Supreme Court of Canada Nominee

The Prime Minister and the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, announced today the name of the government’s nominee for the Supreme Court of Canada, the Honourable Richard Wagner of the Cour d’appel du Québec.

He’s a 55 year old construction law litigator from Montréal who has been on the Cour supérieure du Québec since 2004, and on the cour d’appel since Febuary 2011.

The nominee has agreed to answer questions from an ad hoc parliamentary committee on Thursday.

For Slaw readers two items on his résumé stand out: he was one of . . . [more]

Are you now or have you ever been a hipster?

Hard to tell, perhaps. And maybe, too, a label you’d like to avoid, because there’s a bit of social opprobrium out there aimed at hipsters. Not of the McCarthyite kind, of course; more of a wave of disdain and ridicule.

I’m clearly ok. Although, at first I was worried because a pork-pie hat seems to be part of the uniform and I do own one of those. And thick-rimmed glasses very like my own are in with that crowd. But then I learned that plaid is big with hipsters, and . . . [more]

This is a post in a series appearing each Friday, setting out some articles, videos, podcasts and the like that contributors at Slaw are enjoying and that you might find interesting. The articles tend to be longer than blog posts and shorter than books, just right for that stolen half hour on the weekend. It’s also likely that most of them won’t be about law — just right for etc.

Please let us have your recommendations for what we and our readers might like.

I enjoyed reading Philip Roth’s “Open Letter to Wikipedia,” published earlier this month in The New Yorker‘s Page Turner blog, from which flowed amendments to a Wikipedia entry.

In quick summary, as I understand events: Mr. Roth read a Wikipedia entry on his The Human Stain. He noticed “a serious misstatement” about the inspiration of the story. He petitioned Wikipedia for correction of the entry on his novel. Correction was not immediately granted. The New Yorker published Mr. Roth’s Open Letter. This letter recounted Wikipedia’s explanation that Mr. Roth, the author, “was not a credible source: . . . [more]

The Globe and Mail is reporting that two-tier wage scales are becoming more common as corporations attempt to deal with the current economic context and try to stay competitive on a global level. Two-tier wage scales, whereby newly hired employees are paid at a lower rate than their colleagues performing the exact same work, are said to not only be a form of discrimination, but also bad for morale and ultimately production. From a management perspective, it is a way to cut down on labour costs and to stay afloat. Interestingly, in the cases of Ford and GM cited, cited . . . [more]

This ties in nicely — or worrisomely, depending — with John Gregory’s post immediately prior to this one, in which he asked questions about software updates to your car’s computer systems. Now the Governor of California, the jurisdiction that sets the automobile standards for the US and so for the rest of us, has approved a bill that will begin the setting of appropriate standards for self-driving cars. (See the story here.) From the preamble to SB 1298:

. . . This bill would require the department [of the California Highway Patrol] to adopt safety standards and performance

More than a century ago, an early torts scholar (Pollock) wrote that, when it came to causation, lawyers and judges shouldn’t go adventuring with philosophers. Many modern Canadian lawyers and judges are likely more familiar with Sopinka J.’s admonition in Snell v. Farrell against “abstract metaphysical theory” – the claim that causation is “essentially a practical question of fact which can best be answered by ordinary common sense rather than abstract metaphysical theory.” . . . [more]

A number of months ago I pointed you to a site that let you track shipping worldwide. And although lots of people take cruises, orders of magnitude more move about the globe in the air. So today we’re going up, up and away — not, alas, with Superman, but instead with the thousands of planes that ply the sky at every moment of the day.

Two sites (at least) offer you the full picture: Plane Finder and FlightRadar24. In each case, the website receives live data emitted by the aircraft and control towers and uses them to plot . . . [more]

This is a post in a series appearing each Friday, setting out some articles, videos, podcasts and the like that contributors at Slaw are enjoying and that you might find interesting. The articles tend to be longer than blog posts and shorter than books, just right for that stolen half hour on the weekend. It’s also likely that most of them won’t be about law — just right for etc.

Please let us have your recommendations for what we and our readers might like.

Read this endorsement released today by the Ontario Court of Appeal.

Para. [2] sent me searching.

The background to [2] is here.

Read the first 6 paras., and para. 24, in the 13th case in the chronological listing. It’s 2008 CanLII 27483. I’ve chosen to not link to it.

Perhaps this case – and similar others which some of us have been on the wrong side of – is some answer to the question posed here.

When you see the list, and read the case, you might get an idea why I’ve framed this posting the way I . . . [more]

Every so often I feel free to post about things that have no direct connection to law but that are likely to interest our readers because they’re tech- or research-related. Herewith three such things (the last of which, I confess, is merely delightful):

1. All the News

Incredibly, Brewster Kahle, that rare person with a vision large enough to run around in, has negotiated arrangements that let him, in the words of the New York Times story, put online at his Internet Archive:

every morsel of news produced in the last three years by 20 different [TV] channels, encompassing

Canada is a good place to do business. That is the news with today’s release of the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World: 2012 Annual Report.

The Executive Summary is an interesting read. As you might expect, one of the five broad areas used to construct the measurement is the legal system and property rights. Though we outranked the US in many categories, our index under legal system and property rights is considerably below the US, with that particular gap widening since the 2005 report. This chart in the National Post shows the comparison. The connection between the . . . [more]