The Council of the Nova Scotia Barristers Society has just released a report produced by Victoria Rees, their Director of Professional Responsibility, entitled “Transforming Regulation and Governance in the Public Interest.” The report is currently under consideration by the Council.

From the Executive Summary:

The goal of this paper is to inform, not to persuade.
In adopting ‘Transforming Regulation and Governance in the Public Interest’ as a strategic priority, Council has signalled that it wants to consider fundamental and perhaps profound change. Council members will need to approach the concept of transforming regulation and governance with an open

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Innovation in the legal space is lagging behind almost every other industry. For years now, people have been saying that the law students will take up the mantle and be the new wave of innovation, a new way of doing law that will mean affordable legal services. There is little evidence of this with students or in the profession. This gap in innovation is attributed to a reason for unaffordable legal services. There are exceptions to the rule, such as Cognition, and Riverview in the UK. Why is this happening? What can we learn from the innovators? And what can . . . [more]

I remain indebted to peer review. Sure, I’ve been called a dilettante. Had ideas dismissed as half-baked. Had the floor swept with the derivative nature of my work. Been chastised for treating data as singular. And then the self-inflicted wounds of my own careless error. But having suffered from what appears only at first glance to be the slings and arrows of outrageous peer-review, I stand by this process.

I will defend a career’s worth of the anonymous and thankless work of reviewers who have provided the concerted kind of attention that I undoubtedly needed. It has made me, such . . . [more]

Each Monday we present brief excerpts of recent posts from five of Canada’s award-winning legal blogs chosen at random* from forty-one 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. Precedent  2. SOQUIJ Blogue  3. BC Injury Law and ICBC Claims B  4. Legal Post  5. Legal Feeds

Precedent
Precedent opens the TSX
Melissa Kluger, Precedent’s editor and publisher, opened the Toronto Stock Exchange this morning to mark tomorrow night’s AIDSbeat Rock & Roll Circus. Precedent is a proud . . . [more]

According to an article in the Globe and Mail, newly appointed Justice Nadon “has been told” — presumably by the Chief Justice — to stay away, because of the pending challenge to his status.

The article quotes a letter by deputy registrar, Mary McFadyen, written at the behest of “the court” to the provincial and federal governments, making clear that:

As questions concerning the legality of Justice Nadon’s appointment are pending before the Court, it has adopted the following measures to ensure that justice is both done and is seen to be done in an independent and impartial manner: 1.

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The chances of winning the Lotto 6/49 jackpot is about 1 in 13,983,816. The odds of a lawyer winning that jackpot are exponentially higher.

Don Worme of Semaganis Worme in Saskatoon hit the winning number on Aug. 31, 2013. He did not come forward as the winner until this past week, making sure his practice was in order first.

Worme won $14.7 million, the largest win in Saskatchewan. Worme has indicated he plans on making contributions to some charitable organizations, but has something else in mind as well. He plans on using the funds to “super-charging” his practice, which focuses . . . [more]

Once upon a time, Humpty Dumpty reminded Alice, in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass:

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone. “It means just what I choose it to mean – neither more or less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all.”

Readers of this blog, and others who follow Canadian politics and law, will know that there is some controversy surrounding the appointment, by the Prime Minister of Canada, . . . [more]

Commission Charbonneau : La commission Charbonneau pourra utiliser les communications interceptées lors de la surveillance électronique de dirigeants de la FTQ.

This week's summaries concern: Termination of life support / Use of cell phone while driving / Disclosure of lawyer's files:

the (proclaimed by others) progenitor of the law and economics movement.

http://www.worldeconomicsassociation.org/newsletterarticles/ronald-coase-1910-2013-by-david-westbrook

The appeal of the Coase theorem, and to lesser extent the “Theory of the Firm,” to legal scholars is somewhat puzzling. While many law professors resisted the impulse to explain the world in terms of implicit contracts and around alleged costs (the even more speculative reliance on alternative uses of factors of production has been, to my knowledge, ignored), more subscribed. This is odd. One might have thought that lawyers would viscerally sense the importance of history, of power, of institutional arrangements — of lots of things besides

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Earlier this month here in Nova Scotia we undertook an exercise in democracy, the very foundation of our legal system. From a numbers perspective two very interesting numbers came out of that exercise. Firstly, the results of the election proved to be the first time in 130 years that a first term government in Nova Scotia was not returned to power. This is not a political blog so I’m not going to go into any depth on that point other than to say that something happening for the first time in 130 years sounds like a significant event but actually . . . [more]

I had my first cullen skink the other day.

I felt a little as dear M. Jourdain must have felt when he learned he’d been speaking prose all his life, for I’ve had many a chowder in my time that’s come within a ace of skink, had I but known it. Finnan haddie, potatoes, onions, milk or cream. But the name! A delicious mouthful all on its own. Cullen’s a town pretty much in the top right-hand corner of Scotland, and skink, well that’s a Scottish word originally for a shin of beef but later generalized to mean a . . . [more]