ABLawg

By: John-Paul Boyd

PDF Version: Family Justice 3.5: Fostering a Settlement-Oriented Legal Culture

This is the note on rethinking our approach to family justice that I never thought I’d find myself writing, and as a result I need to begin with an explanation and an apology. In this short post, I describe what I see as lawyers’ duties to promote settlement, to respect informed compromise and to refrain from litigating family law disputes without good and sufficient reason. First, however, I’ll explain the circumstances that have provoked me to write.

I’m involved in a number of the present efforts to reform family justice. In one particular group, I have received a certain amount of kickback when I suggest that lawyers should play a larger role at the front end of family law disputes, in order to steer as many of those disputes away from court as possible. (Well, perhaps not kickback so much as dismay.) I would invariably respond that the early involvement of lawyers would result in the parties receiving an explanation of the law and the range of likely outcomes, thereby minimizing unreasonable positions and moving the parties toward settlement, as I have described elsewhere. Although this struck me as self-evident, it is not.

What Makes a Law School Great?

By Alice Woolley

On March 20, 2015

In Legal Education

By: Alice Woolley

PDF Version: What Makes a Law School Great?

What makes a law school great? What should a law school curriculum seek to accomplish in light of the school’s obligations to its students, its university, the pursuit of knowledge, the profession, and society as a whole? What should a law school strive to be?

Every law school has to answer these questions one way or another, and events of the last few years – the crises of American legal education and Canadian articling, and global and technological shifts in the legal services market – have given them greater urgency.

In this post I want to share our law school’s recent efforts to answer them, and the significant curricular changes we have adopted in our attempt to bring ourselves closer to our standard for a great law school. This is not to suggest that our perspective and approach are the right ones (although I am in no way going to pretend to be neutral given I was Chair (later Co-Chair with Jennifer Koshan) of the committee leading the process). It is simply to put them out there as one law school’s view on what it should strive to be.

Trinity Western University: Policing Gender and Requiring LGBTQI+ People to Pay for It

By Saul Templeton

On March 18, 2015

In Human Rights, Legal Education, Tax

By: Saul Templeton

PDF Version: Trinity Western University: Policing Gender and Requiring LGBTQI+ People to Pay for It

This post is a follow-up to my previous post, Trinity Western University: Your Tax Dollars at Work. The first two parts respond to issues raised in the comments to that post. The first part explains my position on the “irreducible conflict” between freedom of religion and freedom from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. The second part deals with whether a line can, or should, be drawn between TWU and other religious institutions and charities that discriminate. (Answer: all charities that discriminate on a Charter protected ground should have their charitable status revoked where the discrimination meets the charity law test of actions contrary to public policy). The third and last part explores TWU’s history of exploiting Canada’s charitable tax credit regime.

Bringing Environmental Law Students Together: the CAELS Conference in Calgary

By Jennifer Cox

On March 16, 2015

In Conferences, Environmental

By: Jennifer Cox

PDF Version: Bringing Environmental Law Students Together: the CAELS Conference in Calgary

Conference Commented On: Igniting a Spark, Canadian Association of Environmental Law Societies 2015 Conference, Calgary

While many students travelled or relaxed during February’s reading week, I was fortunate enough to be a part of a group of second and first year students from the University of Calgary’s Environmental Law Society (ELS) who put together the 3^rd Annual Canadian Association of Environmental Law Societies (CAELS) Conference. The two-day conference was attended by over 100 delegates from all across Canada and covered a wide array of topics with a focus on energy law.

CAELS is a Canada-wide and student-run association which gives Canadian law students a forum to discuss issues in environmental law. The conference, first held in 2013, is now a major part of this forum. ELS members attended the first two years of the CAELS conference, then held in Ottawa. We were impressed by the quality of the speakers and the discussions at the conference, and started talking about what a Calgary-led CAELS conference could look like. We wanted to bring students excited about environmental, natural resource, and energy law to Calgary to gain exposure to the city’s wealth of knowledge in that area. Led by CAELS Coordinator and second year University of Calgary law student Scott Allen, we were able to achieve that goal.

Where Are We Going on Standard of Review in Alberta?

By Shaun Fluker

On March 13, 2015

In Administrative Law, Municipal Law

By: Shaun Fluker

PDF Version: Where Are We Going on Standard of Review in Alberta?

Case Commented On: Edmonton East (Capilano) Shopping Centres Limited v Edmonton (City), 2015 ABCA 85

In Edmonton East (Capilano) Shopping Centres Limited v Edmonton (City) the Court of Appeal has upheld an earlier chambers decision of Associate Chief Justice Rooke to set aside an Edmonton assessment review board decision. This ought to have been a fairly routine administrative law case, however the Court of Appeal chose to engage in the fundamentals of judicial review and purports to add a new exception to the presumption of deference I wrote about early in January 2015 on ABlawg (see Some Thoughts on the Presumption of Deference under the Dunsmuir Framework on Substantive Judicial Review). The Court of Appeal has perhaps also significantly altered the relationship between the superior courts and administrative tribunals in Alberta. I say this because on an initial glance, it is difficult to reconcile the reasoning of the Court of Appeal in this judgment with recent jurisprudence from the Supreme Court of Canada on standard of review generally and the jurisprudence in Alberta which has developed in relation to the Edmonton assessment review board itself. Administrative law scholars and practitioners will no doubt be interested to watch how this unfolds in Alberta.