Category: Legal Information

Posts about legal information generally: news, events, or other legal information items not necessarily connected to the Law Library

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UVic Law Professors in the Annual Author Celebration Event – March 8th

Mark your calendars for the annual UVic Author Celebration Event happening on March 8th at 3pm!

This event recognizes the incredible amount of intellectual content produced by members of the UVic community.

This year’s event features two faculty from UVic law. Professor John Borrows is among the incredible panel of authors and Professor Rebecca Johnson will be moderating the event.

Join the event on Facebook or find more details below:

When: March 8, 2018

Where: University Bookstore

Time: 3:00-4:30pm

THEME: Join us as we celebrate books written by UVic authors, including an engaging panel discussion with authors from the UVic community on issues facing First Nations communities.

Moderator: Rebecca Johnson (Professor & Associate Director, Indigenous Law Research Unit)

Author Panel:

 

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Massive Enviro Law Research-o-thon effort!

We love to see legal research in action for a real-life purpose!

Today, it’s environmental law reform, through the Enviro Law Research-o-thon! The UVic Environmental Law Club co-ordinated a team of volunteers to research relevant BC legislative history and secondary discussion and to synthesize their results into a shared knowledge base.

Their work will help support the development of mining law reform proposals led by the UVic Environmental Law Centre.

Law librarians Alisa, Caron, and Alex prepared a gorgeous targeted and comprehensive research guide website earlier this week to help the students identify and work with valuable resources in the law library collection, including BC legislative research content in our Quickscribe, HeinOnline, LLMC Digital, and BC Laws databases. It also incorporates the legislative starting points compiled by ELC articling student Renata, and Kim’s chapter on researching BC legislation. Today, the librarians are on hand throughout, to help with the intricate process of historical legislative and contextual legal research.

Kudos to all involved, and many thanks to Quickscribe Inc for their generous financial support of the students’ snacks and incidentals!

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Hon. Tommy Banks and the Statutes Repeal Act

Hon. Tommy Banks, Liberal Senator from 2000 to 2011, Alberta,  was responsible for the Statutes Repeal Act, SC 2008 c. 20 .  The act stipulates that the Minister of Justice will table in Parliament, annually, a  listing of Acts and provisions of Acts that have not been brought into force within at least nine years of their enactment. These reports have been tabled since 2011 and are available on the Justice Laws Website

Over the course of seven years and five sittings of Parliament,  Banks   introduced and re-introduced the legislation that would finally pass in 2008. The bills  were reviewed by the Standing Senate Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs. The history of the final and earlier bills can be found on LegisInfo.

Hon. Tommy Banks, jazz musician and piano player, died in Edmonton on January 24, 2018.

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Charterpedia – New Resource

Charterpedia (DoJ)

The federal Department of Justice just released Charterpedia – a freely available resource on the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Charterpedia is based on the Department’s internal legal research tools used by Justice lawyers and staff to keep on top of Charter issues and developments in case law.

For each Charter section and subsection , Charterpedia contains:

  • brief overviews of any similar provisions in other international or foreign legal instruments;
  • a summary of the purpose of the provision based on Canadian jurisprudence; and
  • a detailed analysis of how the courts have interpreted and applied the provision with citations to the leading cases.

Charterpedia entries will be updated every six months and is sure to be a go to resource for lawyers and students researching the Charter.

**Update January 23, 2018:
You can now find Charterpedia in the UVic Library catalogue**

Related Resources

Don’t forget the Law Library has several excellent resources on the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Below is a small sample.

For a more complete list check out the subject headings Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and  Constitutional law Canada.

 

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Trinity Western University, et al v Law Society of Upper Canada webcast

Oral argument in the Trinity Western University, et al v Law Society of Upper matter is being delivered today and tomorrow at the Supreme Court of Canada.

The case has generated considerable interest in the legal community throughout its path. Read the SCC summary of the case and the factums of the parties and interveners for background or refresher.

If you are interested in watching the oral arguments live today and tomorrow, you can do so via the SCC webcast.

The video recording of oral arguments will be archived; look for a link to it under the case file.

 

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Reconciliation : Wahkohtowin Conference (webcast now available)

This past September, several current graduate students at the UVic Faculty of Law presented papers at the Reconciliation: Wahkotowin Conference in Edmonton. The conference, hosted by the University of Alberta’s Centre for Constitutional Studies, brought together scholars, Indigenous Elders, community members, policy makers, and students to discuss Indigenous law and reconciliation.

The conference was the third in a series of conferences held in 2017 on Canadian constitutional law as part of the Constitution 150 project organized by the Public Law Group at the University of Ottawa, the Centre for Constitutional Studies, and the Université de Montréal.

From the Conference website:

Inspired by the insights of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, UNDRIP and the treaty relationships that constitute Canada’s first constitutional law, our conference will focus on how to translate the spirit of reconciliation into constitutional text, practice, culture, and law. Is constitutional reconciliation the appropriate concept to pursue? If so, how might it be accomplished? We are particularly interested in the ways in which Indigenous laws and Indigenous constitutionalism can serve as models to chart a path forward, or provide a re-imagining of constitutional relationships within Canada.

UVic graduate students who presented included:

  • Alan Hanna (Faculty of Law, PhD candidate) presenting his paper “The Ties that Liberate: A Theory of Relationality in Substantiating Indigenous Legal Obligations” as part of the panel on Treaties and Relations.

You can watch the full set of webcasts on the Wahkohtowin Conference YouTube Playlist.

Papers presented at the conference will be published in upcoming issues of  the Constitutional Forum and the Review of Constitutional Studies.

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What Elsevier’s acquisition of bepress means for legal scholarship: Backgrounder and commentary

A few weeks ago we wrote about the launch of LawArXiv, a new legal scholarship repository aimed at ensuring community ownership of legal scholarship and preventing legal research from being overwhelmed by the profit motivations that govern other repositories. The launch of LawArXiv couldn’t be more timely.

This month Elsevier (a related company to LexisNexis) announced its acquisition of bepress (formerly Berkeley Electronic Press), a scholarly communications company whose services include Digital Commons, an institutional repository platform and expressO, an online article manuscript delivery and management service for law reviews.

The acquisition of bepress is of particular importance to the academic law community as the Digital Commons is currently used by 74% of US law schools with a digital repository. The Digital Commons also includes the Law Commons Network, a  open access database of over 350,000 law related scholarly works, aggregated from across all Digital Commons repositories.

This acquisition is the latest of a string of Elsevier’s recent acquisitions that have expanded its role from a publisher of academic journals to a company seeking to be involved in all aspects of scholarly communication.  This string of acquisitions includes Elsevier’s acquisition last year of the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), an  open access repository for scholarship from a variety of disciplines, including the largest legal scholarship repository Legal Scholarship Network.

See the articles below for a roundup of recent commentary on the acquisition and what it means for legal scholars and the broader academic community.

Robert Ambrogi, “Elsevier Acquires bepress, Open-Access Repository of Law Reviews, Other Scholarly Articles” (August 3, 2017), LawSites (blog), archived at <https://perma.cc/58XA-J62D>.

Paul Basken, “Elsevier is Becoming a Data Company. Should Universities be Wary?” (August 7, 2017), The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Barbara Fister, “Just Business” (August 8, 2017), Inside Higher Ed – Library Babel Fish (blog), archived at <https://perma.cc/4VAF-93GZ>.

Lindsay McKenzie, “Elsevier Expands Footprint in Scholarly Workflow” (August 3, 2017), Inside Higher Ed.

Glyn Moody, “Elsevier Continues to Build its Monopoly Solution for all Aspects of Scholarly Communication” techdirt.

Kevin O’Keefe, “Elsevier acquires bepress: Library and Knowledge Community Respond” (August 3, 2017), LexBlog (blog), archived at <https://perma.cc/Y7AW-4VT6>.

Roger C Schonfeld, “Elsevier Acquires bepress“, (August 2, 2017), The Scholarly Kitchen (blog), archived at <https://perma.cc/V9HZ-9BA4>.

Roger C Schonfeld, “Reflections on ‘Elsevier Acquires bepress’ Implications for Library Leaders“, (August 7, 2017), Ithaka SR (blog), archived at<https://perma.cc/PDT9-Z22F>.

“What Was Bepress” (August 9, 2017) Gavia Libraria (blog), archived at <https://perma.cc/VY62-87NW>.

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Introducing LawArXiv

On May 8th, Cornell Law Library launched LawArXiv, a repository for legal scholarship. LawArXiv is free and open source for the benefit of the legal community. The repository is run on the Open Science Framework (OSF), a web application of the non-profit technology start-up Center for Open Science (COS). To develop LawArXiv, Cornell Law Library partnered with the Legal Information Preservation Alliance (LIPA), the Mid-American Law Library Consortium (MALLCO), and NELLCO Law Library Consortium Inc. The UVic Law Library is a member of NELLCO, and so LawArXiv represents one of the positive and tangible outcomes of our membership fees.

This free, open access repository is owned and will be maintained by the legal scholarship community and law librarians of Cornell. Legal scholars can contribute preprints or post-prints where the author has the copyright of their published research. As a community-owned repository, LawArXiv can be seen as an instrument for protecting the integrity of the legal scholarly community and preventing legal research from being overwhelmed by the profit motivations that govern other repositories subject to corporate interests. As expressed by Tracy Thompson, Executive Director of NELLCO: “Taking access to scholarship out of the commercial marketplace, through a non-profit collaboration like LawArXiv, just makes good sense. There is no one-size-fits-all solution, but having choices levels the playing field for scholars and researchers alike.”

Visit LawArXiv, or check their twitter feed listing new papers that have been uploaded to the site.

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National Aboriginal Day, June 21

National Aboriginal Day has been observed in Canada since 1996, when the  Proclamation Declaring June 21 of Each Year as National Aboriginal Day was declared by the Governor General  of Canada, Roméo LeBlanc.   One of the recommendations of the 1995 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) was the creation of such a day.   Link to a searchable database of the fulltext of the RCAP final report, hearings, and other documents at Library and Archives Canada . 

The official version of the proclamation  (PC1996-0785) was published as a Statutory Instrument; see  the full text of  SI/96-55   on the Justice Laws Website or in the Canada Gazette Part 1.

More information about the proclamation the day  and can be found on these websites:

 

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Alberta Law Reform Institute Report: A New Trustee Act for Alberta

The Alberta Law Reform Institute issued its final report  A New Trustee Act for Alberta  today (March 1, 2017) outlining its recommendations for the enactment of new trust legislation. The Report recommends that the province adopt the Uniform Trustee Act (2012) prepared by the Uniform Law Conference of Canada  (ULCC) with some modifications to address current best practices and Alberta’s existing trust law.

Alberta isn’t the only province where reform of trust law is being considered. British Columbia has also considered adopting new trust legislation. In 2004, the British Columbia Law Institute (BCLI) issued its own final report A Modern Trustee Act for British Columbia. This report, largely served as the starting point for the ULCC’s Uniform Trustee Act (2012). UVic Professor Emeritus Donovan Waters, QC was heavily involved in the preparation of both documents. In 2014 the government of  British Columbia sought public comments on the Uniform Trustee Act and the BCLI final report to inform a possible new Trustee Act for the province.

So far, New Brunswick is the only Canadian province that has reformed its trust legislation based on the Uniform Trustee Act (2012). In June 2016, the Trustees Act, SNB 2015, c 21 came into force.

Check out the following items in the Law Library’s collection for more information about the reform of the law of trusts in Canada:

  • A modern Trustee Act for British Columbia : a report prepared for the British Columbia Law Institute. Call Number: KEB168 A72B74 and Online.
  • Uniform Trustee Act : final report of the Uniform Trustee Act Working Group. Online.
  • Waters’ Law of Trusts in Canada 4th ed. / Donovan W.M. Waters, Mark R. Gillen, and Lionel D. Smith. Call Number: KE787 W38 2012.
  • Oosterhoff, Albert H., “Trust Law Reform: The Uniform Trustee Act” (2015) 34:3 Estates, Trusts & Pensions Journal 329. Call Number: K5 S7292.
  • A New Trustee Act for Alberta – Alberta Law Reform Institute. Online.