I noticed another disturbing criminal law decision from the Alberta Court of Appeal this week. This time, it’s about starting point sentencing. By way of brief introduction, starting point sentencing has become very popular in recent years – particularly with the Alberta Court of Appeal (see, for example, R. v. Arcand, 2010 ABCA 363 (CanLII), …
Author Archives: Efrayim Moldofsky
The Supreme Court of Canada’s surprising decision in R. v. R.V., 2019 SCC 41
The Supreme Court of Canada has come out with an interesting “trilogy” of cases on sexual assault in the past few months: R. v. Barton, 2019 SCC 33 (CanLII), R. v. Goldfinch, 2019 SCC 38 (CanLII), and now R. v. R.V., 2019 SCC 41 (CanLII). I have the most concerns over the most recent one – …
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One and Done: the Alberta Court of Appeal’s Disturbing Approach to Bail Reviews in R v Ledesma, 2019 ABCA 60
The Supreme Court of Canada has established the requirements for a bail review in numerous decisions – notably, St-Cloud and more recently in Myers. The Alberta Court of Appeal, however, has decided to limit the value of a bail review to an accused person: R v Ledesma, 2019 ABCA 60 (CanLII). Reading carefully, it refers …
Politics and Criminal Law
Photo credit: https://bit.ly/2SEBMj7 I’ve been thinking recently a lot about politics and its effect on criminal law in Canada. It’s fairly self-evident that our criminal justice system is greatly affected by political actors. For example, most appointments to the judiciary are selected by political actors. The Criminal Code is written, and amended regularly, by Parliament (here’s …
A real mensch – the Honourable Mr. Justice Michael Moldaver
(Photo credit: https://bit.ly/2RmOylH) I had the good fortune of listening to Mr. Justice Michael Moldaver of the Supreme Court of Canada last week. He gave the Milvain Lecture at the University of Calgary’s law school – I understand he spent a few days giving the third-year law students feedback during their advocacy course. He spoke …
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Alberta’s Court of Queen’s Bench weighs in on R v Sohal and pre-trial credit for license suspension
In Alberta, there has been much debate over the last few years regarding license suspensions for impaired driving. Essentially, for the last few years, one’s driver’s license was suspended indefinitely in Alberta pending the result of impaired driving charges. In 2017, the Alberta Court of Appeal struck down the provincial legislation providing for this arrangement, …
How to find law articles with *reduced* blood, sweat and tears
I graduated from University of Calgary’s law school in 2016 with a lot of debt, an excellent resume and hardly any articling interviews. In fact, I can count on one hand the number of summer and articling interviews I had during my three years of law school. I managed to find an articling position approximately …
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Moldofsky Law 