As the global community grapples with the escalating impacts of climate change, the legal system has become a critical battleground for accountability and policy change. This course delves into the rapidly evolving domain of climate change law and litigation, examining the intersection of law, environmental science, and global governance. Participants will explore the legal and policy mechanisms and strategies employed to address climate change, the role of litigation in shaping environmental policy, and the influence of legal decisions on the behavior of governments and corporations.
The seminar has two thematic segments. First, it provides a general background on international climate change law, including the UNFCCC, Montreal Protocol, the Kyoto Protocol, and the Paris Agreement, as well as domestic efforts to implement those mechanisms in order to mitigate climate impacts. Second, it looks at the emergence of climate change litigation domestically and in other jurisdictions. Specifically, this seminar will cover cases related to criminal law power, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedom, and private law that have attempted to take governments and other institutional actors to account for their climate-related impacts.
Course or Seminar Category: Tort and Private Law (other than Property and Contracts)
Health Law
This seminar explores the dynamic and challenging field of health law, with a focus on practical issues. The course provides a survey of the legal framework and policy considerations underlying the cornerstone areas of health law, including: consent, capacity and substitute decision-making; mental health law; professional regulation and governance; medical malpractice; and health information privacy. Practical and topical issues will be explored in the areas of: elder law (issues in long-term care facilities, retirement homes); the law of medical assistance in dying in Canada; human rights in health care; hospitals and health care facilities (including physician privileges, employment issues and tensions between administrators, healthcare professionals and other stakeholders); the civil commitment system; reproductive health and surrogacy; and research ethics.
Typical seminars will cover substantive law including case law and statutes, as well as policy issues and examples of applications in practice. Students are expected to actively participate via class discussion and a class presentation. Guest speakers will provide unique perspectives on particular topics. Students will be asked to attend (in person or through electronic means) a hearing in the health law field and to reflect on that proceeding in a midterm written paper, and to explore and analyze an issue in health law through a major research paper. Through readings, class discussion and assignments, students will gain a foundation for a dedicated health law practice and an analytical framework for addressing health law issues as they arise in other practice areas.
Class Actions
Class actions have become a key element of the Canadian civil justice system. Building on the tradition of public interest litigation, they seek to promote access to justice, judicial economy, and behaviour modification, while supporting traditional procedural values. The interface between these aspirations has generated considerable interest and debate among practitioners and academics alike. In this seminar, we welcome a series of leading counsel and judges to discuss with us topics such as the roles of class counsel and defence counsel, and related ethical issues; costs (who should pay and when and how much) and principles of funding and financing; the role of court-approved settlements in maximizing value for the class; the role of the representative plaintiff and the ways in which the interests of the class can best be served; and parallel and overlapping cross-border class actions. This is an excellent seminar for those considering a career in civil litigation and for those interested in the way class actions are transforming the role of civil justice in society.
Law & Social Change: Torts and Technology
Tort law is one of the law’s oldest areas of law, where one still encounters such Latin tags as “sic utere tuo ut alienum non laedas” and “volenti non fit injuria,” where some cases printed in the casebooks are a century older than printed books. Can this area of law be of any relevance to the brave new world of large language models in the metaverse? Perhaps. In 2023, Epic Games, the studio that developed the enormously popular video game “Fortnite,” was sued in both Quebec and British Columbia on the charge that their game was too addictive. Snapchat was sued in the United States after a traffic collision for allegedly encouraging its users to earn a “badge” by driving at excessive speeds. The leading Canadian case on invasion of privacy did not involve snooping into someone else’s bedroom but accessing someone’s bank account details. Social media is full of defamatory statements, with chatbots increasingly adding their voice.
The course aims to see what tort law can do to deal with these issues. It will start by considering the impact of technology on our lives; it will then turn to the question of the interrelationship between technological change and legal (especially tort) doctrine: how technological change influenced doctrine and whether doctrine can affect technological change. A large part of the course will be devoted to examining the law of defamation, harassment, and invasions of privacy. These areas of law are not new, but new technology has given them greater urgency.
Restitution
The law of restitution is the third branch – in addition to contract and tort – of the common law of obligations. An understanding of restitutionary doctrine is vitally important for potential litigators and commercial lawyers. Restitutionary issues can, however, arise in virtually every legal area. This course covers a number of topics – such as fiduciary obligation and constructive trust – that feature prominently in contemporary litigation both in commercial matters and in other aspects of private law, including family law.
The course organizes these materials in terms of a unifying theory of unjust enrichment and examines the relationship of restitution with the more familiar doctrines of tort, contract and property law. In so doing, the course fills in a number of gaps left by the first year contracts course and offers the student an overview of the entire field of civil liability.
Placing particular emphasis on Canadian materials which adopt the unjust enrichment theory, the course examines the more common instances of restitutionary recovery, benefits conferred under mistake, fraud or compulsion, in circumstances of necessity, or under transactions that are ineffective for such reasons as informality, incapacity, illegality, mistake, undue influence, unconscionability, frustration or breach. As well, consideration is given to the recovery of benefits acquired through wrongdoing whether criminal, tortious or in breach of a fiduciary duty.
Insurance Law
Are personal injury lawyers ambulance chasers? Are insurance companies only interested in denying claims and generating profits for their shareholders? There are many misconceptions about the insurance industry despite the important role that insurance law plays in regulating so many areas of our lives. Through this course, students will achieve a better understanding of the role that an insurance law lawyer plays in advancing and defending claims arising out of a motor vehicle collision, a slip and fall accident, or a long term disability claim. Through a case study approach, student simulations and by attending litigation events involving real litigants, students will experience first-hand the application of insurance law and procedure. This will also involve an analysis of the Rules of Civil Procedure, the Rules of the Licence Appeal Tribunal (LAT) and case law generated by the Financial Services Commission of Ontario, the License Appeal Tribunal and multiple levels of the Superior Court of Justice.
Students are required to participate in one of the following insurance litigation events throughout the term: an examination for discovery, a mediation session, a LAT case conference, a LAT Hearing, a pre-trial hearing and a day of trial. The course instructor will facilitate this process. Students will be required to prepare a paper of 5 pages at the end of their real world litigation experience.
Conflict of Laws
In a world of cross-border communication, trade and travel, crossborder disputes arise in every field of private law. A good understanding of the subject is vital for most careers in legal practice and scholarship and it provides an important foundation for the study of other international law subjects. Once based on arcane principles and complex doctrines, the conflict of laws has changed dramatically over the years to facilitate the flow of products, wealth and skills across borders and to ensure that disputes with connections to other provinces and countries are resolved fairly.
This course provides a solid grounding on the basic questions of whether a court has authority to decide a dispute and whether it should exercise that authority; what effect the court should give to the judgments of courts in other provinces or countries; and which law a court should apply to determine the issues in dispute. Also considered are the particular rules that have been developed for key areas of private law.
The rules applied by Canadian common law courts are compared with the rules applied in other common law countries — the United States, Québec, and Europe. This course also addresses the special rules that apply in federal and regional systems.
Environmental Law
This course is an introduction to Canadian environmental law. Major issues in environmental law are brought to life via guest lectures, videos, and exercises drawn from real-world environmental controversies. Course topics will include legislative jurisdiction and federalism, pollution regulation and regulatory instrument choice; climate change; toxic substances; environmental compliance and enforcement; economic instruments of regulation; public participation and environmental rights; judicial review of administrative action; common law environmental actions; environmental/impact assessment; endangered species law; review of environmental regulation in other jurisdictions, for comparison.
Additional principles and experiences will be gleaned from inherently related matters including indigenous issues, environmental sciences, natural resources and waste management, land use planning and brownfield development, and environmental case law. The practice of environmental litigation is addressed in the Willms & Shier Environmental Law Moot.
By the end of this course, students should be able to:
• understand the jurisdictional framework and core principles of environmental law in
Canada;
• understand the sources of federal, provincial and local environmental law in Canada, including key legislation, regulatory instruments, and court decisions and assess the effectiveness of the environmental legal regimes
• understand the structure and operation of the main agencies and institutions that
play roles in the development and implementation of environmental law in Canada;
• evaluate developments in environmental law in Canada, with some comparison to
other jurisdictions; and
• examine, in depth, selected case studies of environmental law in Canada in order
to understand the political/economical/societal dimensions of environmental regulation.
Advanced Torts
The first-year tort law course covers the basic concepts of tort law by focusing on a small number of torts. Most of the course is dedicated to the tort of negligence. But tort law is more than negligence. This course is mostly dedicated to looking beyond negligence.
The course will begin by considering the relationship between tort and contract law, and specifically the possibility of limiting tort liability through contract. The course will then turn to the topic of tort liability of public authorities (including both negligence and other torts), which will examine the relationship between tort law and public law. The third unit will consider the various provincial regimes governing motor vehicle liability (with particular focus on Ontario law). Here, the focus will be on the relationship between tort law and insurance law. The course’s final unit will examine the economic torts (e.g., deceit, passing off, inducing breach of contract). Here the course will consider the relationship between tort law and some aspects of IP law and competition law.