Welcome to the FLC Snippets

If you want your law big – see Cases and Comments, or a lawyer. If you want to see what’s new in the reported cases in bite sized pieces, check out Snippets. It’s like a bowl of peanuts on the table to dip into before getting to dinner. Tasty and small with a hint that there’s more to come.

Our objective in Snippets is to give a brief outline of various family law cases which have caught our fancy. Often we’ll also be able to provide links to the full decisions along with more detailed case comments you’ll find in the Cases and Comments section of the FLC site.
 

Caveat and Notes

The brief notes below are summaries of recently released decisions as well as from digests and reports set out more fully in a variety of sources including the Syrtash Family Law Netletter (one of the QuickLaw databases found as SFLN), the monthly Ontario Family Law Reporter, the case summaries found at the end of both The Lawyers Weekly and the Law Times weekly legal newspapers, caswes posted onn the Internet by the Supreme Court of Canada and The British Columbia Superior Court and Court of Appeal and the Ontario Court of Appeal and the public press. The summaries here are done for general information by the Family Law Centre and are not the responsibility of any of those sources.

As these are only synopses and summaries they should not be relied upon as an accurate description of the law contained in the actual judgments referred to. Always check the actual report before relying upon a comment set out below.

If you have access to QuickLaw, you will be able to find the excellent Syrtash Family Law Netletter (SFLN) with John Syrtash's full summary and comments along with the report of the case itself. That is the most direct way to get the written decision of any case without obtaining a copy from the lawyers involved or the court office - unless the case is a decision of the Supreme Court of Canada, the Ontario Court of Appeal or the British Columbia Superior Court or Court of Appeal, whose decisions are available on the Internet. Both The Lawyers Weekly and The Law Times have fax services which will send you copies of the decision at a charge. Many of the cases set out below will eventually be reported in the regular print legal reports and available from your local law library.

The Family Law Centre will not be able to supply copies of full judgements. To get further information if you are not a lawyer with access to the sources referred to above, you are advised to retain one to do the research you want or to follow up on anything you find of interest below.

Note: The designation means that the summary is new and is the most recently added case or group of cases to the section, not necessarily that the case is more recent than the others noted below it.