ABLawg

By: Admin

PDF Version: Judging Former Colleagues: A Collection of Justice Woolley’s ABlawg Posts

Our former colleague Alice Woolley is being formally sworn in as a Justice of the Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench today. We take this opportunity to highlight Justice Woolley’s contributions to ABlawg over the ten years that she was a contributor, while we still called her “Alice”.

Alice wrote a clean 100 posts for ABlawg between December 2007 and July 2018. Actually, while the number may be clean, the titles were as colourful as Alice’s language, as we noted in our first brief farewell to her in ABlawg’s 2018 year in review post, including Regulating Lawyer-Client Sex, Law Schools’ Dirty Little Secret, and Defending Rapists, to name a few. This is a good time to mention that we are not really judging her, either for leaving us and becoming a judge, or for her posts themselves. We were simply trying to come up with a Woolley-esque title.

Many of Alice’s posts had over 2000 hits on ABlawg – she had a very impressive number of readers. Her most viewed posts were: When Judicial Decisions Go from Wrong to Wrongful – How Should the Legal System Respond? (over 5300 hits); What has Meads v Meads wrought? (cowritten with Jonnette Watson Hamilton, with over 3400 hits); and The Incarcerated Complainant: Submissions to the Minister of Justice (also with over 3400 hits). The Woolley posts that received the most comments were What has Meads v Meads wrought?; What Ought Crown Counsel to do in Prosecuting Sexual Assault Charges? Some Post-Ghomeshi Reflections; and Defending Rapists.

Alice’s large readership was no doubt sparked by the controversy of the topics she blogged on, as well as her clearly articulated positions on the issues they raised. In addition to the posts noted above on sexual assault, vexatious litigants, and legal education (see also her posts on Trinity Western Law School here, here, here, and here), she blogged on lawyers’ and judges’ ethics in a range of areas (see e.g. Top Ten Legal Ethics posts here, here, here and here), the regulation of the legal profession (see e.g. Ontario’s Law Society: Orwell’s Big Brother or Fuller’s Rex? and A National Code of Conduct?) and administrative law more generally (see e.g. her posts on the legacy of Dunsmuir here, here, here and here). And then there was the Volkswagen Scandal.

Alice also blogged in a regular column for Slaw, which ABlawg regularly cross-posted to reach an even broader range of readers (for Amy Salyzyn’s Slaw post on Alice’s contributions, see here).

We will greatly miss Alice’s ABlawg posts, especially at times like this when the issues of the day call for out analyses of questions like – in relation to Michael Cohen – Is a Bad Lawyer a Bad Person? and – in relation to Jody Wilson Raybould – whether Prosecutors [are] Ministers of Justice? (although Alice had a different spin on that issue). We are looking forward to blogging on Justice Woolley’s decisions, and wish her all the best on this special day.

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By: Jennifer Koshan and Jonnette Watson Hamilton

PDF Version: The Right to Support for Adult Children with Disabilities

Case and Bill Commented On: Ryan v Pitchers, 2019 ABQB 19 (CanLII); Bill 28, the Family Statutes Amendment Act 2018

 As Laura Buckingham noted in an ABlawg post in December 2018, Alberta’s Bill 28, the Family Statutes Amendment Act 2018, made three key amendments:

• creating legislated rules for property division for separating common-law couples;
• closing a gap in child support legislation for adult children with disabilities; and
• repealing the Married Women’s Act, RSA 2000, c M-6.

The second of these amendments was recently considered in Ryan v Pitchers, 2019 ABQB 19 (CanLII). In this case, a mother brought a constitutional challenge to the pre-amendment version of the Family Law Act, SA 2003, c F-4.5 (FLA), which did not allow disabled children of unmarried parents to obtain child support once they turned 18 and were not attending school full-time. The mother’s argument was that the definition of child in the FLA violated the equality guarantee in section 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The government did not defend the case given the pending legislative amendment in Bill 28, and although the father raised constitutional counter-arguments, the mother’s claim was successful.

Although the decision may seem like a foregone conclusion, the section 15 analysis of Madam Justice Carolyn Phillips has some interesting features that we will comment on in this post.

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