Timeliness is necessary to the achievement of justice.
In Hameed v. Canada 2024 FC 242 the Federal Court has declared that there is a constitutional convention that the Federal Executive is required to make judicial appointments on a timely basis and within a “reasonable time of the vacancy.” In yet another cry of alarm Justice Henry Brown observes that treading water in making appointments fails not only those who depend on them to …
Andy Gregory at the Independent recently reported that “criminals are gaming the system by pleading not guilty and relying on crippling tactics to evade justice.” The criminal justice systems in most countries have come to depend on a high level of guilty pleas. The natural result of this is that if defendants come to believe that their interests are well-served by requiring the prosecution to …
Various legislatures have recently sought to control the use of litigation to suppress public debate and this has been termed anti-SLAPP legislation. Each of these statutes expressly urge timeliness on the need to shutdown attempts to suppress debate. The recent case of Steven Galloway is a demonstration of the common experience that legislative requests for timeliness run up against the reefs and shoals of delays …
The death of the principal that lies at the heart of estate litigation supports the view that party-driven litigation is particularly prone to delay, when as the Monty Python sketch observed: the Parrot is dead. The transmission of property between generations particularly seems to offer the greatest opportunity for outlandish delays. The delays fictionalised in the case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce chronicled in Bleak House …
25 years is a long time. It’s a quarter of a century, a generation, and longer than the twenty-first century has had to run thus far. Mr. Doran Flock and Ms. Arlene Flock bought a home in Calgary as joint tenants in 1993. Several months later they separated and Mr. Flock moved out and left the payment of Property related expenses to Ms. Flock. They …
It is a common observation that there is no such thing as a short murder trial any longer. Not long ago there were murder trials that took just a few days. Causes of this dramatic increase in trial length abound: the time required to assess Charter issues; the volume and complexity of forensic evidence; the sheer abundance of evidence available through modern life. R. v. …
In 1988, nearly a year before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Leonard Forte was convicted in Vermont of repeatedly raping and molesting his daughter’s twelve-year-old friend. Ten months later, the trial judge ordered a retrial on the basis the female prosecutor was “overly emotional” in her conduct of the case. Thirty years later, Forte was living in Florida, having never faced a new trial. …
