I now continue sharing some of the lessons I learned from walking the historic pilgrimage route in France and Spain, the Camino Frances, over six weeks in May and June. Before we started our journey, the question in our minds was how we were going to sustain walking 20 or 25 (or even 30) kilometres a day, carrying all our belongings? We practiced hiking regularly with our backpacks loaded, but could only really manage time for walking two or maybe three days in a row. How would we walk for 35 days?

After the first two weeks–especially walking through . . . [more]

The Canadian Judicial Council (CJC) has just released its 2012-2013 Annual Report, aussi disponible en français, naturellement.

The Report noted the publication during the year of three informational documents related to the role of technology:

• Guidelines on Benchmarking of Costs
• Court Information Management Policy Framework to Accommodate the Digital Environment
• A Comparative Analysis of Key Characteristics of Court Administration Systems

Judicial conduct, one of the key concerns of the CJC, will be the subject of review:

In the coming months, Council will consider how best to engage stakeholders and other Canadians to explore all and any appropriate avenues

. . . [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. Legal Post   2. Le Blogue du CRL   3. Environmental Law and Litigation   4. Michael Geist    5. Legal Feeds Blog

We have long been fans of Tom Mighell’s iPad books, which include iPad in One Hour for Lawyers, iPad Apps in One Hour for Lawyers, and now the third member of the series, iPad in One Hour for Litigators. If lawyers have tended to fall in love with the iPad, litigators are becoming obsessed with it.

The small form factor, the ease of use and the ability to compete with large firms which have huge litigation budgets have all been factors. One thing we’ve seen as we lecture is that litigators buy the iPad and only then ask, . . . [more]

It’s not enough that there are some who claim there are already too many law schools in Canada, too few articling positions, and too much competition in the job market for junior lawyers. Now they want to make another law school which appears reserved for homophobes, or at the very least a law school which explicitly states that homosexuality is wrong.

The proposed law school would be housed at Trinity Western University (TWU) in Langley, B.C., a private Christian institution associated with the Evangelical Free Church of Canada, with approximately 3,500 students. The school has a Community Covenant Agreement which . . . [more]

One Sunday each month OnPoint Legal Research provides Slaw with an extended summary of, and counsel’s commentary on, an important case from the British Columbia, Alberta, or Ontario court of appeal.

ALLEN v. AINSWORTH LUMBER CO. LTD., 2013 BCCA 271

1. CASE SUMMARY

Areas of Law: Employment; Wrongful Dismissal; Constructive Dismissal

~Employers as well as employees could take the benefit of the doctrine of constructive dismissal. Whether the departure of an employee was properly a termination or a repudiation of employment was a finding of fact for the trial judge~

Discussion: This wrongful dismissal case was unusual in that the . . . [more]

Those of us who write for and read Slaw spend a lot of our time deriving meaning from books or other documents, not an easy task some of the time, particularly when the tomes are old and the language archaic. Imagine, then, how frustrating it must be for scholars when they come up against a text that utterly defies comprehension. Such is the Voynich Manuscript.

Created around 1420, likely in northern Italy, the 200 vellum pages are beautifully inscribed with line after line of what would appear to be text written in characters that are unique to the book. It . . . [more]

At the end of June the Attorney General of Ontario announced that Alvin Fiddler, deputy grand chief of the Nishnawbe Aski Nation would co-chair a new panel intended to help rectify the severe underrepresentation of First Nations peoples in Ontario’s justice and jury. The panel will oversee the implementation of seventeen recommendations made by former Chief Justice Frank Iacobucci in his report “First Nations Representation on Ontario Juries”. The report, which was released to the public last February, was initially intended to examine the narrow issue of First Nations peoples and jury representation. However, with Iacobucci drawing the . . . [more]

As I like to point out, law reform bodies can be a great source for legal research. They often conduct widespread consultation with stakeholders, compare how other jurisdictions deal with the same problem and frequently dig into the history of an issue.

Here are a few examples just from this month:

• Law Commission of Ontario Final Report on Increasing Access to Family Justice: “The family law system has been the subject of much comment in recent years and many reports recommending changes to the system. Since 2010, there have been reforms in relation to procedures to address domestic violence

. . . [more]

We are closing in on the dog days of summer and so I was thinking about what greater efficiency, technology and new players do to large firms in Canada.

If a law firm invests more heavily in process improvement, it becomes more efficient – in other words it can do more work with less people or through a different mix of skill sets. The firm will no longer need to hire huge swaths of new lawyers every year as most of any annual growth will be accommodated either by efficiency gains or by better use of non-lawyer personnel to do . . . [more]

On July 15, 2013, the Ontario Human Rights Commission launched a new policy on removing the 'Canadian experience' barrier in recruiting. A requirement for Canadian experience, even when implemented in good faith, can be an impenetrable barrier in recruiting, selecting, hiring or accrediting, and may result in discrimination.

One interesting scrap of legal news that passed under the radar recently was a testy exchange involving Hideaki Ueda, Japan’s human rights envoy to the United Nations at a session of the UN torture committee in Geneva, Switzerland. The donnybrook arose when a fellow envoy called-out the Japanese criminal system for not mandating electronic recording or the presence of counsel at police interrogations. Mr. Ueda sprang to his nation’s defence, only to be met by the audience’s muffled laughter. In true diplomatic fashion, Japan’s emissary responded by telling his esteemed colleagues to “shut up” not once, but twice. . . . [more]