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Grinding the Gears: Academic Librarians and Civic Responsibility

By: Joshua Sealy-Harrington PDF Version: Should Homelessness be an Analogous Ground? Clarifying the Multi-Variable Approach to Section 15 of the Charter  Case Commented On: Tanudjaja v Canada (Atto…

Commissioned by the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts, Ontario Chapter.

There has been a proliferation of writing about commercial litigation funding (“CLF”) over the past few years, in both the academic and popular press. Too often, the literature presents a narrative of extremes. Commentators are either wholly against CLF on the basis that it gives rise to unethical behaviour and the commodification of our civil justice system, or wholly in support of it on the basis that it promotes access to justice and levels the playing field. A conference held at the University of Windsor Law School in July, 2013 brought together leading scholars, judges and lawyers from the United States, Australia and Canada to engage in a nuanced discussion about CLF that mediated between these extreme polarities. The first conference of its kind in Canada, discussion was focused on four themes: regulation, access to justice, ethics and impacts on class actions. In this article, the conference organizers, Dean Camille Cameron and Professor Jasminka Kalajdzic, survey the principal issues in the debates around CLF, summarize the key points in the conference papers, and identify the basic principles that might inform the regulation of litigation funding in Canada and elsewhere.

In this article, I investigate the nature of exceptions to copyright infringement or users' rights. Are exceptions to copyright infringement rights or privileges? Are they mandatory? While copyright users' rights and interests have triggered interest and debate amongst scholars, relatively less attention has been given to defining their precise nature, and on the consequences of the main characteristics of exceptions to copyright infringement on copyright law and policy. I examine the interplay between the users' rights set out in the Copyright Act and how they can be altered or overridden by non-negotiated standard end-user agreements and TPMs. To this end, I refer to a sample of non-negotiated standard terms of use for the online distribution of books, musical recordings and films. I investigate the nature of exceptions to copyright infringement, including through Hohfeld's theory of jural correlatives. I look at the policy considerations behind these questions and conclude by reflecting on the damaging effects of the uncertain nature of users' rights on the coherence and, ultimately, the legitimacy of copyright law.

In this article, the author investigates the nature of exceptions to copyright infringement or users' rights as they are laid out in Canada's Copyright Act and in copyright jurisprudence, as well as through their interaction with contracts and technological protection measures. The author begins his analysis with four exceptions to copyright infringement that were added to the Copyright Act in 2012 (i.e., the non-commercial user-generated content, the reproduction for private purposes, the later listening or viewing, and the backup copies exceptions to copyright infringement) with a particular focus on their relevance for consumers and their relation to pre-existing users' rights. The author investigates the nature of these exceptions, including through Hohfeld's theory of jural correlatives. He looks at the policy considerations behind these questions and conclude his article by reflecting on the damaging effects of the uncertain nature of users' rights on the coherence and, ultimately, the legitimacy of copyright law.

What does access to justice have to do with legal services regulation? Can we make it easier for people to defend their legal rights and pursue social justice by liberalizing rules about the provision of legal services? This brief paper will begin by reviewing the economic argument that legal services regulation impedes access to justice. Although this argument has strong appeal in theory, deregulatory reforms have not always delivered their accessibility benefits which the economic critique promises. Moreover, economic criticism of legal services regulation tends to assume that lawyers are simply market actors, as opposed to members of an independent profession whose maintenance has value to clients and to the public. The paper will therefore conclude by suggesting that empirical inquiry using a new legal realist (NLR) methodology can make a constructive contribution to this debate.

Osgoode Hall Law School, York University’s Challenging Conventions! Speaker Series organized Re-Igniting Critical Race: A Symposium on Contemporary Accounts of Racialization in Canada on November 2, 2012.  The symposium sought to explore critical race theory and its praxis within the Canadian legal academy by inviting emerging scholars and practitioners to engage with the scholarship of Professor Patricia Williams.

Global Legal Pluralism: A Jurisprudence of Law Beyond Borders (GLP) by Paul Schiff Berman is a legal pluralist’s contribution to the study of local and global regulation. In a tour de force, Berman articulates clear and concise arguments in support of adopting a pluralist lens (coined as a cosmopolitan pluralist perspective). He magnificently traverses the multiple and complex bodies of literature that seek to understand the various inchoate regulatory regimes, actors, norms, and processes, to simply state that we must harness the benefits of the overlapping legal authorities. The overlapping legal authorities for Berman produce legal hybridity, which is a product of globalization(s).

Mass harm exerts enormous pressure on civil justice systems to provide efficient but fair procedures for redress. In this context, settlement of mass disputes is easily understood as a common good. Yet settlements involving hundreds or thousands of claims, often across jurisdictions, raise concerns about the substantive fairness of the compromise reached by lawyers, and the ability of the court system to ensure meaningful oversight. Unburdening the judicial system from mass claims comes at a price; how much rough justice are we prepared to accept?

PDF Version: Blurred Lines: The Need for Clear Criteria in the Sentencing of Sexual Assaults Case commented on: R v Sam, 2013 ABCA 174 What is a “major sexual assault” for the purposes of applying …

Ever since the decision of the Supreme Court of Canada in Semelhago v. Paramadevan , which changed the law on the availability of specific performance for breach of contract, property developers have found the door to that remedy effectively closed. The recent decision of the Supreme Court in Southcott Estates Inc. v. Toronto Catholic District School Board confirms that trajectory despite the valiant attempts by some developers to bring their cases within the rubric of the Semelhago decision. However, Southcott is not so much a case about specific performance, as it is a case about the obligation to mitigate, and how a defendant can prove that a plaintiff has failed to make reasonable efforts to mitigate. It is also a case where the plaintiff sought to plead that it was a ‘volume buyer’, the obverse of a ‘volume seller’, and whether this fact meant that it did not have to take the profit from a subsequent purchase into account as an act of mitigation.

Class actions have an established place in Canadian and Australian legal systems but still attract considerable debate in practice, politics and the academy. One debate concerns whether there is any legitimate justification for class actions beyond the procedural facilitation of grouped proceedings. ‘Access to justice’ and ‘judicial economy’ are the goals commonly said to justify class action provisions. On one view, these goals can be achieved through civil procedures that have compensation as their sole remedial goal. At the same time, many jurisdictions that have created class action regimes also provide as another justification, the promotion of behavioural modification and deterrence of wrongdoers. The principal way behaviour is modified and deterrence is achieved is by ensuring that the wrongdoer is forced to internalise all the costs of any harm that may have resulted from the wrongful act, and - depending on the particular facts of the case and whether the cause of action supports recovery of profits - to disgorge any profits earned from the wrongful conduct. Compensating victims may partially and concurrently achieve deterrence if all victims can be identified and the true nature of their loss quantified. However, in many claims where a class action may be the most advantageous mechanism to compensate victims, not all victims may be able to be identified or, because the amount of each class member’s claim is small, the cost of administering the claim may outweigh any benefit to individual class members.

Global Legal Pluralism: A Jurisprudence of Law Beyond Borders (GLP) by Paul Schiff Berman is a legal pluralist’s contribution to the study of local and global regulation. In a tour de force, Berman articulates clear and concise arguments in support of adopting a pluralist lens (coined as a cosmopolitan pluralist perspective). He magnificently traverses the multiple and complex bodies of literature that seek to understand the various inchoate regulatory regimes, actors, norms, and processes,1 to simply state that we must harness the benefits of the overlapping legal authorities. The overlapping legal authorities for Berman produce legal hybridity, which is a product of globalization(s).2

High prices and lack of innovation have placed expert legal services beyond the reach of too many Americans and Canadians. Is legal services regulation exacerbating common law North America’s access to justice problem? Does regulatory maintenance of a unified legal profession, and insulation of that profession from non-lawyer influence, make it more difficult for people here to meet their legal needs? This article argues that, although regulatory liberalization is not a magic bullet for the accessibility of justice, there is strong evidence of a link between regulation and access. North American lawyer regulators need to understand, and work to reduce, the effects of their policies on the accessibility of justice.

‘Inquisitorial processes’ refers to the inquiry powers of administrative governance and this book examines the use of these powers in administrative law across seven jurisdictions. The book brings together recent developments in mixed inquisitorial-adversarial administrative decision-making in a hitherto neglected area of comparative administrative process and institutional design. Reaching important conclusions about their own jurisdictions and raising questions which may be explored in others, the book's chapters are comparative. The contributors to this collection, who are leaders in the field, explore the terminology and scope of the concept of inquisitorial process, justifications for the use of inquiry powers, the effectiveness of inquisitorial processes and the implications of the adoption of such powers. The book will set in motion continued dialogue about the inherent challenges of balancing policy goals, fairness, resources and institutional design within administrative law decision-making by offering theoretical, practical and empirical analyses.

This paper assesses the Supreme Court of Canada's elaboration of 'user rights' in two significant copyright law decisions rendered after its landmark ruling in CCH v. Law Society of Upper Canada.

Every week in Canada, a woman is killed by a current or former intimate partner. It is a serious systemic problem. To put it in perspective, the number of women killed by their intimate partners in 2011 was roughly comparable to the number of gang-related homicides. Many, if not most, of these cases involve intimate femicide, a term used to give effect to the gendered nature of the crime. R v. Angelis (2013) 99 CR (6th) 315 (Ont CA) appears to have been a case of intimate femicide. Unfortunately, the Court of Appeal did not construct the case in this fashion and, in ordering a new trial, failed to properly assess the relevance of the accused’s post-offense conduct on the critical issue of intent.

This essay will analyze William Twining’s work from a post-colonial perspective. It will be argued that Twining is constrained by the structural limitations inherent in his ‘general jurisprudence,’ reflected in three aspects of his analysis: firstly, Twining appears to disregard the imperialistic historical roots of the Western legal tradition. Secondly, Twining’s definition of globalization, which marginalizes the economic dimensions of globalization, fails to grasp the important historical role of capitalism in the emergence of globalization, and how this affects his very understanding of 'space' and 'proximity'. Finally, this essay will end with an examination of the relationship between the attainment of knowledge and power relations in the context of the Third World. It will be shown that Twining disregards how Western representations of non-Western legal traditions could eventually develop into a discourse that ultimately perpetuates new forms of domination.

Shortlisted for the 2003 Walter Owen Book Prize (first edition)This new edition traces the development in the Canadian law of equitable remedies, greatly influenced by decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada which, since the first edition, has ruled on the availability of Anton Piller orders, specific performance, equitable compensation, and rectification. Beyond these substantive equitable remedies the Supreme Court has also opined on a number of occasions about the nature of modern equity in Canada; in effect, breathing life into equity's distinctive methodology. New areas covered in this edition include the maxims of equity; the appropriate default test for interlocutory injunctions including new discussion on when it is appropriate to allow a view of the merits of the substantive dispute to determine the interlocutory proceedings; the general principles of specific performance, including a critique of the current law on enforcement of keep-open clauses; the contemporary impact of the Supreme Court of Canada's rulings on the availability of specific performance, particularly for those who invest in land; a discussion of equitable damages and equitable compensation which includes new commentary on when damages are assessed that go beyond compensation and toward disgorgement; and new material on rectification, including a section on rectification and taxation cases.