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. Borowski v. Canada (Attorney general) [1989] 1 SCR 342
   

   SOPINKA J. — This appeal by leave of this Court is from the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal, reflex, [1987] 4 W.W.R. 385, which affirmed the judgment at trial of Matheson J. of the Saskatchewan Court of Queen’s Bench, reflex, [1984] 1 W.W.R. 15, dismissing the action of the plaintiff (appellant in this Court). In

Two weeks ago, I suggested that Ontario’s courts will need to implement serious change if they intend to carry out the Supreme Court’s directive to facilitate access to justice through summary judgment.

Lawyers undoubtedly need to change too. Historically, there have been many amazing advocates like J.J. Robinette and G.A. Martin that all lawyers should strive to emulate. I wonder whether the next generation of amazing lawyers will be cut from the same cloth. It goes without saying that every effective lawyer obviously needs strong advocacy skills. But when “most Canadians cannot afford to sue when they are wronged . . . [more]

A group of law students has drafted an open letter to the Benchers of the Law Society of Upper Canada calling for the repeal of the fee levied on licensee applicants in order to fund the LPP. According to a communication from Christopher Rudnicki, a third year student at Windsor Law:

As discussed in a previous post on Slaw, the Law Society of Upper Canada sent licensee candidates an invoice last week for $3,164 on top of the $1,695 already required to write the bar. The additional fee was levied to fund the LSUC’s new Law Practice Program, an

There has been quite a bit of controversy in the past few years about the use of experts in court, the appropriate role of experts in assisting judges, the subject matters upon which experts may testify and the ever-present problem of experts being hired by parties yet having to remain neutral in the search for the truth.

Recently, this issue has been debated outside legal circles. In the wake of high profile crimes such as that of Guy Turcotte who killed his two young children in 2009, the media has grabbed hold of these questions and asked how it is . . . [more]

Trilogies seem to be all the rage these days. Did a book a fraction of the length of The Lord of The Rings trilogy really need to be bisected into a bloated three-part epic about a band of short-statured heroes on a quest to slay a dragon? Probably not but it will be at least another year before we see the end of the newly expanded Hobbit theatrical release. So what to do with this, the fourth in my annual Crime & Punishment retrospective? A prologue seems out of place…does anyone really want to hear my predictions for criminal justice . . . [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.

Technology

Use the TAB Key to Move From Field to Field in an Online Form
Dan Pinnington

If you buy something online, you will likely have to enter various details into a form of some sort (e.g., name, address, phone number, email, credit card TAB-keynumber, etc.). This can be a tad tedious if there are many fields on the form – you type a few characters, stop, reach for the . . . [more]

On January 23, 2014, the Supreme Court of Canada released its decision in the case of Hryniak v. Mauldin, in which it signaled a fundamental shift in the way that summary judgment motions are to be handled in the Province of Ontario.

A scheduling decision, released last week by Justice Brown of the Commercial List in Toronto, provides the first insight as to how summary judgment motions may be changing on a practical level.

Justice Brown noted, correctly, that it is conceivable that parties may end up having to make up to three appearances in connection with motions . . . [more]

A couple of posts ago Thomas R. Bruce reminded me of the work that he, and a team of others, had done for Cornell’s Legal Information Institute on modelling American legislation. This is an extremely useful project that anyone working on modelling data of any kind would benefit from reviewing.

On the project website you will find project documentation, visual documentation and documentation on data model versions. I returned to the project documentation myself this past weekend and found myself having some difficulty conceptualizing the written report as a whole.

This is partly due to the lack of an . . . [more]

Slaw readers might like to know that Stephen Mason’s journal, Digital Evidence and Electronic Signature Law Review, is now open source, under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 license.

Readers will remember that Mason’s book Electronic Signatures in Law was reviewed on Slaw not long ago and an excerpt from that book was one of our recent Thursday Thinkpieces.

The Digital Evidence and Electronic Signature Law Review is published by Mason “with the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (IALS), School of Advanced Study, University of London on the SAS Open Journals System.” The journal welcomes submissions for its peer-review . . . [more]

We were recently made aware of a September 2013 news release from the FBI, stating that a lawyer-targetting fraudster had pleaded guilty and received hefty fines and a prison sentence. Nice to see a victory in the struggle against online scams. The number of law enforcement agencies involved shows how international these scams are, and how much cooperation is required to bring the fraudsters to justice.

Here is the text of the release:

The United States Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Pennsylvania announced that a Nigerian national charged in connection with a multi-national scheme that bilked more than

One of the ideas that surfaced in the lively discussions at the OBA’s Civil Litigation program which I co-chaired last week, was the importance of “face time” between counsel, as a means of improving communication, reducing hostility and keeping lawyers focused on the efficient and economical resolution of disputes.

The view was expressed that counsel sometimes adopt a tone in emails that they would not use in person. Someone has described this as “courage from a distance”.

At the break I was introduced to a California practitioner in the audience who informed me that the rules of procedure in that . . . [more]

It always makes me happy when I see law library folk reaching out to other communities to explain the work we do. Law library technicians and librarians work in a wide range of settings and take on a lot of different responsibilities depending on the setting and their roles. The library community in Ontario know that January is “SuperConference” month since the Ontario Library Association puts on its annual conference in Toronto at the end of January. Brenda Wong and Karen Sawatzy of Library Technician Dialog blog fame (among other great accomplishments!) made the trek from Saskatchewan and Manitoba to . . . [more]