This is just a quick reminder to IT law folks: the Seventeenth Annual Canadian Information Technology Law Association (“IT.CAN”) Conference will be held in Toronto, October 24-25, 2013. The full conference brochure is available on the IT.CAN website, and registration is possible online in English and en français. The brochure contains details concerning CPD and CLE credits available.

Please direct any questions about the conference to Lisa Ptack, IT.CAN Executive Director at lisa.ptack@rogers.com . . . [more]

Unless you’ve been completely disconnected from international economic news, you’ve heard about the fact that, for four years now, Canada and the European Union have been negotiating “the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) in order to bring their trade and investment relationship to a new level”. As explained on the EU’s website:

CETA will cover the key issues relevant to a modern trade and investment environment, from ambitious new market access opportunities to clear rules for European and Canadian traders and investors.

Of course, one of the key issues relevant to a modern trade environment (or . . . [more]

Each Thursday we present a significant excerpt, usually from a recently published book or journal article. In every case the proper permissions have been obtained. If you are a publisher who would like to participate in this feature, please let us know via the site’s contact form.

Ontario Energy Law: Electricity
Fred Cass, Ron Clark and Scott Stoll
Toronto: LexisNexis Canada, 2012

CHAPTER 1 – INTRODUCTION TO ONTARIO’S ELECTRICITY INDUSTRY

Electricity has been an integral element of the province’s development over the past 125 years and it will continue to be a vital part of our success – economic and . . . [more]

In light of the most recent round of federal judicial appointments announced last week, I wasn’t surprised to find 24 women and just one man attending the Manitoba Bar Association’s lunch & learn event, So You Want to be a Judge? earlier this week. The event, co-sponsored by the Women Lawyers Forum and Equality Issues section focused on providing practical information on the process of seeking an appointment to the provincial or federal bench.

Panelists from the Manitoba Court of Appeal, Manitoba Court of Queen’s Bench and Provincial Court of Manitoba spoke frankly about their own experiences on the bench . . . [more]

Over two and a half crisp autumn days last month, The University of Alberta Faculty of Law capped its centenary celebrations with a stimulating conference: The Future of Law School. I imagine a conference so named can either entice or repel, depending on one’s interest in the plethora of discourse on practice-ready graduates, tomorrow’s lawyers and the goals of legal education. Firmly in the camp of the enticed, I made the homecoming weekend trip to the U of A to hear the thoughts of the stellar lineup of presenters.

The keynotes, panels, and question sessions brought external experiences and . . . [more]

ICANN has been busy dealing with applications for new gTLDs (generic Top Level Domains). There are currently 22 TLDs (.com, .net, .org …) but the number of TLDs is about to explode with the first showing up later this year. Despite a hefty application fee of $180,000, ICANN received 1930 applications for new TLDs. Agreements signed recently include .menu, .land, ventures.

The thought of having hundreds if not thousands of TLDs is concerning to some brands, who fear that opportunists will try to scoop their brand names on some of these TLDs. 

For a complete listing of new TLDs in . . . [more]

Jennifer Senior: Had you already arrived at originalism as a philosophy? Justice Antonin Scalia: I don’t know when I came to that view. I’ve always had it, as far as I know. Words have meaning. And their meaning doesn’t change. I mean, the notion that the Constitution should simply, by decree of the Court, mean something that it didn’t mean when the people voted for it—frankly, you should ask the other side the question! How did they ever get there?

We are several years into the social media era now. As social channels mature the major platforms are ramping up integration of paid advertising options into their systems. Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and YouTube all offer paid tools to promote your posts, updates, tweets or videos to audiences beyond those with whom you are already connected. In short, significant advertising dollars are starting to go social. A question few in the legal industry have yet asked but that will increasingly need to be considered is whether paid social media advertising makes sense for your firm, and if so, how best to . . . [more]

Both Google and Yahoo! have run into litigation (class actions) in the US for allegedly looking at (inspecting, reviewing, mining) information in emails carried over their free email services, gmail.com and yahoo.com. It is not alleged that any human being is opening the mail and reading it. It’s all about automated review in order to test the interests of the senders and perhaps recipients, for marketing purposes.

Would such activity be prohibited under PIPEDA in Canada too? Is that ‘collecting personal information’? Is the type of information being collected actually PI or PII?

Any use made of the information . . . [more]

Yesterday was a horrible day for officers in the Edmonton Police Service Canine Unit. They lost a colleague in the line of duty. Quanto, a decorated Police Service Dog, was killed by a creep allegedly fleeing a stolen vehicle. Note where allegedly and creep are in that sentence.

Today’s Globe and Mail and National Post are reporting that there are calls to change the Criminal Code to allow for stiffer sentencing for killing or injuring a police service animal.

Let me preface what follows with the statement that I love my dog and even some other dogs that are . . . [more]

Last Friday I attended a symposium on alternative business structures (ABS — and not to be confused with anti-lock braking systems, American Bureau of Shipping, the absolute value of a number regardless of its sign, etc.) hosted by the Law Society of Upper Canada. I hope that over the next few days, I and a couple of other Slawyers who were there, can fill you in on some of the interesting stuff that we heard (though I’m happy to say that broadly speaking none of it would have been news to a dedicated reader of Slaw). But today I want . . . [more]

Most of us will agree that doing legal research is generally tedious (and frustrating when you get the same results over and over again no matter what search words you use, without finding anything on point !). But once in a while, you will come across a funny case which will somehow make your day a little brighter. In the post-Lord Denning era, this is a post on my recent Canadian favourites.

Bruni v. Bruni, 2010 ONSC 6568 :

Contrary to Quebec, Ontario publishes the names of parties to divorce proceedings. These two, Catherine and Larry, probably wish they . . . [more]