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. Entertainment & Media Law Signal   2. Precedent: The New Rules of Law and Style   3. Slater Vecchio Connected   4. Legal Feeds    5. Off the Shelf

Nobody said starting a new law school would be easy.

Lakehead University plans on opening the first new law school in Ontario in over 40 years in September 2013. The school stylizes itself as the law school “in the North for the North,” and will focus on pressing issues in rural Ontario, including:

1. aboriginal law and understanding of aboriginal issues
2. the needs of small practitioners
3. natural resources law, such as mining rights and employment standards

Development of this specialized curriculum has sparked controversy, before it has even started. The conflict started when the university Senate replaced a mandatory 1st-year full . . . [more]

Summaries of selected recent cases are provided each week to Slaw by Maritime Law Book. Every Sunday we present a precis of the latest summaries, a fuller version of which can be found on MLB-Slaw Selected Case Summaries at cases.slaw.ca.

This week's summaries concern: Disability insurance / Expungement of trade mark / Retroactive maintenance order / Real property boundary / Requirement of leave to appeal:

As we said last year on Good Friday, there are five nationwide holidays in this country: Canada Day (July 1), Labour Day (1st Monday in September), Christmas Day (December 25), New Year’s Day (January 1)—and Good Friday, today (which is two days prior to Easter, which in turn falls, roughly speaking, on the first Sunday after the first full moon, after the vernal equinox).

There will likely be no new entries on Slaw today.

See you all on Monday—which is not a statutory holiday in any province or territory and not a holiday within the Canada Labour Code . . . . . [more]

If you haven’t read about the LAC’s new Code of Conduct, the National Post has the issues well covered. The following section in particular is the portion of the Code (available online) that has most Librarians up in arms:

4.4.2 Teaching, speaking at conferences, and other personal engagements

On occasion, LAC employees may be asked by third parties to teach or to speak at or be a guest at conferences as a personal activity or part-time employment. Such activities have been identified as high risk to LAC and to the employee with regard to conflict of

. . . [more]

In the large business arena, we are starting to see some interesting developments that impact the way law firms are selected for work – which in turn is starting to impact the role of rain-makers in firms.

In larger companies, procurement teams are becoming more active and influential in the legal field. General Counsel are being pushed harder to do more with less and C-suite executives are becoming less convinced that selecting law firms is different from selecting property managers or other suppliers.

Procurement brings a more disciplined and rigorous approach to selecting firms that focuses on costs, but also . . . [more]

We’re once again inspired by the badass ways in which some law students are taking on their institutions. Earlier this month, the Dean of the Faculty of Common Law at the University of Ottawa sent out an email to all the students at the law school warning them that a student Research Assistant had filed a grievance that was against the interests of all other students. As a result, the Dean wrote, there would be less research positions available to everyone this summer. Two Stewards from CUPE local 2626, the Teaching and Research Assistant’s union, then responded to the Dean, . . . [more]

The Law Commissions of Scotland, England and Wales have proposed a clarification of British law about unfair terms in consumer contracts, to ensure that that law applies to end-user licence agreements for software and online services (EULAs).

Canadian jurisdictions do not (so far as I know) have legislation with ‘unfair terms’ in the name, while the UK has implemented the EU Directive on Unfair Terms. (French courts held a decade ago that online contracts, notably the AOL (2004) and Tiscali (2005) subscriber agreements, were subject to the comparable French law – and invalidated a large proportion of the . . . [more]

Across Canada, there is a trend in human rights law to increase protections for transgendered individuals. On March 20, 2013, Bill C-279 to protect the right of the transgendered and make it illegal to discriminate against transgender Canadians under the Canadian Human Rights Act passed third reading in the House of Commons (149-137 vote).

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.

Tomorrow’s Lawyers
Richard Susskind
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013

Excerpt from Chapter Six, edited by the author.

 

To what extent can lawyers’ work be undertaken differently – more quickly, cheaply, more efficiently, but to higher quality – using alternative methods of working? That is a key question of the day. Lawyers have . . . [more]

When did sentencing policies shift from merely being questionable, misguided or ill-advised to becoming downright absurd?

For many years now, the blunt hammer of mandatory minimum sentencing has been gaining traction in repeated Criminal Code amendments. Long a feature of only the most heinous criminal act imaginable – murder – mandatory minimums leaked into the broader sentencing framework in the battle against drunk drivers imposing minimum licence suspensions followed by mandatory jail stints for repeat offenders. Since then, they have been invoked in an ever-growing array of anti-crime objectives including the war on drugs, to battle the scourge of gun . . . [more]

Mr or Ms Executive, in the ONCA’s reasons for judgment released today, to keep your mouth shut about the state of confidential negotiations.

Here’s a link to the reasons on the ONCA  and some excerpts.

[1] This appeal is from the judgment of Justice Edward P. Belobaba dismissing the appellant’s application for an order that the respondents disclose the identities of confidential sources for a story written by the respondent Sinclair Stewart and published by the respondent the Globe and Mail Inc. The appellant, whose sole officer, director and shareholder is Jeffrey G. MacIntosh, holder of the Toronto Stock Exchange

. . . [more]