How many times have we heard a person exclaim, “I just want my day in court!”? Often, this is in response to what that person considers to be an insulting settlement proposal or as a result of frustration over delays in resolving a conflict.

Just what does that person mean by their “day in court”? I suggest that it is not as simple as we might think. The phrase “day in court” conjures up different mental images depending on one’s background and the situation.

The traditional definition focuses on a person’s right to be heard in a court hearing or . . . [more]

Each Thursday we present a significant excerpt 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.

Animals and the Law
by Lesli Bisgould
Toronto: Irwin Law, 2011
Excerpt pp. 279-285

[Footnotes omitted. A PDF file is available with the footnotes included.]

Closing Thoughts

Today’s problems cannot be solved by thinking the way we thought when we created them.
— Albert Einstein

What strikes one most about the profound violence . . . [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 the week of December 18 – 25:

1. R. v. N.S. 2012 SCC 72
   

   [1] How should the state respond to a witness whose sincerely held religious belief requires her to wear a niqab that covers her face, except for her eyes, while testifying in a criminal proceeding? One response is to say she must always remove her niqab on the ground that the courtroom is a

. . . [more]

The life of a lawyer, especially a solo or small firm practitioner, is often stressful. Stress itself is not necessarily a bad thing; our body’s reaction to stress actually helps us to meet the sudden demands that we face as busy lawyers. However, too much stress too often becomes chronic stress, and takes its toll on our physical, mental and emotional well-being. That, in turn, affects our personal lives and our ability to serve our clients. The trick is to eliminate some of the stressors in life, and build our resiliency for the stresses we cannot change. Try to incorporate . . . [more]

We wish everyone a happy and peaceful holiday. Slaw takes a bit of a break at this time of year, so posting will be slow and not at all on December 25 and 26 and January 1. Otherwise, the regular Today features and our columns will be published as usual. This is a good occasion to thank all of you on behalf of our bloggers and columnists for reading Slaw. Our entries are our gifts, and to find you like them pleases us greatly.

The start of a new year is a time for self-reflection and self-improvement. Many of you will think about making changes in your personal and work lives. But while you all have good intentions, it can be difficult to break old habits, especially when you are running hard on the treadmill of a busy life and practice. So, to harness the good intentions you all have at this time of year we are going to post an excerpt every couple of days from our list of “New Year’s resolutions for a healthier practice and a new you” that . . . [more]

Each Monday we present brief excerpts of recent posts from five of Canada's award-winning legal blogs chosen at random* from thirty-five 2010 & 2011 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. Official Clio Blog   2. leeakazi.com  3. Canadian Legal History Blog   4.  Slater Vecchio Connected  5. Entertainment & Medial Law Signal

Canada is a high latititude country. Even those who live in Ontario’s “Southwest” are awfully far north compared to our American friends who live south of the Mason-Dixon line. Being a Nordic country has many charms but it also means that for many weeks of the year on either side of the winter solstice (December 21) it’s cold and dark everywhere in Canada. In the morning, kids go to school and parents go to work in the dark. In the late afternoon or early evening when everyone returns home it’s dark again. During this period, from November until January, the . . . [more]

Mark Twain wrote in Mark Twain, “Chapters from My Autobiography”, 598 North American Review (Sept. 7, 1906):

I wrote the rest of “The Innocents Abroad” in sixty days, and I could have added a fortnight’s labor with the pen and gotten along without the letters altogether. I was very young in those days, exceedingly young, marvellously young, younger than I am now, younger than I shall ever be again, by hundreds of years. I worked every night from eleven or twelve until broad day in the morning, and as I did two hundred thousand words in the sixty days,

. . . [more]

Last Friday the Supreme Court of Iowa upheld a summary judgement decision by the Iowa District Court which found that a dentist who terminated his assistant for being too attractive had not engaged in gender discrimination.

The plaintiff was hired in 1999 when she was only 20 years old, and the defendant conceded she was an excellent employee. The relationship was generally without incident, with exception to a few occasions when the dentist commented that he was distracted by her tight fitting uniform. The defendant acknowledged he made inappropriate comments of a sexual nature towards the plaintiff, who was also . . . [more]

A couple of days ago Edward Adams of Bloomberg Law’s Behind the Headlines interviewed one-time Slaw columnist Jordan Furlong on the topic of recent mergers between Canadian and U.S. law firms. Most of Bloomberg Law is behind a subscription paywall, but there’s a lot of Bloomberg video goodness on YouTube, and in this case Slaw has been given permission to show you the twelve-minute video of this interview here in the website.

Even though he’s piped in via Skype (would Google Hangout produce better quality?), Jordan is as thoughtful and informative as ever.

. . . [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 are in Deportation, Sentencing, Collective bargaining, & Debtor's relief