Earlier this month I was invited to the Law Society of Upper Canada’s Alternative Business Structures symposium. It was a bringing together of international speakers, thinkers and interested parties to discuss the possibility of allowing Alternative Business Structures (ABS) in Ontario – read: allowing outside investment in legal services providers, as is permitted in the UK and Australia.

Kudos to Benchers, Susan McGrath and Malcolm Mercer for organizing the event.

For those of us who were there, the consensus seemed to be that if ABS was allowed in Ontario the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse would not descend upon our . . . [more]

Although the Parti Québécois government has yet to table any legislation regarding it's proposed Charter of Quebec Values, and has not provided any firm date as to when it expects to do so, on October 9, 2013, a Québec solidaire member of the national assembly tabled private member's Bill 398, Charter of Quebec State Secularism in the assembly. This Bill conveys that party’s position and tries to provide a compromise to end the contentious debate sparked by the PQ’s proposal.

Section 649 of the Criminal Code makes it an offence for a juror to disclose “any information relating to the proceedings of the jury when it was absent from the courtroom that was not subsequently disclosed in open court.” This sweeping prohibition has prevented the public from knowing about the reasons for, and the process by which, juries go about making decisions. The concern addressed here relates to communications with the media by jury members following conclusion of a trial, a common feature of high profile cases in the United States. It is time to loosen these restrictions and let . . . [more]

Back when I knew everything the world was much simpler. Any topic, situation, challenge or choice could be easily placed into one of two categories. Category 1 consisted of matters where I was right and category 2 consisted of matters that didn’t matter.

Back when I knew everything there were no hard choices. Other people’s resources were best directed to ends of my choosing and my own resources were merely allocated between “now” and “soon”, possibly to “later”, but never to “never”.

Back when I knew everything there was no gap between . . . [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.

Canadian Federal Political Parties and Personal Privacy Protection: A Comparative Analysis
Colin J. Bennett & Robin M. Bayley
Commissioned by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada
Privacy Research Papers, March 2012

Excerpt chosen by Slaw.

[Footnotes are omitted. They are available in the full version via the hyperlink above.]

Federal and . . . [more]

Paul Daly has posted an interesting argument on his blog, Administrative Law Matters, relating to the legality — or perhaps correctness — of Prime Minister Harper’s appointment of Federal Cour of Appeal Justice Nadon to the Supreme Court. As everyone will likely know, the governing provisions are ss.5 and 6 of the Supreme Court Act, which read as follows:

5. Any person may be appointed a judge who is or has been a judge of a superior court of a province or a barrister or advocate of at least ten years standing at the bar of a province.

6.

. . . [more]

As we’ve discussed a number of times on Slaw, a good many hyperlinks break over time as their targets get moved or taken down. This link rot is particularly challenging in academia and in law, where cited authorities are an important component of one’s argument.

In a 16 page document available on SSRN three weeks ago, “Perma: Scoping and Addressing the Problem of Link and Reference Rot in Legal Citations,” Harvard professors Jonathan Zittrain and Kendra Albert:

. . . document a serious problem of reference rot: more than 70% of the URLs within the Harvard Law Review

. . . [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;

. . . [more]

There are a lot of great resources for primary law online, both free and fee. However, to get legal analysis and cutting edge thinking on current legal topics there are also some great resources for free online. Bar associations are a great source (of course!) but here are some others that have great content. You just have to know where to look.

Lexology
Lexology (aka ACC Newstand) brings together articles submitted by major commercial law firms. Register and then search the site or set up custom RSS feeds to be delivered Outlook or your feed reader. International in scope, the . . . [more]

One of the pleasures of dabbling in the law and literature field is finding an overlooked treasure. The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald is one such gem.

The Bookshop is the slow, graceful telling of Florence Green’s attempt to establish a bookshop in a quiet English town. Green is described as “small, wispy and wiry, somewhat insignificant from the front view, and totally so from the back.” She is a character to be ignored and bypassed by the social structure and politics of the town until she purchases a derelict, abandoned property to start her shop. Undeterred by the shop’s active . . . [more]

It is budgeting season again for many law firm libraries. My process for this arduous task is to look at the things that my department collects in baskets, compare the balance of the baskets to each other, and decide which baskets need more and which need less. As an example, for the last few years the ‘print collection’ basket has been weighing less.

My law firm library has a lot of baskets: print collection, database access, items used for current awareness, Canadian content, foreign content, things that are available to borrow locally, things that we can share between our offices, . . . [more]

When a partner leaves a law firm for another practice, what should happen to his or her email account at the original firm? Should, or must, the original firm continue to read and respond to the emails? Must it forward all or some of the emails to the former partner? Should it say how that person can now be reached? Or should it simply send an automated bounce-back message that the email account is now closed?

These questions were the subject of an official ethics ruling of the Philadelphia Bar Association last month. Here is a news report on it. . . . [more]