This course will introduce the law governing the proof of facts in civil and criminal trials in Canadian courts. Upon completion of the course, students should have a broad understanding of the law of evidence in Canada, including its common law, statutory and constitutional elements. The basic principles regulating the use and admissibility of evidence—including relevance, probative value, prejudice, and judicial discretion—will be examined in detail. Specific topics covered will include burdens of proof, competency and compellability of witnesses, rules about introducing physical evidence and questioning witnesses, judicial notice, character evidence, hearsay, admissions and confessions, expert evidence and privilege. Emphasis will be placed on the origins, purposes and justifications of evidence rules and the ways in which they operate in their legal and social context.
Course or Seminar Category: Dispute Resolution - Civil Legal Process and Professionalism
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 language, structure and organization of documents that create and support legal relationships such as formal contracts, letter agreements and licenses. Students review, analyze, prepare, present, and discuss various legal documents in corporate/commercial law and other substantive law areas. Students will work on selecting and adapting document precedents. The work will include class discussions and take-home assignments.
Legal Engineering: Technology & Innovation in Legal Service Delivery
The course will require a laptop but does not require any technical, coding or engineering knowledge at all. This course will: (a) introduce students to how client needs have pushed the boundaries of legal service delivery to include elements of information/data, computer technology and artificial intelligence as both inputs to work product and components of the work product itself; (b) give students the practical skills in breaking down contracts and legislation into decision trees, develop markups and workflows for contract development and negotiations, attain basic experience with common legal technology applications, apply design thinking methodology to legal problems; and (c) give students an opportunity for reflection on the theoretical and practical implications of these changes to the practice of law. Various topics will be discussed, including:
1. Business and technological developments leading to new avenues in the practice of law
2. Design thinking: theory and practice
3. Decision tree development through legislative interpretation
4. Contract model development and markup
5. Contract automation and smart contracts
6. Artificial intelligence and its influence on:
a. Data extraction
b. Due diligence
c. E-Discovery
d. Judicial predictions
e. Legal self-serve chatbots
7. LegalTech startups and alternative career paths
8. Advancing access to justice through automated tools
9. No-Code application building for legal
10.Theoretical topics including:
a. Rules-based legislative drafting
b. The interaction between rules and legal reasoning
c. Ethical implications of A.I. and automation tools
d. Free speech and algorithmic review on social platforms
Legal Ethics
Legal ethics may be one of the only subjects in law school that every lawyer will encounter in practice. This course invites students to deeply engage, both conceptually and practically, with foundational principles of legal ethics, as well as a lawyer’s duties and responsibilities to clients, the profession, and the wider community. We will discuss how we solve complicated problems that present themselves frequently (and often unexpectedly) in countless ways over the course of our professional lives. We will explore current practical dilemmas in different practice areas, along with international comparisons. We will also explore the influences of the adversary system on the pursuit of justice.
Evidence
This course will examine the basic rules and principles of evidence law in Canada, and the impact of constitutional principles and constraints. The course will also examine some of the philosophical underpinnings on which judges and legislators rely when they develop and apply rules of evidence. Students will learn how to reason about evidence, and will be encouraged to reflect critically on the modern law of criminal evidence.
Evidence
This course will provide students with a theoretical and practical understanding of evidence law. After discussing evidence law’s place in the legal system, the course will move on to questions about competence and compellability. This will be followed by a consideration of what makes evidence “relevant” – the threshold requirement for admissibility. The rules governing credibility will be considered, as will the most common exclusionary rules, and the exceptions to them. This will include hearsay evidence (and its most common exceptions, including the principled exception), opinion evidence (and its exceptions, including expert evidence), and character evidence (and its exceptions, including the “similar fact” rule). By the end of the course, students should: • Understand the goals of Evidence Law • Understand the sources of Evidence Law and their interrelationships • Be able to identify and analyze evidentiary problems in fact scenarios and resolve them with reference to prevailing evidentiary rules (common law, statutory and Charter). • Understand the procedural requirements for litigating different evidentiary issues. • Understand, on a practical level, how evidentiary issues are litigated.