Category: News & Administration
What Now?
It turned out that the courts – judges and lawyers – were Canada’s bastion, despite the intentions and hopes of some Canadian “conservatives” during Canada’s far milder version of what just happened in the United States. Let’s hope that the same holds true there.
Brilliant
Source: https://i.redd.it/9ebdhdrf4tvx.jpg
Good luck is what the good people of the U.S. will need. I wonder why and how some of them forgot, or didn’t learn, the lessons from 1968-1977.
For some of the rest? They will need that luck too, lest they find that they regret what they wished for. Many of them seem to have forgotten that their great …. grandparents were once the arrivestes. Some might have left southern, central, western, and northern Europe voluntarily, so to speak. Others were volunteered or offered the choice between death and departure. The newer arrivals? The rebound affect will bite. The enemy of your enemy isn’t by that fact your friend.
The Fourth Monkey Speaks
May 31, 2017
From June 1, 2017 onward, it won’t be quite necessary for hell to freeze over and host a New Year’s Day NHL outdoor game between the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Montreal Canadiens before this blog contains new commentary on any Canadian trial level or provincial appellate level decision dealing with proof of factual causation. However, the occasion will have to be something equally remarkable.
June 1, 2020 October 31, 2016
This blog will remain mostly dormant inconsistently active, usually, and consistently mostly harmless, inevitably, for the foreseeable future. However, comments are now open, again, although what’s here is mostly past not prologue. But, that re-opening comes with a caveat. Click on “continue reading”, below, to read the caveat.
November 9. 2020
I wasn’t dead. Just went walkabout. But the pandemic put a crimp in those plans, at least for now.
One of the advantages of having not practising law in Ontario since the end of 2012 was that I didn’t have to explain that I wasn’t related to the person with the same surname whose name too often appeared in the Ontario Reports, in the style of cause, on the wrong side of the “v.”.
If a wall still exists where the Osgoode Hall class-year pictures are / were hung, I’m in 1975 year’s picture. I’m wearing a brown sweater with gold rectangles tilted so the vertex of one corner points up, over a green shirt hat had white polka dots. The picture is in black and white, though, so you won’t see the colours. There might even be pictures of the 1972-75 hockey OWLS around. I’m the goalie with the longer hair, and the poor attempt at a moustache, in the first two years. The 1975 picture was taken towards the end of 3rd term. Articling was on the horizon.
For the future? Unlike Ozymandias, I look back on my own works and despair. But I’m not quite Outis, yet. If a judge of the (now defunct) House of Lords was prepared to say “never say never”, not that long ago, who am I to disagree?
Breaking News & what’s in store for 2021/22?
October 24, 2013: I’m very pleased to announce that I’m joining Vancouver’s Pacific Law Group. This doesn’t necessarily mean Ontario judges have seen the last of my face as an Ontario lawyer; nor that I plan to stop my reasoned critiques of doings in my former home territory. I plan to keep my membership in the Law Society of Upper Canada.
As an aside, my “timeline” seems to have significant (?) events every decade or so. For example.
1951 – born (so I’m told and the paper work claims. I don’t remember)
1961 – broke right leg playing soccer in the fall (no hockey that winter)
1972 – law school
1981 – text (Apportionment of Fault) is published, take year off (ahem: from practice) to work for Parliament
1982 – joined law firm where I spent the next 2 decades
1992 – played goal for Israel, in Johannesberg, South Africa, in the IIHF Group C World Championship. (I might then have been the best 41 year old, Canadian-trained, Israel-born, goalie on the planet. If I wasn’t the best, I was the only one fit to play, available, able to travel, and who’d held Israeli citizenship long enough that I qualified to play for Israel under IIHF. )
2001 – left firm where I’d spent the last 2 decades, decided to start writing, again, about law
2012 – finished LLM, decided to take year off (from practice), decided to move to Vancouver
2013 – moved to Vancouver from Toronto, took most of the year off, returned to practice.
2021/22 – I hope to still be at least as healthy as the proverbial 60 year-old Swede (but with a better hairline).
Congratulations Mr. Justice Russell Brown (Alberta Q. B.)
The University of Alberta Faculty of Law’s loss (for now) is the Canadian judicial system’s gain. Russ Brown, who until recently was “merely” a professor of law (and an associate dean) is now Mr. Justice Russell Brown, a judge of the trial division of Alberta’s Queen’s Bench.
From http://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/news-nouv/ja-nj/2013/doc_32849.html
The Honourable Russell S. Brown, an associate counsel with Miller Thomson LLP and associate professor of law at the University of Alberta, is appointed a judge of Her Majesty’s Court of Queen’s Bench of Alberta …
The 4th Monkey Still in Abstenia 