Alberta Law Review (ALR)
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Lawyers and Judges on Circuit in Canada’s Northwest Territories in the Twentieth Century
Get PDFThis article presents a few selected vignettes of lawyers and judges on criminal court circuit in Canada’s North during the last century. It seeks to provide a discrete historical database that may be useful to counsel and judges when discharging their northern court duties. It also captures some of the Aboriginal issues that continue to arise in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut
Corporate Foreign Corrupt Practices and Director Liability
Get PDFThis article examines the various forms of potential liability faced by directors in their capacity as such in connection with corrupt practices engaged in by the corporations they serve. Although generally little discussed to date, Canadian directors do face potential civil liability associated with contraventions of the Corruption of Foreign Public Officials Act that are particular to their status as directors of a corporation. This article thus highlights this particular area of corporate law by reviewing both Canadian jurisprudence and American case law to decipher what lessons Canadian directors can learn in the absence of Canadian precedent similarly on point. Several key cases are highlighted and various risk mitigation strategies available to Canadian directors to guard against these potential liabilities are also discussed
Locking up those Dangerous Indians for Good: An Examination of Canadian Dangerous Offender Legislation as Applied to Aboriginal Persons
Get PDFThis article examines the systemic reasons behind Aboriginal over-representation as Dangerous Offenders (DO) subject to indefinite detention. Colonialism has left behind various social traumas that continue to devastate Aboriginal communities. It is not surprising that significant numbers of Aboriginal persons accumulate lengthy violent criminal histories such that they come under the radar of the DO regime. One approach this article will stress is a call for greater emphasis on preventative social programming, and less emphasis on incarceration after the fact. This may lead to less Aboriginal over-incarceration generally, but also less Aboriginal over-representation as DOs, and less demand on resources over the long run. Secondly, the article also includes a review of case law where Aboriginal accused have been subjected to DO determinations. The conclusion is that courts are placing greater priority on the avoidance of harm to the public, to the point of marginalizing meaningful consideration of the background circumstances of Aboriginal accused, and of different approaches to long-term supervision that are grounded in Aboriginal cultures and may be more cost-effective. The article calls for greater judicial awareness and sensitivity towards the alternatives, as well as the development of an Aboriginal-specific risk assessment instrument that stresses dynamic instead of static factors
Writing on a Blank Slate: The Alberta Court of Appeal’s Early Charter Cases
Get PDFThis article describes several cases heard by the Alberta Court of Appeal during the first five years after the Charter was proclaimed. In doing so, it highlights the key contributions made by the Court of Appeal to early Charter interpretations. It further explores how the Alberta Court of Appeal’s Charter judgments were received by the Supreme Court of Canada. It outlines the contributions that these judgments made to foundational principles of Charter interpretation and ultimately concludes that the Alberta Court of Appeal had a significant role in shaping how the Charter was understood and applied
People Principles Progress: The Alberta Court of Appeal’s First Century 1914 to 2014, David Mittelstadt
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Are Clinics a Magic Bullet?
Get PDFIn the current conversation about reforming legal education, one of the constant refrains is that law schools must graduate students who are “practice ready.” Commentators go on to argue that for law schools to produce “practice ready” students, they must expand how they offer experiential learning. One potential way to do that is to expand clinical legal education programs. I worry that law schools (and others) are envisioning clinical legal education as a magic bullet that will solve all of the ills and imbalances present in current legal education. In this article, I demonstrate the unhelpfulness of the phrase “practice ready,” and dismantle the idea that clinical legal education, or any other singularly-focused intervention, can transform legal education. Building from key insights already made in clinical legal pedagogy, I offer an alternative vision of legal education as an ecology of learning, in which law school as a whole is understood to be an interconnected and interdependent system that is dynamic, changing, and in action. I articulate how understanding law school as an ecology of learning can advance innovative changes — both small and large — leading to graduates who have better chances of flourishing in the legal profession
A Canadian Law School Curriculum for this Age
Get PDFThis article suggests a number of curricular alterations to the current law school program in order to adjust for the modern practice of law. The author begins by reviewing the expansive nature of law school from the end of the Second World War until the period just after the year 2000, which he describes as the Gilded Age of law school. He asserts that the Gilded Age ended with the introduction of market forces into Canadian legal education in 1995. The author argues that the law school of today must anticipate the legal profession of tomorrow. The suggested additions to law school include: grounding legal education in learning theory; using solution-oriented and economic analysis; instructing lawyers to be leaders, team players, project managers, and globally minded; using legal history as a basis for understanding the law; and implementing technology as part of the core curriculum
Crowdsourced Coursebooks
Get PDFGiven increasing criticism and dropping admissions, American legal education is likely to change, hopefully reversing the unsustainable trend of increasing expense without increasing value. Much debate focuses on restructuring the curriculum to make it more “practical” and skills-infused; here we instead propose a rethinking of the basic unit of law teaching, the casebook. Casebook authors and publishers are cautiously venturing into electronic editions, but they fail to harness the power of social learning to make textbooks dramatically smarter as well as cheaper. We are developing an online platform that reinvents both authorship and learning. The platform, which has progressed to alpha testing, provides an online system for crowdsourcing authorship by law professors (including shared and socially ranked case selections, edits, annotations, questions, and problems) and reading by law students and others (including shared and socially ranked highlights, notes, questions, answers, and other interactions, as well as live collaboration). Rather than settle for twentieth century casebooks in digital form, we aim to enable twentyfirst century coursebooks that originate in, and then grow increasingly useful and valuable through, social intelligence