Scotland proposes to join England and Wales in abolishing the rule against double jeopardy in some criminal matters. According to the story on the BBC site, the move appears to have been prompted by the acquittal, three years earlier, of a person suspected of being guilty of some terrible murders.

The Scottish Law Commission released a report on double jeopardy [PDF] at the end of last year, recommending that the law be changed to permit an acquittal to be set aside where the trial was “tainted.” The Commission was unable to reach a conclusion as to whether an acquittal might . . . [more]

Morrison v. Hooper, 2010 ONSC 4394

M was 84 when she was struck by a vehicle while crossing a road. One liability issue was whether she was in a crosswalk crossing with the lights. She was on her way home from the bank.

She was healthy enough (physically and mentally) before the accident to be living independently, comfortably. Nonetheless, the defence counterclaimed against M’s children for contribution, alleging that M was mentally incompetent, that the children had a duty to supervise her, that they breached this duty, and that that breach was a cause of the incident.

The children moved . . . [more]

As everyone will know by now, Conrad Black’s six libel actions in respect of statements posted on the Hollinger International, Inc. website will be allowed to proceed in Ontario. The defendants lost their challenge to the court’s jurisdiction in the Ontario Court of Appeal judgment released yesterday — Friday the 13th, as it happens. The court explored the proper manner to determine whether “a real and substantial connection” exists between the jurisdiction and the defendant and the plaintiff’s claims; they also looked at whether the motions judge exercised discretion properly on the issue of forum non conveniens.

This entry . . . [more]

Remember the 60s?

Well, I do, and not just in flashbacks, either. It was all about — well, it was about a lot of things, most of which never did get finished. But that’s okay because some of those things are of an eternal nature: peace, love, and music come to mind. And these are brought to my mind again by the work of an outfit that I stumbled across quite a while ago now and at that time hurried past, the way one does on the internet. But as also happens on the internet, what goes around comes around . . . [more]

Standards of good behavior vary by culture. What is worthy of reprimand in one doesn’t raise an eyebrow in another. In an attempt to forestall misunderstandings, VisitBritain, a marketing group working with the UK government, has released some tips to help the citizenry play nicely with others. Personally, I appreciate that Canadians are included in the list of nations with idiosyncrasies worthy of particular mention.

I know that Brits, like Canadians, will be subject to the frivolous complaints of jealous rivals when they host the 2012 Olympics. With these tips in hand, I’m sure they’ll do a great . . . [more]

Much to the chagrin of the museum crowd, the last few years has seen a steady degradation of the term “curate.” A recent New York Times piece noted that the term “has become a fashionable code word among the aesthetically minded, who seem to paste it onto any activity that involves culling and selecting.” In this sense, everyone perhaps is a curator. 

Now, as stimulating as an etymological debate on the word “curate” undoubtedly would be (e.g., Florida still uses the phrase “probate curator”), I’m not really interested in doing it here. I raise the issue because I am . . . [more]

Twitter has launched it’s own “tweet this” button for blogs and websites; an intended replacement for the many third party buttons people are currently using for web content sharing. The biggest of those companies is Tweetmeme, whose service we use here at Slaw. Here’s a capture from Twitter’s new offering:

Techcrunch calls it “poaching the best ideas from the eco-sytem”, and it’s a strategy Twitter’s used for innovation a few times now. The best example is probably shown by the company watching the iPhone app market evolve for Twitter clients. Once the innovation had taken place and proved . . . [more]

I saw an intriguing tweet from Westlaw today:

@Westlaw: WestlawNext New delivery format: WordPerfect http://ow.ly/2oiFw

Why am I intrigued?

File formats for downloads from free and fee services may seem innocuous, but every change has an effect. For instance, when Queen’s Printers in some jurisdictions changed their format (from HTML to PDF) for publicly available legislation, CanLII had to come up with new collection practices as PDF formats made point in time comparison with existing HTML files ‘difficult’. That is a grand scale example of a file format issue.

A smaller scale example would be rewriting user materials to . . . [more]

Here’s an interesting new online resource — where “interesting” involves some head scratching and not a little wonder. It’s a tax wiki conceived by U of T law prof Benjamin Alarie and built with the help of students in his tax class and others. Taxwiki.ca aims to

. . . establish a publicly-accessible and editable “wiki” of current “interpretation bulletins” and other tax materials. These are not, of course, official CRA interpretations bulletins, but they would initially use as “seed” materials the current stock of bulletins. These are edited and refined by expert users, with the goal of providing an

. . . [more]

In a ruling that could set a precedent for all parents and employers, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal recently decided that employers must promote work-life balance.

[Written with Bradley Albrecht]

Since 1998, the Canadian Forum on Civil Justice has developed a number of online resources and databases which are designed to increase understanding about the civil justice system, and ultimately to improve access to civil and family justice. My last article focused on the Inventory of Reforms, which, alongside our Clearinghouse, is designed to provide greater access to information on the civil justice system and civil justice reform initiatives.

In all of our work at the Forum we have found that there is a real need to promote a stronger shared understanding and . . . [more]

U.S. President Obama today signed into law the “Speech Act,” which is aimed at protecting U.S. writers from foreign libel judgments from jurisdictions that, in the opinion of a U.S. court, do not adequately protect freedom of speech. Such foreign judgments will not be enforceable in the United States — where, presumably, the writer’s and publisher’s assets are located. The legislation was prompted, as the BBC report says, by a libel suit against American writer Rachel Ehrenfeld who was sued in England, a notorious destination for libel tourism, because of a book on the funding of terrorism.

I believe that . . . [more]