1. The solution for making legal services again available at reasonable cost is to enable CanLII[1] to be the necessary national support service. This requires CanLII be able to provide the support services that are provided by the LAO LAW division of Legal Aid Ontario (LAO) to Ontario lawyers in private practice who do legal aid cases. LAO LAW is a centralized legal research service.[2] As its first Director of Research, beginning in July 1979, I developed its technology of centralized legal research, which involves specialization as an on-going process in regard to: (1) its research lawyers; (2) . . . [more]

The Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) of Ontario recently published a report on ‘alternative voting technologies’, mainly ‘network voting’ by Internet or telephone. The Election Act had been amended in 2010 to require such a study. His conclusion, somewhat controversial, is that no election technology currently exists that can satisfy the criteria that his team decided should apply to any such system before it could be implemented.

The stated criteria are a helpful base line for considering the use of voting technologies. No authoritative list could be found, so after study, the list was created. Most people who have commented . . . [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.

Natural Resource Jurisdiction in Canada
Dwight Newman
Toronto: LexisNexis Canada, 2013

Excerpt from Chapter 4 Devolution of Jurisdiction to the Northern Territories

In various areas of natural resource jurisdiction, a problem that can exist is that case law developed in very different contexts — without any contemplation of the effects on natural resource . . . [more]

When I was looking for an articling position, people would often tell me to make sure that I found a place where I “fit.” At the time, I found this advice incredibly frustrating. I thought “fit” was a criterion that only those candidates who had multiple Bay Street offers could consider. I was more concerned about factors like type of law, location, and simply whether or not I would be hired. However, as I come to the end of my articling term, I find myself giving prospective articling students the same advice.

I articled at a boutique firm practicing in . . . [more]

Discussions about access to justice typically focus attention on access through the traditional routes of courts, lawyers, law schools and pro bono or legal aid service providers. In this context, solutions tend to emphasize more effective use of online technologies or simplification of processes to bridge the gap between those who need legal services and the services they require.

But, as Julie Matthews made clear in her recent article, Educating the Early Assistance Providers, in some cases, community-based intermediaries can function effectively to provide assistance that can reduce or eliminate escalation of a legal problem to the point where . . . [more]

The Ontario Superior Court of Justice has launched a new website this month. The site will be rolling out additional features in the coming months, but already has a new section for the public called “Going to Court?” which provides some basic information about the justice system. There is also a page in this section for teachers and students which provides instructional resources.

In Chief Justice Heather Forster Smith’s speech during the Opening of the Courts on Sept. 24, 2013, she focused on access to justice and the role of technology. In addition to envisioning greater e-filing in . . . [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. Meads v. Meads 2012 ABQB 571
   

   [1] This Court has developed a new awareness and understanding of a category of vexatious litigant. As we shall see, while there is often a lack of homogeneity, and some individuals or groups have no name or special identity, they (by their own admission or by descriptions given by others) often fall into the following descriptions: Detaxers;

Lawyers tend to think of time in units of .1 hour.

But that is eons compared to some other time measurements.

If you are having trouble getting your head around the concept and speed of quantum computing that Simon wrote about yesterday, consider time metrics for tech we currently have.

Peter Higgs and Francois Englert recently won the Nobel Prize for physics for predicting the existence of the Higgs boson particle that explains how elementary matter attained the mass to form stars and planets. The actual existence of the Higgs boson was confirmed at the Large Hadron Collider at . . . [more]

The Ontario Superior Court of Justice rendered a judgment on the Ikea Monkey in September and it is just as weird as you would expect. However, this decision and others dealing with the custody of animals raise questions regarding animal welfare, the move towards protective rights legislation, and the remaining roadblocks to accepting notions of animal rights under the law.

The Ikea Monkey:

Most of you will remember the story of Darwin, the macaque who escaped from his owner’s locked car last December and made his way into a Toronto area Ikea store, wearing a diaper and winter coat . . . [more]

One of the features that I really, really like in the LEGISinfo service is a wee little link in the right panel of the Status Overview for a Bill. The link is titled “Similar Bills Introduced in Previous Sessions”. It is extremely useful to look at previous iterations of legislation and likewise to see how long something has been on Parliament’s agenda. I use this information regularly, most recently for a Slaw post.

Since I was on a plane last week, the title of Bill C-3 which was introduced on Friday caught my eye: “An Act to enact the . . . [more]

As with so many things, the legendary — and ofttimes apocryphal — Yogi Berra said it best: “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” Still, there are developments that seem to be certainly portentous, even if we can’t say what shape the portents will assume tomorrow and the day after that. All of which wriggling is appropriate to a discussion of quantum computing, if only because the very nature of quanta is elusively probabilistic.

But what might any of this have to do with law? Here’s the simple thought: we can see that as information technology becomes more . . . [more]