A. INTRODUCTION Under the Ontario Class Proceedings Act, 1992 (“CPAâ€) [1], the Representative Plaintiff (“RPâ€) is a member of the class that in most instances commits to a bigger responsibility than all other class members. …
In the spirit of increased collegiality and collaboration within the Canadian legal blogging community, LawisCool.com and TheCourt.ca have set aside their heated rivalry to bring you their first ever joint posting. What follows is a…
The Osgoode Hall community received an e-mail today regarding the “JD or LLB?” debate, that had pretty much disappeared from most of our minds due to the dramatic collective action (or perhaps more fitting, inaction)…
by Alex Dimson (from the February Issue of Nexus, Western Law’s Student Newspaper) Western Law has begun to discuss with alumni the possibility of changing to a Juris Doctor (JD) degree after students voted decisively…
In most Commonwealth countries the designation for lawyers is LL.B., for Bachelor of Laws. The University of Toronto breaks ranks with Canadian law schools, issuing a J.D., or Juris Doctor to its graduates. The J.D….
A few days ago the Canadian House of Commons rejected an assisted suicide bill. The proposed legislation would allow doctors to help terminally ill patients or people in unrelenting pain to end their lives. Currently,…
An article jointly written by David Shulman and Lawrence Gridin Last week the government of Québéc announced that it would restrict female Muslims from covering their faces with the niqab.  This article is about the fundamental…
This is the final instalment of a three-part series on access to legal services. In Part 1, I argued that the crisis facing access to legal services is precipitated by a fundamental mismatch between supply…
In this three-part series, I make the case that the legal profession needs nurses. More to the point, we need to create new categories of legal professionals who are not lawyer, but who are qualified to provided limited legal advice and even representation within a well-defined scope. These non-lawyer professionals would be regulated by a system similar to that of colleges or associations of nurses in the health industry. In Part 1 of the series, I explore the shortcomings of the “traditional” approach to promoting access to legal services (that is, increasing the capacity of legal aid and pro bono). I argue that these approaches are cost-prohibitive from a government viewpoint and will therefore prove inadequate in addressing the underlying shortage of lawyers.
Liu Guijin, China’s special envoy to Darfur, is currently in Doha meeting with representatives from Britain, France, Russia, United States and the European Union in a 5-day conference on how to deal with the situation in…
One of my strongest memories of my entering Canada were that the moment I switched on the TV, I saw an advertisement of a personal injury law firm. A few minutes after that I saw…
Money, Sex and Madness Maclean’s interviewed Philip Slayton, author of a new book entitled Lawyers Gone Bad: Money, Sex and Madness in Canada’s Legal Profession, for the August edition of the magazine. An excerpt from…
