The Justice System
-
Legal Self-Services, Part Deux
Just a follow-up to yesterday’s post about the impact of a “self-service mentality” on the legal profession. This mentality, I suggested, is part of what explains the surge in self-representation. Josh Blackman, of South Texas College of Law, says something similar in a blog post, but his perspective is different and more optimistic. Prof. Blackman points… Continue reading
-
Legal Self-Services
Jim Gardner, of SUNY Buffalo, has an interesting post at The Faculty Lounge, arguing that [t]he capacity to acquire information, shop, travel, and do almost anything without human intermediation is conceived as a right, or at least a new baseline norm. Insistence upon the necessity of human interaction as a condition for completing a transaction… Continue reading
-
Googling Justice
Law review articles don’t make newspapers very often. But they do sometimes, as I noted in a post discussing the use of a certain four-letter word by Supreme Courts in the U.S. and Canada. Another example is a very interesting forthcoming paper by Allison Orr Larsen, of the William & Mary School of Law, called… Continue reading
-
Independence Enough Day
Ontario’s Small Claims Court relies on the work of 400 “deputy judges” – practising lawyers who take up part-time judging gigs, for an average of 19 sitting days a year. Subs. 32(1) of the the Courts of Justice Act provides that they are appointed by “[a] regional senior judge of the Superior Court of Justice… Continue reading
-
In an Unknown Language
It is not every day, or even every month, that courts get to quote and discuss a statute enacted in the reign of Edward III. But the BC Court of Appeal did just that in an interesting decision it issued last week, in the case of Conseil Scolaire Francophone de la Colombie-Britannique v. British Columbia,… Continue reading
-
Small is Beautiful
How many judges should a country’s highest court have? Those of Canada and the United States both have nine, but Jonathan Turley, of George Washington University, argues in an op-ed in the Washington Post that that’s not nearly enough. Although made with the U.S. context in mind, his argument, if persuasive, would be relevant to… Continue reading
-
The Best and the Rest
A friend has drawn my attention to what seems like an interesting book, Laughing at the Gods: Great Judges and How They Made the Common Law by Allan C. Huntchinson, a professor at Osgoode Hall. I haven’t had a chance to start reading it yet but I will eventually, because prof. Hutchinson’s topic is directly… Continue reading
Double Aspect 