Appeals
ArbitrationOur Blog
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In a recent decision, Hummel Properties Inc v Niagara-on-the-Lake (Town), the Ontario Court of Appeal affirmed that the Town of Niagara-on-the-Lake’s enactment of an interim control by-law (“ICBL”) was illegal. The decision, summarized below, has important implications for municipalities, developers, and builders across Ontario.
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The Court of Appeal for Ontario has once again reaffirmed the deference afforded to first instance judges in cases of contractual interpretation that rely heavily on the factual matrix—even where the underlying facts and history are unique.
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Many of you have seen our weekly blog posts that provide predictions as to how likely it is that particular cases will get leave to the Supreme Court of Canada. Those predictions are based on a dataset of every Supreme Court leave application decision from January 1, 2018 to the present. While those predictions are one use of our data, it’s not the only use. Here we present another: a quantitative year in review of leave applications decided by the Supreme Court of Canada in 2021.
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In the spring of 2020, we posted an analysis of the Supreme Court of Canada’s 2019 Year in Review and summarized some of the statistics found in that document. Unfortunately, the general statistics found in the 2019 Year Review were high level and limited the analysis we could provide about what was happening at the Supreme Court of Canada. We also could not find any publicly available and current datasets that would allow us to provide a more detailed analysis.
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As I have posted before, I’m a fan of using empirical data to inform legal practice. Much as the evidence-based medicine movement has taken hold in the field of medicine, the practice of law should, wherever possible, rely on objective data to inform our decision-making. Unfortunately, empirical legal work remains at an early stage. While there are some academics embracing empirical analysis, much of legal academic scholarship does not involve the quantitative analysis of empirical data. In my view, it is important for lawyers to test our intuitions whenever we can by reference to whatever data is available.
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The Supreme Court of Canada has announced important changes to the Rules of the Supreme Court of Canada that will take effect on January 27, 2021. The amendments were published in the Canada Gazette here, and the Supreme Court of Canada has also published a plain language guide for these amendments here. While these changes are fairly minor in the grand scheme of Supreme Court practice, they will simplify the process for seeking leave to the Supreme Court of Canada.
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Lawyers are trained to do close and careful reading of cases. We are experts in textual analysis of individual decisions, and we can spend hours arguing over what individual paragraphs in Supreme Court of Canada decisions mean. Yet while individual decisions are important, so are the aggregate trends. Quantitative data can reveal important information that lawyers can use to engage in more effective advocacy and better inform our clients as to what to expect.
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At the risk of stating the obvious, gambling is unpredictable. Most people would agree that law is different. We think of law as being a predictable discipline governed by rules. Or at least we want to think that it is. A recent decision of the Ontario Court of Appeal—one that fittingly involves gambling— reminds us, however that predictability is not the only principle that courts value.
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Law and fact, deference and correctness seem no less muddled than ever, as judges begin to interpret the Supreme Court's decision in Sattva Capital Corp v. Creston Moly Corp, 2014 SCC 53. In Sattva Capital, the Court held that pure contractual interpretation matters generally raise issues of mixed fact and law requiring deference, unless it is possible to clearly identify extricable issues of law.
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The Court of Appeal has affirmed the robust gatekeeping function to be exercised by trial courts in the admission of expert evidence (Meady v. Greyhound...
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