Early in my career in education, I was introduced to a learning scale that offered both my students and me a different way of thinking about competency. The scale looks like this:

Understanding the Competency Continuum

Let’s consider this through a real-world example: learning to drive a car.

Before you begin learning to drive, you have little understanding of either the process itself or the rules of the road. At that stage, you are unconsciously incompetent. You do not yet know what you do not know.

As you begin to learn, however, you quickly realize how much there is . . . [more]

With Chief Justice Morawetz set to ride off into the sunset, the Ontario Superior Court will soon be graced with a new leader. While it can be anticipated that the new Chief will continue the court’s mission to prioritize form over substance, it is respectfully suggested that the new Chief Justice focus on a more pressing, if less intellectually stimulating endeavor, namely working to make the Ontario Superior Court less terrible.

As a branch of government entirely dependent on the public purse, the Court finds itself with a dwindling number of friends or supporters. Part of this results from . . . [more]

Each Monday we present brief excerpts of recent posts from five of Canada’s award­-winning legal blogs chosen at random* from more than 80 recent Clawbie winners. In this way we hope to promote their work, with their permission, to as wide an audience as possible.

This week the randomly selected blogs are 1. Robeside Assistance 2. Timely Disclosure 3. The Court 4. Barry Sookman 5. Reconciliation Syllabus

Robeside Assistance
Recently Published Ottawa Decisions

In a family law dispute, the Court dismissed a father’s motion for DNA paternity testing, finding it lacked evidentiary support and served no useful purpose. The Court . . . [more]

Every week we present the summary of a decision handed down by a Québec court provided to us by SOQUIJ and considered to be of interest to our readers throughout Canada. SOQUIJ is attached to the Québec Department of Justice and collects, analyzes, enriches, and disseminates legal information in Québec.

PÉNAL (DROIT) : Il existe une preuve à l’appui d’une conclusion de culpabilité mais, en raison des multiples faiblesses de cette preuve contradictoire, celle-ci ne peut satisfaire à la norme de la preuve hors de tout doute raisonnable de l’actus reus d’attouchements sexuels; la déclaration de culpabilité prononcée par . . . [more]

One Sunday each month we bring you a summary from Supreme Advocacy LLP of recent decisions at the Supreme Court of Canada. Supreme Advocacy LLP offers a weekly electronic newsletter, Supreme Advocacy Letter, to which you may subscribe. It’s a summary of all Appeals, Oral Judgments and Leaves to Appeal granted from March 1 – April 17, 2026 inclusive.

Appeal

Charter: Discrimination Based on Sex; Subsidized Childcare
Quebec (Attorney General) v. Kanyinda, 2024 QCCA 144; 2026 SCC 7 (41210) Mar. 6, 2026

Québec became the first province in Canada to introduce universal subsidized daycare, which marked . . . [more]

As a supplement to our Sunday Summary each month, Supreme Advocacy LLP in Ottawa presents Supreme One-Liners, a super-short descriptive guide to the most recent decisions at the Supreme Court of Canada. Supreme Advocacy LLP offers its more comprehensive weekly electronic newsletter, Supreme Advocacy Letter, summarizing all Appeals, Oral Judgments and Leaves to Appeal granted.

Appeal

Civil Litigation/Mortgages: Res Judicata; Cause of Action Estoppel
Patrick Street Holdings Ltd. v. 11368 NL Inc., 2026 SCC 15 (41296)

Clarification re res judicata & cause of action estoppel.

Leaves to Appeal Granted

Professions: Pharmacists
Haggaï v. Loiselle, 2025 QCCA 932 (41976) . . . [more]

On March 6th, a prominent group of publishers including the 5 biggest global book publishers (Hachette, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Macmillan and Simon and Schuster) filed a lawsuit in NY federal court to try and shut down the shadow library “Anna’s Archive”. A decade ago, John Willinsky described scholarly publishing as having its “Napster moment” with the emergence of pirate sites like LibGen and Sci-Hub. The race to train large language models using sites like Anna’s Archive (which is the successor site of Libgen/Sci-Hub) feels like a second act, where these sites are not just channels for . . . [more]

Each month, we tell you which three English-language cases and French-language cases have been the most viewed* on CanLII in the previous month and we give you a small sense of what the cases are about.

For this past month, the three most-consulted English-language decisions were:

1. R. v. Singer, 2026 SCC 8

[1] Thirty years ago, in R. v. Evans, 1996 CanLII 248 (SCC), [1996] 1 S.C.R. 8, this Court affirmed that “the common law has long recognized an implied licence for all members of the public, including police, to approach the door of a residence and . . . [more]

In recent posts, I have been skeptical about using AI to generate certain kinds of legal writing. I’ve drawn a distinction between using AI to edit or revise a document and using it to create one from scratch.

I take the view that even if you can avoid hallucinations, using AI to create a court brief is likely to raise issues of competence. And I’m not convinced it is well suited to drafting opinion or demand letters, because it leads to writing that comes across as flat and robotic, verbose, and overly formalistic.

But there’s another view out there . . . [more]

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a bold experiment being conducted on our institutions, with very few guardrails. When we do experiments with chemicals and biological materials to develop new drugs, pesticides, or even cleaning products, we set up controlled environments with protections for the humans involved in the testing. AI is mostly being developed without external controls, other than basic guidelines implemented by the developers themselves.

We are living through an experiment and finding out in real time the impact of AI on institutions and society. Sometimes AI is a benefit, sometimes it is benign, and sometimes it can have a . . . [more]

Each Monday we present brief excerpts of recent posts from five of Canada’s award­-winning legal blogs chosen at random* from more than 80 recent Clawbie winners. In this way we hope to promote their work, with their permission, to as wide an audience as possible.

This week the randomly selected blogs are 1. Double Aspect 2. Reconciliation Syllabus 3. Civil Resolution Tribunal blog 4. Administrative Law Matters 5. PierreRoy & Associés

Double Aspect
Nothing Matters Still

The Supreme Court’s recent pronouncements on constitutional interpretation are inconsistent with precedent, but the Court doesn’t care. I return briefly to the Supreme Court’s . . . [more]

Every week we present the summary of a decision handed down by a Québec court provided to us by SOQUIJ and considered to be of interest to our readers throughout Canada. SOQUIJ is attached to the Québec Department of Justice and collects, analyzes, enriches, and disseminates legal information in Québec.

PÉNAL (DROIT) : La nouvelle preuve que l’appelante, une gardienne d’enfants déclarée coupable de l’homicide involontaire d’un bébé, souhaite introduire n’est pas suffisamment pertinente, plausible et probante quant à la déclaration de culpabilité; un préjudice résultant de l’assistance inadéquate de son avocat en première instance ne peut donc être établi. . . . [more]