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

It is common now for those promoting justice reform to urge a “client-centred” or “user-centred” approach. But what does it really mean to take a “user-centred” approach? Is it enough for justice insiders to take their own understanding of the client experience into account or to invite one or more ‘users’ of the system to participate in reform discussions? Just how do we truly obtain the perspective of those using (or wanting to use) the justice system?

Once again, we can look outside our own sector for clues.

Example #1 – Business

The business world has been focusing for hundreds . . . [more]

The Canadian Bar Association has undertaken an update of the Joint Policy Statement on Audit Inquiries (“JPS”), in collaboration with the Auditing and Assurance Standards Board. An auditor of an entity’s financial statements will often request that its lawyers confirm the reasonableness of the entity’s evaluation of claims and possible claims both by and against the entity. The JPS was developed in 1978 by the CBA and (then) CICA to provide guidance on communication protocols between the auditor, law firm and management of the entity, in order to protect solicitor-client privilege and keep an appropriate distance between the auditor and . . . [more]

Prepared by
Laverne Jacobs, PhD
Associate Professor
Director of Graduate Studies
University of Windsor, Faculty of Law

Hi Everyone,

it’s with great pleasure that I’m writing to announce that the Windsor Yearbook of Access to Justice has become an open access journal.

Our first open access issue (31(1)) became available last week. The move to open access was initiated by an editorial team of our colleagues over the past few years, along with Yearbook coordinator, Vidya Balachandar. The initiative was led by former Editors-in-Chief, Reem Bahdi and Myra Tawfik. Here is a link to issue 31(1): http://ojs.uwindsor.ca/ojs/leddy/index.php/WYAJ

The Yearbook’s move . . . [more]

The other Arab world. Not the masked, Kalashnikov wielding crazies the media treats us to each day. But highly educated, global citizens that are passionate about innovation in government. There are times you see very pointedly that you are being brainwashed.

The impressive three-day Government Summit that the government of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) annually organises in Dubai is a Davos style combination of large plenaries, cosy workshops, and ‘experience-it’ expositions. I was there last week. The crowd is decidedly international, but it’s refreshing to walk around in a definition of ‘international’ in which ‘Western’ is a very small . . . [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. Armitage, 2015 ONCJ 64

[2] Before I get to this, I would like to make two short comments. First of all, I want to say something about the style of this decision. For those who have read some of my past judgments, the reader may notice a change. For Jesse Armitage, I have tried to say what I wanted . . . [more]

When the Uniform Law Conference of Canada decided, back in 1993, to address the legal effect of electronic communications, it started with the law of evidence. See 1993 Proceedings of the Uniform Law Conference of Canada, Appendix G, pages 34-35, 198 – 206. It was clear even then that more and more information intended to have legal consequences was generated, communicated and stored by electronic means. If the legal consequences were to be properly adjudicated, the information had to be capable of being put before the adjudicators.

The question was thought to be of interest both to barristers, who . . . [more]