I was in the United Arab Emirates recently to talk to assistant minister of justice Abdulla Al-Majid. He is, as far as I know, the only person of that rank in any ministry of justice who carries the title chief innovation officer. That is a worrying conclusion. Data tells us that justice systems all over the world are underperforming. We also see that they are not solving the problem with more ‘business as usual’. So why aren’t there more of his kind?

As a person Abdulla is hard to equal in terms of vision, drive, and courage. He will . . . [more]

As part of World IP Day on April 26, 2018, the federal government announced a to “help Canadian businesses, creators, entrepreneurs and innovators understand, protect and access intellectual property”. The strategy, led by the Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development, has a number of initiatives, and $85 million in funding, which will be rolled out over the upcoming months and years. New resources, tools, opportunities and legal changes may be interest to many in innovation oriented businesses.

IP Awareness and Tools

In addition to specific tools, a big focus on the strategy is increasing IP awareness. There is money . . . [more]

Everywhere I go, there’s an aquarium. When I took the library tour while I was attending the law rare book school at Yale, there was an aquarium in the library book stacks. And when I went to the AALL annual meeting in Baltimore, Maryland and decided to have dinner at one of the suggested eateries, Luna del Sea Steak & Seafood Bistro had an aquarium. What are the chances of seeing aquaria in unlikely places in the span of a month? Well, each time I saw an aquarium, I was drawn to the black, unmoving fish hidden in the dark . . . [more]

This is a general and quick review of who should or can be responsible if something goes wrong on blockchain. I am brainstorming, not educating. Don’t take this essay as legal advice.

I can think of two categories of potential defendants in blockchains: developers and users. But first of all, what is liability?

Black’s, tenth edition, defines liability as “The quality, state, or condition of being legally obligated or accountable; legal responsibility to another or to society, enforceable by civil remedy or criminal punishment.” I am interested only in civil liability here.

The key element of liability is that it . . . [more]

On June 19, 2018 Steam Whistle Brewing and Great Western Brewing scored an historic victory against the Alberta Gaming and Liquor Commission: Madam Justice Marriott of the Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench declared Alberta’s beer mark-up regime unconstitutional, and awarded the brewers over $2 million in restitution. The full decision can be read here. The decision also marks the first time a court has been called on to apply the Supreme Court of Canada’s recent statement of the law in R v. Comeau with respect to the proper interpretation of s. 121 of the Constitution Act as it relates . . . [more]

In January of this year, I canvassed developments on electronic wills in Australia, New Zealand, England & Wales, the U.S. and Canada. Since that time, the Uniform Law Commission (ULC)’s drafting committee in the U.S. has been moving the file forward. I am not aware of any law reform action Down Under, and the Law Commission of England & Wales is still thinking about it. Canada is discussed later in this column.

UNITED STATES

In late July, the ULC will give first reading to an Electronic Wills Act. The “Annual Meeting Draft” is quite compact yet covers the . . . [more]

Since the summer of 2017 Canada, Mexico and the United States have been negotiating with the objective of agreeing on a revised NAFTA—sometimes called NAFTA 2.0. Most observers take the view that the talks have not gone well to date. The U.S. Administration is now signaling that it wants to take a hiatus until after the Congressional mid-term negotiations in November. This, in spite of renewed pushes from Canada and the newly elected Mexican President’s calls to accelerate the talks. It seems that the parties cannot even agree on the timetable, and it has grown increasingly clear that there is . . . [more]

Canada is known around the world for the quality of its student legal clinics and the level of responsibility given to law students.

In 2016, the International Journal of Clinical Legal Education held its annual conference in Toronto jointly with the Association for Canadian Clinical Legal Education (ACCLE). A number of my students attended, and were surprised to learn that Canadian law students carried a great deal more responsibility than their counterparts in other countries.

My students handle trials in criminal matters, small claims court, and landlord and tenant matters. They draft wills and powers of attorney. They handle mediations. . . . [more]

With very little fanfare, but flood of notifications heralding its imminent arrival, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation 2016/679 (GDPR) came into direct effect across the 28 member states of the European Union and three of the four states belonging to the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), (collectively the European Economic Area (EEA)) on May 25, 2018. The Regulation has been on the statute books for a couple of years, but only appeared on the legal risk radar recently. The maximum penalties for non-compliance are jaw dropping and headline grabbing – €20M or 2% of global revenue for non-compliance . . . [more]

In Part I of this two-part column, I examined the fate of a current California legislative initiative intended to expand access rights to state-sponsored research. While the bill continues to move through the legislature, my previous post discusses how the publishers lobby swiftly managed to amend the bill, eliminating its six-month reduction of the twelve-month embargo period (allowed publishers to delay providing open access after publication). While attesting to their support for open access, in principle, the publishers held that reducing (by six months) the public’s wait to see this research violated their property rights and threatened the future . . . [more]

When people are dealing with a legal problem they often don’t approach a lawyer as their first step. Frequently, people go to a source they’re in closer contact with: frontline staff working in local community-based organizations.

Frontline workers are people working in settlement agencies, housing or health support, libraries, community centres, and in many other community services. They listen attentively, show empathy, and try their best to refer clients in the right direction. Frontline workers get to know their clients’ circumstances and their larger set of problems. In some cases, they share languages and cultural backgrounds with their clients. Their . . . [more]

In Canada we allow lawyers to have sex with their clients. Or, to be precise: we do not prohibit lawyers from having sex with their clients.

Canadian law societies do regulate lawyer-client sex in a limited way. Almost all law societies prohibit sexual harassment.[1] And most law societies also identify lawyer-client sex as potentially creating conflicts of interest. They identify sexual relationships with clients as the sort of thing that may “conflict with the lawyer’s duty to provide objective, disinterested professional advice to the client” and which may “permit exploitation of the client” (FLS Model Code Rule 3.4-1, Commentary . . . [more]