“Civil procedure” is what lawyers and judges call the elaborate game of suing somebody. The process would be familiar to anybody who’s been through a 70-minute call with the phone company to dispute some outrageous charge on their bill. Except it is longer by many orders of magnitude, so complicated that the U.S. […]

Tonight, I pushed over all my spare loonies and toonies for bottles of Canadian as the Oilers won a hockey game, then donned my toque and mitts to head out into steady October snow piling up on the Old Strathcona streets.

Yesterday, in a short, frustrated entry on promulgation, I forgot to mention a curious nuance that nobody seems to talk about—the promulgation of bad law. All the time, state and federal courts are discovering, with the help of scrutinous litigants, that certain legislation is unconstitutional. But, as the courts are striking these laws […]

Ages ago, I promised to provide a link from this blog to my other, high-minded “research blog” once it reached a kind of equilibrium. It has begun chugging along, and I’ve just posted a history of the Vancouver-based People’s Law School, which I’ll be visiting next month. To read it, and to keep […]

At the end of a recent entry here, I asked whether the legal system isn’t perhaps just “a small circle of people on the playground making up new rules for the basketball game going on nearby, then waiting with grins for someone to do something wrong without even knowing it.” Well, no, it’s not. […]

Speaking of graffiti, I ought to mention the listen bird, which I’d guess that everybody who’s spent more than a day in Edmonton would know about. “Listen,” often paired with a particular bird, shows up graffitied (sometimes by stencil) nearly everywhere that I’ve been in the city—on walls, windows, newspaper boxes, Canada Post drops, […]

Recently on CBC Radio’s “Sunday Edition,” I heard this excerpt from an interview with Wendell Berry, the farmer-intellectual from Kentucky:
You know that everybody subscribed, finally, to what I call the industrial economic program, which said that it was better to buy things than it was to produce things, essentially. That’s the doctrine. You […]

More conference proceedings, to tide you over until I polish off more of the usual, self-important essays. This is off the cover of the proceedings of a June 1979 seminar held at the Caulfield Institute of Technology near Melbourne, Victoria, Australia and entitled “Community Legal Education: Preventive Legal Aid”:

I didn’t think you could wait another day without more lost-and-found conference proceedings masterpieces. Here’s one from Robert Cooper (who I think may be this guy), a Canadian lawyer who in the late 70s was the CBC’s “Ombudsman” and gave remarks at an April 1977 public legal education conference at the University of Ottawa:
After […]

In June 1975 about 300 key stakeholders from throughout Canada and North America gathered in Victoria, British Columbia, for a national conference on Canadian legal aid. The conference covered three days and treated a raft of topics, but among four major addresses to the conference were remarks by Morgan Ellsworth, then president of the […]