DAILY
CASE-EXTRACTS
Stay Current With all
Ontario and Canada
Appeal Court Dicta
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Isthatlegal.ca Mission Statement "To create and maintain exhaustive online Ontario and Canadian-based legal resources."
Summer's over! (well almost)I'm writing this on a beautiful late summer Thursday afternoon.
The brief history of the Isthatlegal website is that I started writing exhaustive legal 'Guides' (really, online textbooks) 30 years ago in the areas of my initial interests - which were social assistance, tenancy and employment law. The Guides eventually expanded to about 15 different topics, most of which are still being maintained. Then in about 2015 I started daily case-extracting from the main Canadian and Ontario appeal courts, something which has continued and expanded to date. Now, I regularly review all the cases from the four Canadian and Ontario appeal courts [Supreme Court of Canada, Federal Court of Appeal, Ontario Court of Appeal, Ontario Divisional Court] for interesting and useful 'dicta' from our hard-working and conscientious judges.
Over time, the natural process of organizing these dicta into topical categories has resulted in rich new resources - which is what you will largely find in the 190+ sidebar topics [see 'Daily Case-Extracts']. What you have here is basically an extracted summary of what the appeal courts have considered over the past 5-8 years, growing daily. As well, two years ago I expanded case-extracting to include all legal topics from these courts - even things like patents, criminal law and much of the federal areas that I haven't practiced in regularly. I found legal thoroughness to be more satisfying, much more consistent with the innate obsession that drives most legal writers - and most lawyers for that matter.
Lately, I've started to include (and update) the related statutes and regulations in the major topics, for instance the 'evidence' and 'administrative law' topics - and now (in progress) the large 'civil litigation' topic, with the addition of the Courts of Justice Act and the key Rules of Civil Procedure. As well, given the ever-growing nature of administrative law I've got plans to integrate the many tribunals with their numerous rule-sources as well.
I cherish the law and it's role in preserving democracy, but as a legal professional feel shame that it is so undeniably inaccessible to our citizenry in wide swaths. So - god willing - I'm likely going to continue in these 'megalomaniacal' legal paths for the foreseeable future.
Simon Shields, Lawyer
simonshields@isthatlegal.ca
31 August 2023
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