Civil procedure can get short shrift, so you should read “Thoughtful Practitioners and an Engaged Legal Community:  The Impact of the Teaching of Procedure on the Legal Profession and on Civil Justice Reform”.  The piece is a continuation of engagement among colleagues Janet Walker, Andrew Higgins, Thomas D. Rowe Jr., Carla Crifo, Lorne Sossin, and David Bamford.  It crosses Canada, English and Wales, the United States, and Australia, asking whether teaching civil procedure as an academic subject holds promise for the civil justice reform.  In addition to the marvellous comparative survey, and hypotheses about the potential of civil procedure as a subject of academic study, you’ll find a succinct and helpful summary of the recent changes to legal education and the regulation of the profession, focused on Ontario.

A great collaboration is good news:  Jennifer Koshan and Jonnette Watson Hamilton are the go to team for start-to-finish analysis of section 15 of the Charter.  If you want a terrific illustration, and one that will catch you up if your section 15 is rusty, download “The Continual Reinvention of Section 15 of the Charter”.  Koshan and Watson Hamilton start with Andrews and end with Fraser.  They slice the section 15 cases into three broad approaches and offer a way forward for important section 15 cases that loom ahead.

You can take Brian Cheffins out of Canada, but you can’t stop him from illuminating aspects of the world around us.  In “Hedge Fund Activism Canadian Style“, Cheffins drops us into the world of offensive shareholder activism (minus the judgement that label suggests).  The paper offers tentative explanations for why Canada, with its (historic?) culture of passivity, is one of the most popular targets for hedge fund activism.  Among other reasons to read the paper, it provides a comprehensive review of offensive shareholder activism in Canada, leading with the Canadian Pacific story, it offers an impressive version of the Canadian history, and it posits a corporate influence heuristic that should inform future work in this area.  Offensive shareholder activism doesn’t have an extensive history in Canada, but its rise (and to some extent decline) make for fascinating reading.

If Albert Yoon wrote it, I’m in the line up to read it.  His work is always a pleasure.  Check out “The Labor Market for New Law Professors“, authored collaboratively with Tracey George.  (For other pieces by Albert, look here.)  The piece focuses on the US race to become a tenure-track law professor.  If you read it for nothing else, the detailed description of that process is fascinating relative to our much more humane-sounding Canadian process.  Yoon and George seek to explain the variables that predict success in the entry-level, tenure-track law teaching market.  They undertook a comprehensive survey of participants in the process and some of their results are surprising.

Jennifer Bond and David Wiseman step boldly into byzantine territory in “Shortchanging Justice:  The Arbitrary Relationship Between Refugee System Reform and Federal Legal Aid Funding“.  Their piece takes on the new refugee system and its implications for refugee legal aid programs in Ontario.  The administrative functioning of these two regimes are complex enough when analyzed independently and Bond and Wiseman do a wonderful job of drawing them together.  They demonstrate how the federal government failed to make the necessary links in aid of access to justice in reforming the asylum process.  If you haven’t kept up with the immigration and refugee reforms, or to the pressures on legal aid funding, then this piece is all the more important for its helpful overview of recent changes.

An introduction to a collection can be a great way into an area and that’s the case with Peer Zumbansen and Ruth Buchanan‘s, “Approximating Law and Development, Human Rights and Transitional Justice“.  The chapter is the introduction to their edited collection, Law in Transition:  Human Rights, Development and Transitional Justice.  The volume is designed to “intervene at the cross-section” of the three fields.  It does not make an effort to survey the now extensive work in each of the fields, but instead engages with the rapidly evolving discourses and questions of each and pushes at the places where the fields intersect, querying the risks presented by their convergence and paying attention to the new questions that emerge.

Supervisory relationships pervade legal education.  So it’s worth reading Gemma Smyth and Marion Overholt‘s “Framing Supervisory Relationships in Clinical Law:  The Role of Critical Pedagogy”.  Their contribution will leave you thinking about your approach to supervisory relationships and its implications for learning.  More than that, the piece does a terrific job of underscoring the value of clinical education in the context of a broader legal education (and especially its focus on the affective and pyschomotor).  There is a great literature in clinical law in Canada and if you haven’t been keeping up, start here.

Ben Alarie and Andrew Green, both of U of T, have jointly taken on some terrific empirical work (see here and here and here and here – there’s more but you get the point).  Their latest contribution, “Policy Preferences and Expertise in Canadian Tax Adjudication”, is similarly good fun and worth reading.  In it, they look to appeals from administrative decisions in tax to see whether the type of taxpayer, the taxpayer’s choice about representation, the outcome of the appeal, the geographic source of the appeal, the procedural process at the Tax Court, the type of legislation, the gender of the judge, the government who appointed the judge, or the prior experience of the judge correlated with the outcome and appeal process of the cases.

The legal regulation of consumer credit has to be one of the most fascinating areas of commercial law.  Stephanie Ben-Ishai and Saul Schwartz’ recent empirical work in this area ought to be embraced: “Credit Counselling in Canada:  An Empirical Examination“.  The paper is terrific.  It starts with Margaret Atwood and ends with a plea for financial literacy.  The argument is that neither of the two main options for dealing with debt if easily accessible to low-income debtors.  The empirical component saw mystery calls to non-profit credit counselling agencies to see what kind of advice they offer individuals with credit pressures.  Spoiler alert:  the advice is not well aligned with the articulated purpose of the agencies.  Read this.

It’s December 1 and The Friday Library is taking the December break.  More in January, so stay tuned.