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Articles by Sean Vanderfluit
Defining Essential Travel During the Pandemic
January 3 rd 2021 Posted in: Like most countries around the world, Canada introduced early travel restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic. These restrictions are necessary to limit the spread of the virus, and become increasingly important as new strains are being identified and also being brought into Canada.
Making the Hard Decisions: Ethical Lawyering
What do you do as a lawyer when your client wants you to call a witness or make representations to the court that you believe are non-starters and even dangerous to your client’s case? If you’re one of President Donald Trump’s lawyers, you might seek to introduce a “handwritten yellow sticky note” as evidence of election fraud (see decision with ruling the note was inadmissible as hearsay here).
Education, unbundling, pro bono, lawyer surcharge, judicial intervention-What’s the answer to achieving A2J?
We know that too many litigants are forced to represent themselves, sometimes with some form of assistance. These are people who cannot afford a lawyer and do not qualify for legal aid. (I am concerned here with people who would prefer to have a lawyer rather than those who want to represent themselves.) They may not even become litigants, but, where they are able, give up the opportunity to seek the justice they believe they deserve.
Solving the Issue of Access to Justice by Redefining “Access to Justice”
“Justice is open to all; like the Ritz Hotel.” In the article “Clients Need Legal Services But Not Necessarily Lawyers“, Mark Cohen writes about the issue of access to justice. He points out that improving access to justice does not always mean improving access to lawyers. He refers to new products that provide legal services.
A Pay or Play Proposition for Access to Justice
When people lament the deteriorating state of access to justice in Canada and the unwillingness of cash-strapped governments to address the issue in meaningful ways, their focus often shifts to the role of lawyers in ensuring the delivery of critical legal services. Many observers, including Canada’s Chief Justice and Governor-General, characterize the role as a professional responsibility tied to the collective privilege of an effective monopoly on legal work.
PMO, Minister of Justice and Attorney General; AG and SNC-Lavalin: The Possibilities
We don’t know yet what really the reality of the allegations that the PMO “pressured” (whatever that means) the former Minister of Justice and Attorney General to (in turn) tell the Director of Public Prosecutions to let SNC-Lavalin to enter into a “deferred prosecution agreement” rather than go to trial on charges of bribing officials (and engaging in fraud and corruption) in Libya is.
Advocating for a Mentally Healthy Attitude Toward Mental Health
A couple of things you may not know about heart surgery: patients are given “cough pillows.” They use them the first few weeks after surgery, hugging them to their bodies to lessen the pain that comes with coughing, sneezing or even laughing after your sternum has been cut open. And did you know that severe depression is often a side-effect of open-heart surgery?
Do We Still Need E-mail?
The issue of e-mail management is now old hat for anyone involved in the practice of law. Rather than asking whether lawyers use it, it is a story when lawyers choose not to use it. The world has grown more complicated, though, as we try to figure out where to place our energy integrating new technologies, like Twitter or Google’s Wave, into our work. Even our choices about how to use e-mail have expanded. E-mail often reminds me of books.
The Underwear Gnomes of Law
Depending on your age and preferred cultural touchstones, the title of this column is ether instantly recognizable or a complete mystery. If it’s the latter, the video below, excerpted from a 1998 episode of South Park, should shed some light. The underwear gnomes’ profit strategy has become a widely cited meme in the intervening years, owing to its effective illustration of the shortcomings of many strategic plans.
Osgoode AI Sets Vision for Canadian Leadership
When the Government of Canada earmarked $125 million for a Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy, it was premised on the assumption that this area will be a future economic growth engine, The 2018 Budget reaffirmed this commitment, with one of the five innovation superclusters focusing on artificial intelligence-powered supply chains that would create jobs and develop research to improve standard of living.
Let Canada Be First to Turn an Open Access Research Policy into a Legal Right to Know
Canada’s three federal research funding agencies – the Canadian Institutes of Health ($1 billion annual budget in 2016-17), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada ($1.1 billion), the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada ($380 million) – instituted an intellectual property law exception in 2014. It effects the publication of research and scholarship resulting from grants which they have awarded.
Simon Fodden (1944 - 2018)
It is with a heavy heart that I share the news that our beloved Slaw founder, Simon Fodden, passed away on February 10th, 2018. Simon had been fighting cancer for the past four years, and died surrounded by his family at the Kensington Hospice in Toronto. Simon’s accomplishments were many.
Two Improvements Our Courts Can Implement for Self-Represented Litigants
Recently Chief Justice Wagner announced that the Supreme Court will modernize its headnotes by adding a summary written for regular folks. This summary will be posted on the Court’s website and its Facebook page. This change is a response to the way people are getting information. Today people learn about information from social media and websites in addition to traditional news broadcasts. Justice Wagner’s initiative should be followed by our lower courts.
Compliment or Sexual Harassment: Where do you Draw the Line?
Written wholly by Doug Macleod Employment and labour lawyer at MacLeod Law on First Reference Talks Despite a number of legislative initiatives that are intended to reduce and ultimately eliminate sexual harassment in society, sexual harassment continues to be a problem in Ontario’s workplaces. One of the more nuanced areas of sexual harassment law is what kind of language a male can direct towards a woman in the workplace.
Judgmental Judges
Judges exercise considerable power, and discharge a crucial public function. They identify, interpret and even create the rules that govern us. They decide what happened. And they determine the legal consequences of what happened. But judges also exercise a defined and limited public function, and in doing so they are human, not superhuman.
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