There are many excellent recommendations in the CBA’s Reaching Equal Justice report. 

As a law professor and a member of the Legal Education and Training Team of the CBA’s Legal Futures initiative, I naturally focused on those relating to law schools, including this one:

All graduating law students should have a basic understanding of the issues relating to access to justice and know that fostering access to justice is an integral part of their professional responsibility.

This sounds great but there is a problem. Reaching Equal Justice assumes that access to justice is part of a Canadian lawyer’s professional . . . [more]

Back in April, I posted about a case where the failure of a real estate lawyer to check their fax machine cost their purchaser client a $100,000 deposit. My post is here if anyone is looking for a refresher on the facts.

The purchaser recently appealed the decision to the Court of Appeal who, in a very short decision, upheld Justice Lederman’s decision. . . . [more]

This article is by Nora Rock, corporate writer and policy analyst at LAWPRO.

From a malpractice claims perspective, criminal law may not be as safe an area of practice as you might think: LAWPRO sees over 30 criminal law claims per year on average. These claims are sometimes complicated by steps taken by lawyers who take certain dangerous DIY steps in the name of claim “self-repair”.

One of the most common bases for claims against criminal lawyers is “ineffective assistance of counsel”. This allegation, not uncommon as an appeal ground in criminal court, may also be cited in a malpractice . . . [more]

Shortly after being disappointed that Oxford’s Constitutions of the World wanted money from me — my university background and the ethic of free knowledge can’t be taken out of the boy, it seems — I learn about Constitute. Here, too, are the world’s constitutions, but absent any fee.

Now, Constitute doesn’t promise to update according to a schedule (they claim they’re up-to-date as of September 2013), and though all the constitutions I’ve had a quick look at are set out in English, there’s no indication of how or by whom they were translated from their original language, this is . . . [more]

Those of you who are into legal informatics will like to know that there’s a proposal to form a new technical committee at OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) to work on “an open standard for machine-readable tagging of legal citations.” Legalcite, if the draft proposal is approved, will come up with a “tagging model” that would let content producers affix a variety of metadata to a case or statute citation in such a way that a computer could, first, recognize that the citation was just that: a legal citation; and then “understand” a number of things . . . [more]

Last week a London criminal court tackled the thorny problem of whether a witness should be required to remove her full-face veil.

Judge Peter Murphy ruled the witness must remove it when giving evidence but may wear it at other times during her trial. When she is not wearing it only the judge, jury and counsel will be permitted to see her face. Courtroom artists will not be permitted to sketch he without her veil. See the judge’s reasons here: The Queen -v- D (R) . . . [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. BC Injury Law Blog   2. The Court    3. Slater Vecchio Connected   4. Le Blogue du CRL    5. Ontario Condo Law Blog

Two tragic deaths, months and thousands of kilometers apart, recently collided in my consciousness as I pondered the topic of my latest contribution to this SLAW Justice Column.

In late March of 2013 a jury found Richard Kachkar not criminally responsible (“NCR”) in the tragic high-profile death of Sgt. Ryan Russel. Kachkar had been charged with murder after an early morning barefoot rampage in a stolen snowplow. By the time the evidence at this trial was done, both the defence and crown psychiatric experts had reached the conclusion that Kachkar was suffering from a serious and debilitating mental illness. The . . . [more]

The Ontario Court of Appeal released a decision earlier this month in Delicata v. Incorporated Synod of the Diocese of Huron, resolving a dispute between the congregation of an Anglican church in Windsor and the larger Anglican Church of Canada. The conflict originated in the Anglican Church of Canada’s blessing of same-sex marriages. The congregation of St. Aidan’s voted to leave the Synod of the Diocese of Huron after the Bishop of the Synod accepted a resolution to “grant permission to clergy, whose conscience permits, to bless the duly solemnized and registered civil marriages between same-sex couples.”

Although the . . . [more]

Énergie, Mines et Ressources : Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro n'a pas démontré que la Régie de l'énergie avait commis une erreur révisable en confirmant le calcul de la capacité de transport disponible établi par Hydro-Québec ayant mené celle-ci à conclure que la capacité du réseau québécois ne suffira pas à permettre de transporter à la fois la charge locale et une partie de l'énergie en provenance des futures centrales du Bas-Churchill (C.S.).

Occasionally here at SLAW I feel the need to represent the East Coast with an appropriately themed post. Earlier this week an interesting event happened when a Greenland Shark was brought back to Halifax in order to be examined. Why is this interesting? Because this is a shark that can grow over 6 metres in length, weigh over 2000 lbs, (perhaps larger than Great Whites) and we (meaning science type folk) know virtually nothing about it! This animal lives in the coldest, deepest parts of the ocean and a study from the 50’s estimated that they could live to be . . . [more]

Slaw readers who are also hockey fans might be aware of this new NHL penalty: 2 minutes for removing your helmet before a fight.

Well, last night we were given a little reminder to “not judge a pugilist book by its cover”; along with “the code” among hockey fighters. Not impressed with the new rule, Krys Barch of the Islanders and Brett Gallant of the Devils found themselves a loophole — they took each other’s helmets off. Here’s the video clip:

Given the number of physical gestures leading up to the fight, one would assume they hadn’t discussed the . . . [more]