Yesterday, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada tabled her annual report on the Privacy Act. While she came down hard on a number of federal bodies such as the passport office, one aspect of the report should be of interest to lawyers generally.

The Commissioner reports on a whole range of complaints against tribunals and quasi-judicial bodies for publishing sensitive personal information about parties and non-parties. Decisions and tribunal records have always contained such information, but now that more of these decisions are readily available online, complainants are not happy that searching for their names online will bring up . . . [more]

CanLII announced this evening that, together with LexUM, it has released Reflex, “a tool allowing you to hyperlink your documentation with CanLII’s material.”

The simple notion is that, on the Reflex page, you upload a document (or a case name or single citation) from your machine and Reflex, recognizing case names, citations and legislation data, will edit that document by supplying citations (where necessary) and hyperlinks to the appropriate text. You can save the final result as an HTML document (which, of course, you can then convert to other formats as needed). Reflex accepts material in the following formats: . . . [more]

While on Twitter I recently came across Mari Moreshead who does “client services and community management” for CourtCanada.com. I had never heard of CourtCanada and so checked their website and asked if I might interview her for the purpose of reporting back to Slaw readers.

CourtCanada was started in 2006 by former bankruptcy lawyer Gregory Azeff who is the company’s President and Chairman of the Board of Directors. CourtCanada is currently comprised of two services:

InSolve – a bankruptcy case management system, first beta tested in February 2007 and released in final version January 2008. For cases in the . . . [more]

At Slaw we’ve referred from time to time to the practice in some US courts of declining any precedential value to cases.

This week’s Minnesota Lawyer brings the debate into sharp focus with discussions of a recent case that appears to have been buried, despite its value. The case involved whether punitive damages could be awarded in defamation cases.

In Canada, the proliferation of electronically accessible case law of dubious value makes one nostalgic for the days when a stroke of the DLR editor’s pen could consign such case law to non-existence. . . . [more]

There’s a possibly apocryphal story of Lord Denning MR changing his mind on who won an appeal after the judgment had been released to the WLR so that the WLR version has the plaintiff winning 2-1 while the All ER version had the defendant winning 2-1. [Challenge to those who have free access to Lexis – was there such a case?]

But this week’s Lawyer’s Weekly refers to a case being redacted by the Supreme Court of Canada after it had been released. The deletion was a reference to the Federal Government’s withdrawal from the Charter Challenges programme.

The counsel . . . [more]

On Tuesday of this week, while the rest of the United States is going to the polls, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear argument in Federal Communications Commission v. Fox Television Stations, et al.. (The docket # is 07-582 but the link generated by the U.S.S.C. site is currently giving a 404 error.) This case has its recent origins in the reaction to a few television broadcasts in which performers used profanity, particularly, variations on the word “fuck.” The F.C.C. had a rule permitting “fleeting expletives,” which rule was changed in 2003 to forbid any use of certain words . . . [more]

Schedule L of Bill 114 in Ontario, if passed, will effectively over-rule the Ontario Court of Appeal decision in Hare v Hare. The Bill will amend the Limitations Act, 2002, by tying the limitation period to the date of default under a demand loan rather than the date of the loan. The Ontario Bar Association discusses this issue in its October 28th e-newsletter. . . . [more]

Here is a link to a useful decision from the BC Courts yesterday which confirms what we always thought was the case: that linking to allegedly defamatory material does not constitute republication so as to expose the linking site to liability in defamation.

Good to have this confirmed. . . . [more]

The significance of the offer by Maritime Law Book of free access to its collection of over 215,000 cases under the name “Raw Judgments” has not yet been given the attention it deserves in the world of Canadian legal information as a portent of things to come.

Eric Appleby, the founder of Maritime Law Book, has long been a leading innovator in Canadian legal publishing, from the launch of the New Brunswick Reports, to the creation of a national jurisdictional law reporter system in print and online, to the introduction of the MLB Key Number System. Based on his track . . . [more]

The House of Lords has just released a judgment, Em (Lebanon) (Fc) (Fc) v. Secretary of State For The Home Department [2008] UKHL 64, of some interest.

A mother and her seven-year-old son from Lebanon sought asylum in the U.K., claiming a right to remain under article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights read in conjunction with article 14. She had been granted a divorce from her husband in Lebanon and had actual custody of their child; when the boy would turn seven, Shari’a law would automatically pass all custody, legal and actual, to the father; . . . [more]

Tomorrow morning, the Supreme Court of Canada will, finally, release its judgment in Saulnier v. Royal Bank of Canada. The case concerns whether a government-issued licence – in this case, a fishing licence – can be treated as a form of intangible “property” for purposes of the Personal Property Security Act and the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act.

This case has the potential to be quite significant. The traditional common law position, represented by cases such as National Trust v. Bouckhuyt (1987), 61 O.R. (2d) 640 (C.A.), was that a discretionary licence issued by a government body grants a mere . . . [more]

That’s the title of my latest London Free Press article. I thought Slaw readers might find the article interesting. Since my arrangement with the newspaper does not allow me to republish it for a period of time anywhere but on my own blog, you can read it on my blog, or on the Free Press site, or on the Canoe technology news page (although this weeks article is not yet there at the time I write this.)

The gist of the article is that a UK judge was very critical of the drafter of an agreement, accusing him/her . . . [more]