Today is Canada Day, so there won’t be regular posting on Slaw. Instead, we’ll be outside (we hope) celebrating our country’s 146th birthday. Oh, and in Quebec there’ll be a lot of déménagement going on, because it’s moving day in that province, a traditional, rather than a legal event, when a too large number of leases terminate and moving companies experience a bonanza.

Thanks, by the way, to Google for the tip of the chapeau to our Parliament building:

Update: I should have mentioned that the link takes you to their “street view” of the inside of the Parliament. . . . [more]

This is just a quick note to let you know that I’ve updated my Canadian Law Blogs Search Engine, a Google custom search engine that queries all the Canadian law blogs as listed at Stem Legal’s Lawblogs.ca. (You can also access the search engine in Slaw’s footer from any Slaw page.) As of June 26, 2013 there were 461 blogs in the database to be searched.

Unfortunately, it seems it’s no longer possible to rank or confine the search results of a Google CSE by date, though I’m continuing to look for ways to do that. . . . [more]

Actually, the big news, of course, is that the U.S. Library of Congress has integrated its web archives into its main web search function. For quite some time now, LOC has been archiving significant websites, of which Slaw is one. At the moment there are 940 such sites being archived. Though archiving began in 2008, the archives of Slaw contain some posts reaching back to its inception in 2005 but extend only up to 2010, because the archiving process lags by a few years. (As a digital archivist at LOC explained to me by email, “We do have an . . . [more]

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 . . . [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