The Court has spoken, and it has said that BCE won.

This is all that is said:

The appeals from the judgments of the Court of Appeal of Quebec (Montréal), Numbers 500-09-018525-089 and 500-09-018527-085, dated May 21, 2008, heard on June 17, 2008, are allowed with costs throughout. The decision of
the Court of Appeal is set aside and the trial judge’s approval of the plan of arrangement is affirmed.

The cross-appeals from the judgments of the Court of Appeal of Quebec (Montréal), Numbers 500-09-018524-082 and 500-09-018526-087, dated May 21, 2008, heard on June 17, 2008, are dismissed with

. . . [more]

Today's Wisconsin Law Journal raises a neat issue: whether it's appropriate for judges to conduct their own research and decide cases on authorities not cited by the parties. I know this is an issue that we've blogged on before and because of Semelhago v. Paramadevan Professor Swan feels strongly about the appropriateness of it..

The Wisconsin case (decided by the Court of Appeals) settled that it wasn't improper for a circuit court to do independent research, since a competent judge has a duty to ensure the correct law is being applied.

The case is Camacho v. Trimble Irrevocable Trust . . . [more]

Here are a couple of links to interesting pieces that editors (in their infinite wisdom) decided didn't need to appear in the print versions of either the Globe and Mail or Canadian Lawyer.

Martha McCarthy was asked to comment on the five years that have elapsed since the Ontario Court of Appeal's Halpern decision.

Philip Slayton talks about how little we actually know about the judges of the Supreme Court of Canada. He observed from a conversation in a Yaletown bar that it was easier for two Canadian lawyers to list members of the U.S. Supreme Court . . . [more]

Let me quote from the Thursday news release on the CanLII site:

Thanks to a grant from the Law Foundation of Ontario, the following additions have been made on CanLII:

• All Supreme Court of Canada cases originating from Ontario back to 1876 in searchable HTML and PDF-image format (2,100 cases)
• All Court of Appeal for Ontario cases that were appealed at the Supreme Court of Canada (1,300 cases)
• All reported Ontario Superior Court of Justice cases back to 1994 (3,500 cases)

This project added 100,000 pages of historical material on CanLII. CanLII wishes to sincerely thank the Law Foundation of

. . . [more]

Today Ontario Superior Court Justice David McCombs made his final ruling allowing all media–television and internet alike–access to a tape of an interview with Paul Bernardo.

The video, running 31 minutes, shows Bernardo being questioned in a Kingston, Ontario jail on June 7, 2007 about the murder of Elizabeth Bain. Bernardo was not originally considered a suspect in her death, but some lawyers believe he should have been. Robert Baltovich was convicted of Bain's murder in 1992.

The tape was meant to be evidence in Baltovich's court case this past April, but was never played. According to the CBC website: . . . [more]

On June 2, 2008 (one week ago) the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of Major League Baseball Advanced Media v. C.B.C. Distribution and Marketing, Inc (2007) 505 F.3d 818. ((8th Cir.(Mo.) Oct 16, 2007)), the Fantasy Sports case. To backtrack a bit; for those who are unfamiliar, Fantasy Sports (or rotisserie and many other names), is the pursuit where players "select" teams of players from real sports teams and compete against other fantasy sports players based upon the statistics compiled by the players they have selected, Wikipedia Definition here.

Fantasy sports have evolved over the . . . [more]

Readers may be interested in the decision of the Quebec Court of Appeal in the BCE bondholders case, released late Wednesday. The PDF of the judgment [2.5 MB] is available here on Slaw. It is not yet on CanLII. . . . [more]

As reported in Slaw (Oregon Claims Copyright Over Laws and It's All Gone Ore-gon), the state of Oregon maintains that it holds the copyright over its laws and has moved to prevent their publication by others. Now the state will hold a hearing in June to reconsider the question. . . . [more]

The Tuscaloosa News yesterday had a pot-pouri of useful information under the heading Lawyers Open Their File Cabinets for a Web Resource, focussing on JDSupra, a database for contributed legal documents and PreCYdent.

The San Diego Business Journal describes this under the headline PreCYdent Legal Research Web Site Takes on LexisNexis, Westlaw. The product was built in San Diego and Milan, and offers a free and quite robust interface to U.S. Supreme Court and Court of Appeals cases.

It describes its content as:

US Supreme Court: complete with official US citation and pagination since 1759

Federal Reporter . . . [more]

Thanks to Jon Smithen for a link to a BBC piece discussing the availability of The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913, which is a fully searchable edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing 197,745 criminal trials held at London's central criminal court.

The site is fascinating, although I would advise North American readers of Slaw to look at the site in the evening, since there is so much traffic from British researchers that the site is crashing.

A conference on the use of these resources is planned for later . . . [more]

This from Maritime Law Book to Slaw:

Effective June 1, 2008 Maritime Law Book will provide free access to over 215,000 cases in our 12 databases that cover every common law jurisdiction in Canada plus the House of Lords and Privy Council (U.K.).

No registration is required. And the databases are searchable.

Free access is limited to the judgment without a headnote. Also the free access does not include the MLB Key Number System.

Existing subscribers will continue to have access to our time saving headnote material at existing prices. And note that all users will now have access to

. . . [more]

I just noticed while browsing CTV news on a wireless connection in my hotel room in Boston that their lead story is that Mr. Justice Bastarche is retiring from the Supreme Court of Canada . . . [more]