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Full-Text Articles in Law
Collaborative Family Law And Gender Inequalities: Balancing Risks And Opportunities, Wanda Wiegers, Michaela Keet
Collaborative Family Law And Gender Inequalities: Balancing Risks And Opportunities, Wanda Wiegers, Michaela Keet
Osgoode Hall Law Journal
Collaborative Law (CL) is a unique settlement process increasingly used by family lawyers. In this article, the authors examine the potential of CL to alleviate the impact of gendered differences in bargaining power between family clients. Proponents suggest that the more extensive involvement of lawyers in the CL process can prove more effective in dealing with vulnerable clients than either litigation or family mediation in their current forms. Drawing on the available literature on CL, their own empirical research, and the extensive literature on gender imbalances in mediation, the authors examine the likely impact of both the background norms and …
Peer Review In Canada: Results From A Promising Experiment, Frederick Zemans, James Stribopoulos
Peer Review In Canada: Results From A Promising Experiment, Frederick Zemans, James Stribopoulos
Osgoode Hall Law Journal
The end point in the access to justice debate often focuses on expanding the availability of legal services for the poor. This article argues that true access to justice requires greater focus on the quality of legal services provided. It tells the story of the introduction of peer review in Canada as a quality assurance tool for evaluating the legal work of a group of criminal lawyers. The article chronicles the various obstacles encountered in making even a very limited form of peer review a reality in Canada, where historically there has been skepticism about the peer review process in …
Does Civility Matter?, Alice Woolley
Does Civility Matter?, Alice Woolley
Osgoode Hall Law Journal
Recent discussion of legal ethics in Canada has focused on the importance of "civility" as a fundamental value and goal of ethical conduct. This comment questions that focus. After defining the content of "civility' and reviewing its treatment in these initiatives by both the law societies and the courts, the author suggests that the emphasis on civility is misplaced. Focusing on civility has the undesirable tendency to impede lawyer reporting of misconduct by other lawyers and potentially undermines the effective representation of client interests. It also shifts emphasis away from the ethical values that should be the focus of our …
Canadian Legal Ethics: Ready For The Twenty-First Century At Last, Adam M. Dodek
Canadian Legal Ethics: Ready For The Twenty-First Century At Last, Adam M. Dodek
Osgoode Hall Law Journal
This article analyzes the transformation in the scholarship of legal ethics that has occurred in Canada over the last decade, and maps out an agenda for future research. The author attributes the recent growth of Canadian legal ethics as an academic discipline to a number of interacting factors: a response to external pressures, initiatives within the legal profession, changes in Canadian legal education, and the emergence of a new cadre of legal ethics scholars. This article chronicles the public history of legal ethics in Canada over the last decade and analyzes the first and second wave of scholarship in the …
Sustainable Professionalism, Trevor C. W. Farrow
Sustainable Professionalism, Trevor C. W. Farrow
Osgoode Hall Law Journal
This article challenges traditional visions of lawyering by building on current alternative narratives and articulating a new discourse of professionalism that is personally, politically, ethically, economically, and professionally sustainable. It is a discourse that makes space for lawyers' principles, interests, and life preferences by balancing them with other important interests (including, but not dominated by, those of clients). It is a discourse that seeks to make good on aspirational promises of equality, access to justice, and protecting the public interest. And it is a discourse that takes seriously obligations to, as well as benefits from, the culturally complicated makeup of …