Room 611: Tuesday, June 15. 2021

Today's classes are:

9:15 - 11:50 C Block Legal Studies

12:30 - 3:05 B Block Human Geography

C Block Legal Studies - Today we'll take a look at the main differences between civil and criminal law. I would like you to read the Thomas v Hamilton Board of Education (1994) case and we'll talk about it together. Here are the questions for the case that you and a partner should discuss:

Why do you think Thomas and his family brought a suit against the school board and the coaches?
What would you have decided if you were the judge in this case?

Consider "Duty of Care" for sports activities.

Next, I'd like to look at the Thornton et al. v. Board of School Trustees of School District No. 57 (Prince George) et al. (1978) case together (kind of an important case for non-pecuniary loss in Canada). Here are the questions for the case that you and a partner should discuss:

Why did Gary’s parents bring this action to court on their son’s behalf?
Why was the action brought against the Prince George School District?
Did the teacher do what was expected or required of him as a physical education teacher? Why or why not?
Do you think that Gary was in any way responsible for his injuries? Why or why not?
In this case, the original trial and appellate court judgments awarded Gary $200 000 for pain and suffering and loss of enjoyment of life. The Supreme Court of Canada reduced this amount to $100 000. Do you think this was a fair and reasonable upper limit? Discuss.

And lastly, we'll look at two sources:

• Waddah Mustapha v. Culligan Of Canada Ltd., 2006 CanLII 41807 (ON C.A.)
• The Paisley Snail - Donoghue vs. Stevenson

You should become familiar with Donoghue v. Stevenson Donoghue v Stevenson [1932] A.C. 562, [1932] UKHL 100, 1932 S.C. so to help

The Donoghue v. Stevenson case relates to the Mustapha v. Culligan of Canada Ltd. case. So, I'd like you and a partner to discuss the following and then we'll talk about it as a class:

What factors influenced the trial judge’s decision? The Court of Appeal’s decision?
Do you agree with the decision of the trial judge or the Court of Appeal? Why?
What is meant by “reasonable foreseeablility” and what elements does the court look at when deciding what is “reasonably foreseeable”?
Should the test of what is “reasonably foreseeable” be an objective or subjective test? Why?
Should the test be different in cases where psychological as opposed to physical harm is involved?
Some would say that the Mustapha family reacted to the fly in the water in an unusual and unexpected way. Should a manufacturer or seller be responsible for any extreme or serious harm caused by defective goods (such as those experienced by the Mustapha family), or only what is expected that most people would experience in a similar situation? Where should the courts draw the line of liability for harm suffered by others?

I'll go through civil trial procedures with you and explain what a summons or statements of claim and the options available when a lawsuit is claimed against you (statement of defense, counterclaims, third party claims, or default judgement). Next I'll explain the benefits of an out of court settlement and identify why negotiating an agreement is better than going to court. You can find more on the differences between criminal and civil law at: Diffen or OttoGraph and you can find out more about Civil Procedures at Canada's Department of Justice or the Courts of British Columbia.

B Block Human Geography - Today, we are in the learning commons/library working on a language project. Your job will be to create an information graphic poster on an endangered language. For your endangered language you’ll need to:

Show where the endangered language originated and diffused to (yes on a map).
Show the connection to the family, branch, and group of the endangered language. (Use your best judgment on this).
Show where the language is spoken today, indicate how many people speak it.
Show Unique features of this endangered language (What makes it different to and similar than others?)
Show examples of how the language is written and or spoken
Show why your endangered language is important to save
Show how your endangered language is both being threatened (contributing factors) and being saved
Show how people can find more info (links...sources cited)

From Lera Boroditsky in Scientific American:

A hallmark feature of human intelligence is its adaptability, the ability to invent and rearrange conceptions of the world to suit changing goals and environments. One consequence of this flexibility is the great diversity of languages that have emerged around the globe. Each provides its own cognitive toolkit and encapsulates the knowledge and worldview developed over thousands of years within a culture. Each contains a way of perceiving, categorizing and making meaning in the world, an invaluable guidebook developed and honed by our ancestors. Research into how the languages we speak shape the way we think is helping scientists to unravel how we create knowledge and construct reality and how we got to be as smart and sophisticated as we are. And this insight, in turn, helps us understand the very essence of what makes us human.

From A silenced tongue: the last Nuchatlaht speaker dies

Without a geographic and population base to cling to, minority languages seldom tread water for more than a generation or two before going under. Chances are, if your grandparents came to B.C. speaking something other than English, you can’t speak their mother tongue...The question has to be asked: Why fight the tide? The answer: Language is key to retaining culture...That’s not just important to those within the culture, but to all of us. “What the survival of threatened languages means, perhaps, is the endurance of dozens, hundreds, thousands of subtly different notions of truth,” argued Canadian author Mark Abley in his book Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages. Lose a language and you lose the nuanced perspectives it contains, the ones that offer a different view of the world.

And from Wade Davis

“Language is not merely a body of vocabulary or a set of grammatical rules. It is a flash of the human spirit, the means by which the soul of each particular culture reaches into the material world. Every language is an old-growth forest of the …mind, a watershed of thought, an entire ecosystem of spiritual possibilities.”