We’re pleased to announce that Adam Dodek is joining Slaw.

Adam is an Associate Professor in the common law section of the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Law. He teaches and writes about public law, legal ethics, the legal profession and the Supreme Court of Canada. He is a founding member of the Canadian Association for Legal Ethics (CALE). And at the moment he is writing a book about solicitor-client privilege. You might take a look at his recent work, “Courthouse Cancellations and Challenges to Self-Regulation: Correspondent’s Report from Canada” (Legal Ethics, Vol. 14, No. 1, . . . [more]

A U.S. court has decided that a bank whose client lost money because someone hacked into its account and transferred funds out of it, was not liable to the client because the bank had used ‘commercially reasonable’ security. The case is described on the Goodwin Proctor website. The lengthy decision of the Judge Magistrate in Patco Construction v People’s Bank, later upheld, is available online. .

Is this the right standard of care for negligence? Does it matter that the bank is regulated strictly under the Bank Act? Does it matter that the U.S. bank could . . . [more]

We’re pleased indeed to tell you that John Papadopoulos has joined Slaw as a regular contributor. As many of you will know, John is Chief Law Librarian of the Bora Laskin Law Library at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law. A law graduate, he teaches legal research methods at both the Faculty of Law and the Faculty of Information at U of T. He is a co-author of The Practical Guide to Canadian Legal Research 3rd ed (Carswell, 2010). Prior to joining the University of Toronto John worked at a number of Toronto law firms as a reference librarian. . . . [more]

Slaw began on July 8, 2005. In the ensuing six years we’ve written a lot: more than 7300 posts, which, if you assume 500 words per post, yields 3,650,000 words. Add to that the more than 10,000 comments you’ve given us, and the Slaw community has produced the equivalent of something like 66 novels.

The posts and columns have been written by nearly 200 people over the years: lawyers, librarians, judges, consultants, scholars, and politicians. And they’ve been read by thousands of you: we now average just under 50,000 unique visitors each month who pay us 130,000 visits a month, . . . [more]

Canadian and American courts (and others) have been making pronouncements about the reliability of electronic documents for various purposes, not all of them equally persuasive, and the Canadian ones more sceptical than the American courts — perhaps only because of the facts before them.

Comments welcome on any of these cases: were they rightly decided? Do they suggest gaps in legislation? . . . [more]

A group of US politicians are concerned that the President has not properly signed a law, a step described in the US Constitution, if his signature is applied to the relevant piece of paper by an auto-pen — whether or not the President authorized the application of the pen (being out of the country when the bill came up for signature, and things being rather urgent.)

Do you think this is right? I think it’s ludicrous, myself. My signature can be made by anyone I authorize to make it — or by a machine. Signatures made for me by other . . . [more]

We’re proud to announce that as of today Slaw will post each week up to ten summaries of recent interesting cases.

The summaries are provided by Maritime Law Book. As you may know, MLB’s National Reporter System publishes 14 reporters covering federal decisions and those of every province except Quebec. MLB editors index, classify, and prepare headnotes for all decisions.

Cases are selected for us by MLB editors using the following criteria:

• Cases involving modern technology
• Cases that extend or restrict the common law
• Cases that interpret new or existing statutes
• Cases that extend or restrict the existing interpretation

We’ve reached a new milestone here on Slaw: comment number ten thousand. The lucky commenter turns out to be a good friend of Slaw, Peg Duncan, as you’ll see in the image below:

Congratulations, Peg.

And heartfelt thanks to all of the thousands who have given us the benefit of their thoughts in the past (nearly six) years. . . . [more]

One of the interesting elements of Google’s StreetView program was that its camera crews picked up and recorded the location of wireless hotspots that were not secured. This information was not, so far as I recall, published by Google, but its collection made some news. It seems to me, however, that one hears less often about ‘war-driving’ and other forms of cruising about looking for unsecured wireless signals in order to piggyback onto the Internet with them. Is that because there are so many public wireless access spots available nowadays, or because broadband access has become so cheap that one . . . [more]

We’re pleased to announce that Gabriel Granatstein will be joining Slaw.

Gabriel is a lawyer in the Montreal office of Ogilvy Renault, where he practices employment and labour law. He also writes for his blog, Quebec Labour Law.

Prior to joining Ogilvy Renault, he served as an officer in the Canadian Forces, where his duties included assisting in grievance processing, conducting administrative and disciplinary investigations and a period of deployment as a peacekeeper in Bosnia. He continues to serve as a reservist. . . . [more]

The Ontario Superior Court recently released a judgment about recovering domain names, South Simcoe Railway Heritage Corporation v. Wakeford 2011 ONSC 1234, in this case a .com name rather than .ca domain name.

Someone who had been active in a voluntary organization registered a domain name for the organization and later transferred it into his own name. He also changed all the registration information settings to private so no one, including the organization, could track who was responsible for the site.

The plaintiff organization brought actions in ‘detinue sur trover’ (a new cause of action for me after all . . . [more]

As mentioned earlier this month on Slaw, the UNCITRAL Secretariat has published WP.107 for its meeting next month, setting out the first draft of a set of rules for procedure in online dispute resolution (ODR). That document is available online. With the same link you will find the report of the first meeting of the Working Group on ODR, from December 2010, to see how the group got to where it is now.

The principle of the draft rules is that they should apply readily to low-cost, high-volume disputes, so they should be simple and accessible and allow . . . [more]