Monthly Archives: June 2013

CALE 7th Annual Legal Ethics Teaching and Research Symposium – October, 2013

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                  CANADIAN ASSOCIATION OF LEGAL ETHICS

                  SEVENTH ANNUAL LEGAL ETHICS TEACHING AND RESEARCH SYMPOSIUM

                                                      Saskatoon, Saskatchewan

October 25-26, 2013

SAVE THE DATES!

Colleagues:

The College of Law at the University of Saskatchewan will host the Seventh Annual Legal Ethics Teaching and Research Symposium on Friday, October 25 and Saturday, October 26.  The tentative schedule for the Symposium follows.  [Unless otherwise noted, all events will take place at the College of Law on the campus of the University of Saskatchewan.] Continue reading →

A Salyzyn: Beyond the Quid Pro Quo Premise: The Legal Profession and the Public Interest

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Amy Salyzyn, Beyond the Quid Pro Quo Premise: The Legal Profession and the Public Interest, published on SLAW April 9, 2013.

The Canadian legal profession has never been shy to rationalize and justify its role in society. The public relations campaign launched by the Ontario Bar Association in February is just the latest in a long history of institutional advertising efforts tracing as far back as the 1930s when the Saskatchewan Law Society placed a series of advertisements in a farm weekly.

A new urgency, however, now colours our collective efforts. What it means (and will mean) to be a lawyer has perhaps never been more uncertain. In other jurisdictions, new and disruptive business structures are radically changing once taken-for-granted “rules of the game” for the delivery of legal services. New technology is displacing the need for lawyers to perform certain tasks and will continue to do so. On top of this, our country is neck-deep in a seemingly perpetual access to justice crisis that has seriously undermined the public’s confidence in the ability of the legal profession to respect and protect their interests. The list of challenges, as we all know, goes on.

How should we, then, seek to understand and explain ourselves in this tumultuous time?
For the rest of the article and comments click HERE

J Rozenburg: Judges Could Quit Over Pensions

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Monday 17 June 2013 by Joshua Rozenberg wrote a brief article for the Law Gazette in the UK, on Judges, pensions and work in retirement.  Click HERE

Stephen Pitel and Will Bentolin discuss a range of issues that arise in retirement for Judges in their article “Revising Canada’s Ethical Rules for Judges Returning to Practice” available on SSRN HERE. Continue reading →

T Taddese: Defence counsel not alter egos of clients: judge

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Posted on the Law Times June 3, 2013.

Yamri Taddese has an interesting piece on the Law Times website on the discussion in R v Faulkner that considers the relationship between client and solicitor.  Taddese’s analysis of Justice Michael Code’s judgment highlights the way in which “[t]he lawyer erred in thinking she had to get a green light from Faulkner before making every move”.

For the full article and link to the decision, click HERE.  

N Semple: Core Values: Professionalism and Independence Theories in Lawyer Regulation”

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Noel has a new article available on SSRN if you click HERE.

It has been posted to the Legal Ethics Forum; to make/view any comments, you can click HERE.

Abstract: 

North America is the common law world’s last bastion of traditional lawyer self-regulation. In the United States and in common law Canada, lawyers make and enforce almost all of the rules which govern legal service delivery. These regulatory regimes are also distinctive in their (i) maintenance of a single, unified occupation of “lawyer,” (ii) insulation of law firms from non-lawyer ownership, and (iii) near-exclusive regulatory focus on individual lawyers as opposed to law firms. Other wealthy English-speaking countries (the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand) have gradually abandoned all of these elements of traditional lawyer regulation over the past 40 years.

Why have North American lawyers and legislators resisted such reforms and maintained traditional self-regulation? One school of thought is that lawyers have defended traditional self-regulation in order to protect their own interests. However, North American lawyers supported by functionalist sociologists respond that traditional self-regulation protects the interests of clients and the public by upholding important “core values”. This article seeks to elucidate this public interest theory, through a new reading of the legal and sociological literature. The thesis is that professionalism and independence are the two allied but conceptually distinct core values which animate the public interest theory of traditional lawyer regulation.