Advocacy LLP of recent decisions at the Supreme Court of Canada. Supreme Advocacy LLP offers a weekly electronic newsletter, Supreme Advocacy Letter, to which you may subscribe.

Summary of all appeals and leaves to appeal granted (so you know what the S.C.C. will soon be dealing with) (Jan. 7 – Feb. 11, 2015 inclusive).

Appeals

Criminal Law: Money Laundering
Canada (Attorney General) v. Federation of Law Societies of Canada, 2015 SCC 7 (35399)
Federal proceeds of crime/money laundering/terrorist financing legislation (including regulations) “interfere with the lawyer’s . . . [more]

Summaries of selected recent cases are provided each week to Slaw by Maritime Law Book. Every Sunday we present a precis of the latest summaries, a fuller version of which can be found on MLB-Slaw Selected Case Summaries at cases.slaw.ca.

This week’s summaries concern:
Administrative Law – Civil Rights – Libel and Slander

Dichmont v. Newfoundland and Labrador (Minister of Government Services and Lands) et al. 2015 NLTD(G.) 14
Administrative Law – Civil Rights
Summary: Dichmont, for reasons of her religious convictions, resigned as a marriage commissioner when the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador insisted that same sex . . . [more]

One of the many functions of legislation is to overrule different aspects of the common law, as need demands, and establish new schema in their place. Family law is no different in this regard than the law of property, torts and contract, particularly following the English Parliament’s seizure of jurisdiction in matrimonial causes from the ecclesiastical courts in 1857. With the passage of time, lovely old torts such as jactitation of marriage, criminal conversation, loss of consortium, enticement of a spouse, restitution of conjugal rights and breach of promise to marry have fallen by the wayside, banned by one provincial . . . [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.

MEASURING LIFE
 
Chapter 2
Smell the Rain