This intensive seminar provides students with the opportunity to refresh and update their research and writing skills. Skills reviewed will include the analysis, citation and presentation of authorities; and standard research techniques, tools, and concepts, such as noting-up, controlled subject vocabularies, digests, and boolean searching. We will review the formats and media used to publish legal information, including web sites, print, and microforms. Additional topics covered will include the publishing and record-keeping practices of the major decision-makers, rule-makers, lobbyists, interest groups, etc.; the publishing and business activities of the significant commercial and non-profit disseminators of information and libraries; and the institutionalization of research activity in law firms, government and academia.
Course or Seminar Category: Dispute Resolution - Civil Legal Process and Professionalism
Lawyer as Negotiator
Law schools have traditionally prepared lawyers for litigation and the courts, although in practice lawyers spend much of their time resolving disputes through forms of dispute resolution, including negotiation and mediation. Lawyer as Negotiation is designed to familiarize students with representative negotiation theory and practice, and specifically how theory informs the development of bargaining strategy in a legal setting. Students will attend weekly lectures, conduct negotiation simulations, and participate in small group discussions and reflections which will introduce and critique the principles of representative negotiation. Students will be expected to prepare detailed negotiation plans for their weekly negotiations as well as a final negotiation held at the end of the semester. Students will be coached and critiqued by dispute resolution practitioners throughout the year and will be encouraged to reflect on and discuss their weekly
negotiations in small working groups of either 14 or 16 students. The first half of the course will introduce students to distributive and integrative bargaining techniques as well as the importance of developing a negotiation strategy and a detailed plan for each negotiation. The second half of the course will focus on the importance of power, gender, culture, ethics, and emotions, among other issues, in representative negotiations.
Class Actions
Class actions have become a key element of the Canadian civil justice system. Building on the tradition of public interest litigtation, they seek to promote access to justice, judicial economy and behaviour modification, while supporting traditional procedural values. The interface between these aspirations has generated considerable interest and debate among practitioners and academics alike.
In this seminar, we welcome a series of leading counsel, judges and professors to discuss with us topics such as the roles of class counsel and defense counsel, and related ethical issues; costs (who should pay and when and how much) and principals of funding and financing; the role of court-approved settlements in maximizing value for the class; the role of the representative plaintiff and the ways in which the interests of the class can best be served; and parallel and overlapping cross-border class actions.
This is an excellent seminar for those considering a career in civil litigation and for those interested in the way class actions are transforming the role of civil justice in society.
Constitutional Litigation
In this seminar, students explore the adjudication process in constitutional litigation, consider questions of procedure, proof and remedies and discuss effective preparation of and advocacy in constitutional cases.
Seminar topics will include: the role of the courts in constitutional litigation; commencing a constitutional case, drafting pleadings, government action under s.32 of the Charter, standing, crown defendants, choice of venue, remedies, evidence in constitutional cases, the role of experts and drafting effective affidavits, discovery of governments, and interlocutory relief.
Legal Drafting
This course is designed to help students develop practical skills in drafting clear and effective legal documents. The focus will be on the form and substance of formal agreements supporting corporate and commercial transactions as well as certain dispute resolution scenarios. Students will work with document precedents, review, draft, revise, and discuss various legal documents. The work will include class discussions and take home assignments.
Legal Ethics
Truly, consideration of legal ethics and legal duties will be an integral part of everything that you do and say in your workplace and with others. These ethics and duties help define your relationship with your client, your relationship with other lawyers, your relationship with the
Law Society, and your relationship with the public at large.
Using readings, class discussions, group presentations and a take-home exam, we will consider the concepts found in the Rules of Professional Conduct, and in the principles of access to justice, confidentiality, competence, interests, professionalism, and self-regulation.
Legal Ethics
This course introduces students to ethics and professional responsibility in the legal profession. A core question will involve how we – individually and collectively – should act. Our focus will be both conceptual and practical. Students will be expected to participate extensively. The course has three main learning objectives.
Knowledge. The first objective is two-fold: to look at what the landscape of the legal profession is, can and should be; and then to situate lawyers and their conduct in that landscape. We will look at ethical codes that govern lawyers, their relationships with clients and the profession. We will also look more broadly at various aspects of lawyering and the profession, including self-regulation, the nature of the adversary system, demographics, ethical tensions between zealous representation and a commitment to the public interest, various practice contexts, access to justice and innovation.
Skills. The second objective of the course is to help students to think about what ethical issues arise in practice, how they arise and how they can – and in some cases must – be dealt with. To help develop these skills and identify available tools and resources, in addition to the assigned materials, we will regularly use hypothetical problems and exercises to spark thinking and active in-class discussion.
Reflection. The third objective – primarily through participation, a group presentation and a final paper – is to encourage students to identify and reflect on issues and topics of specific interest to them.
Legal Information Technology: Data Analysis & Coding for Access to Justice
In this course, students will engage with law as data, using new legal technologies that promise to shift how lawyers practice in coming years, with a particular emphasis on exploring implications for access to justice. The aim is to examine not how the law regulates new legal technologies, but rather how these technologies can or should be used by legal professionals to advance the rights and interests of marginalized groups.
The course will use a hands-on experiential pedagogy. That is, students will engage directly with new legal technologies – including by completing several small coding projects involving legal data analysis. In addition to exploring these technologies, students will critically reflect on their ethical, professional, social, and economic impacts, focusing on implications for low-income and otherwise marginalized groups.
No prior coding experience is required. The course recognizes that students may bring a range of prior skills and knowledge. Both learning and evaluation have been designed to allow students who are beginners to coding and legal data analysis opportunities to successfully explore a new area, while also allowing students who already have relevant technical skills – as well as students who want to push their skillsets further – to take on more advanced projects. As such, participation is weighted heavily, and students can elect to pursue final projects that involve coding or no-code/low-code final research papers.
The course involves both synchronous and asynchronous components. After an initial introductory class, most of the first half of the course will be delivered asynchronously, through online modules and small coding projects. The instructor will be available for online troubleshooting sessions and for other support during the hours notionally set aside for classes in the weeks when modules and small coding projects are completed. In addition, at the conclusion of each small coding project, synchronous discussion sessions will be held to explore ethical, professional, social and economic impacts, with some critical readings provided. The second half of the course will involve students working on a final project (either individually or in groups), presenting a draft of that project to colleagues for feedback, and finalizing the project.
Synchronous sessions will be delivered in a hybrid (hyflex) format, meaning that students can elect to attend any given synchronous session either in person or remotely via Zoom. Classes will be scheduled in 3-hour blocks.
Topics:
(1) Introduction to Coding & Access to Justice (Module 1: Automating the boring stuff)
(2) Data Gathering & Cleaning (Module 2: Finding legal datasets and creating new ones)
(3) Data Analysis (Module 3: I have some legal data, now what?)
(4) Artificial Intelligence (Module 4: Using generative AI to advance access to justice)
(5) Student Presentations of Draft Final Projects
Civil Procedure II
This advanced course in Civil Procedure explores in greater depth certain topics dealt with in introductory civil procedure courses, and delves into other more advanced topics not previously studied. The subject matter includes the lawyer-client relationship (including conflicts of interest), motions, disposition without trial, cross-border litigation, discovery, insurance aspects of litigation, certificates of pending litigation, and interlocutory injunctions. Examination of the leading jurisprudence and recent case law under each topic is supplemented by extensive discussion of the practical aspects of and advocacy techniques associated with each procedure.
Evidence
This course is an introduction to the law of evidence. What is evidence? When is evidence admissible? How does it get admitted? In this course, we will learn about the specific rules that apply to many categories of evidence, like hearsay, expert opinions, and privilege. But we will also learn about the general principles that inform the overall structure of our rules of evidence, and the common sense assumptions that underlie them. We will see what happens to the rules when those assumptions are challenged or proven untrue, the role Parliament has played in efforts to reform the rules of evidence, and the balance the court has struck between competing interests in light of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.