Advanced Family Law: Resolving the Family Law Case

This course will canvass, at a sophisticated and practical level, various areas of family law, including parenting issues, child and spousal support, equalization of net family property, domestic contracts and divorce. Using a problem-solving approach, we will look at numerous family law scenarios and examine how modern techniques of dispute resolution can be and have been used to resolve these problems. The course will examine the processes of negotiation, mediation, arbitration, collaborative law and the adversarial system in a family law context. 
  
Students will have an in-depth opportunity to practically examine how family law problems can be resolved in an effective fashion and understand how the family law system operates in both Ontario and Canada. The focus of the course will be on the distinctive problems raised in the context of the breakdown of family relationships, which necessarily involves the complex interaction of legal and emotional issues, together with the interaction of family law issues with other areas of law. Throughout the course, students will be encouraged to critically examine the current family law statutory regime, including analyzing some of the practical problems posed by the current legislation.