Law is a tool. It's a tool for everyone to use. And with increasing numbers of people representing themselves in court and using legal how-to books and online resources, everyone is using it. Lawyers and judges have a responsibility to talk and write clearly so that others can effectively use the tool.
Legalese is the term used for language used by lawyers and in legal documents that is difficult for ordinary people to understand. Here are four techniques that exclude others:
Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) has been notorious in recent years for its attacks on charities for their alleged political activities. Charities concerned about climate change and Aboriginal rights bore the brunt, with some still awaiting the attitude change promised by Justin Trudeau when he took power.
Taking Trudeau at his word, our law firm provided our thoughts to the Liberals' inquiry on the issue of how charities' political activities should be regulated.
Here's a précis. The full submission is here.
On October 14, 2016, the Superior Court of Ontario heard an application for an injunction preventing the display, broadcast, and dissemination of the team name and logo of the "Cleveland Indians," a U.S. baseball team scheduled to play at the Rogers Centre later that day. The team, whose offensive logo has long been the subject of criticism amongst Indigenous Americans, was playing against the Toronto Blue Jays as part of the American League Championship Series.
The new Access to Cannabis for Medical Purposes Regulation (ACMPR), which came into force on August 24, 2016, has changed how patients with prescriptions for medical marijuana can get their medicine. The ACMPR came to be, in part, as a response to a Federal Court ruling that the former Marihuana for Medical Purposes Regulations (MMPR) violated the Charter because it prohibited personal production of medical cannabis. For many medicinal cannabis users, the cost of accessing through the channels allowed under the MMPR were simply unaffordable.
I was recently listening to a radio program featuring racialized lawyers in Ontario discussing the challenges they faced in the legal profession and was struck by my reaction. I thought: how unfortunate that this was all being shared publicly. Unfortunate, not because I did not believe the experiences of these individuals or sympathize with the challenges they were describing, but because I didn't want people to know about the challenges. Why would anyone hire a racialized lawyer if they knew that the lawyer felt that there was a higher standard placed on them in court, by judges, as compared with their non‑racialized colleagues?
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