It seems that law enforcement agencies are commonly using the records of people’s cell phones to establish where the people (or at least their phones) were at material times.

A US court decision has recently refused to admit such evidence, as not being properly based on science. One expert quoted in the article calls this use ‘junk science’.

Have there been attacks on the use of cell phone records in Canada on the ground that they are not reliable indicators of location? Should there be?

The US case referred to tracking by use of the relation of the phone to . . . [more]

When does the law require you to follow up an email to see if it was received? Is that a matter of prudence only, i.e. if you really have to know, you had better follow up? Are you liable for negligence for not following up, in important cases, or all cases, if the message was not received?

A recent Swiss case – in the Federal Supreme Court – held that senders of emails have a duty to verify receipt in almost all cases. On the facts of the case, the result may be OK: an agent for a taxpayer emailed . . . [more]

Slaw is proud indeed to report that Nathalie Des Rosiers and Sarah Sutherland have joined Slaw as columnists.

Nathalie Des Rosiers has been General Counsel of Canadian Civil Liberties Association since July 1, 2009. She was previously Interim Vice-President (Governance), University of Ottawa (2008-2009), Dean of the Faculty of Law – Civil Law Section of the University of Ottawa from 2004 to 2008 and President of the Law Commission of Canada from 2000 to 2004.

She obtained an LL.B. from Université de Montréal and an LL.M. from Harvard University, and received an honourary doctorates from the Law Society of Upper . . . [more]

With this entry Slaw goes past an impressive milestone: our bloggers and columnists have given our readers ten thousand posts since Slaw began very nearly eight years ago. In that time we've acquired thousands of readers from Canada and around the globe and our complement has grown from half a dozen bloggers to a robust two dozen bloggers and sixty columnists.

This is a good occasion to say thank-you to those of you who now write for Slaw and to the many who have contributed over the years. And thank you especially to you, our readers, who are the reason . . . [more]

Since our new design was implemented in December of last year, I've received lots of compliments — and a few expressions of particular concern from columnists. Their difficulty is that it was hard to see a list of all of the recent columns (as opposed to the daily blog posts) when the left sidebar was removed to increase the size of the main content area.

I've taken these concerns to heart and have come up with what I hope is a solution that works for those who were disappointed and yet keeps Slaw readable, with its larger type and comfortable . . . [more]

We're proud indeed to announce that a third great provider of legal content, Eugene Meehan's firm, Supreme Advocacy, has agreed to provide us with summaries for our Summaries Sunday feature. As Slaw readers will doubtless know, Eugene Meehan Q.C. has been publishing the weekly SupremeAdvocacyLett@r for a good many years, keeping lawyers up to date on developments at the Supreme Court of Canada. He has agreed to provide us with a summary of his newsletter's content once a month — on the second Sunday of the month — and as well four times a year he will craft for Slaw . . . [more]

For some years now Slaw has acted as a repository for the memos and precedent opinions of the Toronto Opinions Group (TOROG), an informal group of lawyers primarily practising with the Toronto offices of the larger Canadian law firms, with an interest in third party (or transaction) opinion practice.

Recently TOROG has updated two of the memos and has added a new one, providing a good opportunity for Slaw to remind readers of the existence of these very helpful documents.

Updated are the memos on "Third Party Opinions On Foreign Law Documents" and "Limited Partnership Opinion Paragraphs . . . [more]

A recent Ontario Superior Court case gives some interesting guidance on regulatory jurisdiction over Internet activities. Civil jurisdiction is not completely resolved, but there are lots of cases, and criminal jurisdiction is also ‘known’ to some extent. What regulators can do or should do is often harder. I speculated a bit on that topic in a presentation on jurisdiction a few years ago: www.euclid.ca/jurisdiction2005.ppt (pages 15 – 20).

In Ontario College of Pharmacists v. 1724665 Ontario Inc., 2013 CanLII 13655 (ON SC), the court held that a call centre in Ontario that was acting for a company in Belize . . . [more]

As we did last year, we're having a modest Law Student Week on Slaw. In the coming week we'll post each day a student essay chosen by Slaw columnist and Ottawa University law prof Adam Dodek from papers submitted by his first year students. As well, the Lawyers' Professional Indemnity Company (LAWPRO) will provide daily posts of interest and benefit to law students.

As Professor Dodek said in his introductory post last year:

I have found that our students have great perspectives on these issues because they were so recently members of that ridiculous term that only lawyers use: "lay

. . . [more]

As we said last year on Good Friday, there are five nationwide holidays in this country: Canada Day (July 1), Labour Day (1st Monday in September), Christmas Day (December 25), New Year's Day (January 1)—and Good Friday, today (which is two days prior to Easter, which in turn falls, roughly speaking, on the first Sunday after the first full moon, after the vernal equinox).

There will likely be no new entries on Slaw today.

See you all on Monday—which is not a statutory holiday in any province or territory and not a holiday within the Canada Labour Code . . . . . [more]

The Law Commissions of Scotland, England and Wales have proposed a clarification of British law about unfair terms in consumer contracts, to ensure that that law applies to end-user licence agreements for software and online services (EULAs).

Canadian jurisdictions do not (so far as I know) have legislation with ‘unfair terms’ in the name, while the UK has implemented the EU Directive on Unfair Terms. (French courts held a decade ago that online contracts, notably the AOL (2004) and Tiscali (2005) subscriber agreements, were subject to the comparable French law – and invalidated a large proportion of the . . . [more]

The European Union is adopting regulations on alternative dispute resolution (ADR) and online dispute resolution (ODR), according to a press release and associated documents, including a draft ODR regulation. This is aimed at consumer e-commerce in particular.

I have not yet found in the documents answers to some questions that occur to me off the cuff. (The answers may be in there somewhere – feel free to provide via comments.)

• Who pays? It appears to be taxpayer-funded, rather than relying on user fees. There is mention of a cost of 4.6 million Euros (annually?).
• What law applies? This list

. . . [more]