The Ontario Superior Court of Justice just decided that although an employee was constructively dismissed when he was suddenly “laid off,” the employer did not owe the employee any damages because he failed to mitigate his loss.

[7] Recovery in negligence presupposes a relationship between the plaintiff and defendant based on the existence of a duty of care — a defendant who is at fault and a plaintiff who has been injured by that fault. If the defendant breaches this duty and thereby causes injury to the plaintiff, the law “corrects” the deficiency in the relationship by requiring the defendant to compensate the plaintiff for the injury suffered. This basis for recovery, sometimes referred to as “corrective justice”, assigns liability when the plaintiff and defendant are linked in a correlative relationship of doer and sufferer of the

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A recent Ontario Court of Justice decision has declared that briefly handling your cellphone while behind the wheel should not get you a ticket under Ontario's Highway Traffic Act distracted driving provisions.

Is the fact that the trial judge cuts and pastes 85% of one party’s closing written submissions into his judgment “cogent evidence” displacing the presumption of judicial integrity which includes impartiality?

This is the question the Supreme Court of Canada will be considering in November in Cojocaru.

The trial judge awarded $4 million for brain damage suffered at birth. Of the 368 paragraphs in the trial judge’s reasons, 321 were taken, without attribution, word for word, from the plaintiff’s closing submissions.

Since Simon Fodden’s post here on the B. C. Court of Appeal’s majority decision, leave to appeal to . . . [more]

Our task [as lawyers] must be to understand factual causation as it actually is. We should not be looking for a heuristic model of factual causation that generates liability in accordance with our instinctive feelings, unconcerned whether the model is accurate or not. Simply, lawyers cannot say that C was the cause of E when it was not, or that C was not the cause of E when it was. To do so is, literally, to part company with reality. It is sometimes said that a philosopher is someone from whom a tragedy is a good theory destroyed by the

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On July 12, 2012, a two-to-one majority dismissed the appeal, upholding the ruling that Portsmouth diocese is liable to pay for alleged wrongdoings of its clergy. This ruling according to many legal experts paves the way for similar claims and far reaching implications.

For whatever this is worth, for those who need to care (or do, regardless of need).

These propositions are written for the Canadian lawyer whose knowledge of the relevant Canadian law is such that a Superior Court (or equivalent) judge would consider that lawyer competent to prosecute or defend an “ordinary” personal injury or property damage action. As such, they presume a certain level of knowledge.

Comments are on for a limited purpose. I will attempt to clarify any of these propositions if the manner in which I have stated the proposition is not sufficiently clear, bearing in mind what . . . [more]

Following our previous Slaw post, were we commented on the June 15 British Columbia Supreme Court ruling that struck down the Criminal Code ban on physician-assisted suicide. Without being surprised, on July 14, 2012, we learn that the federal government has decided to appeal that decision.

http://business.financialpost.com/2012/07/12/scc-gives-wide-interpretation-to-fair-dealing-in-copyright-saga/ . . . [more]

While lawyers and academics will surely be allocating a significant amount of short term resources to analyzing the SCC’s pentology of copyright decisions issued this morning, a quick look demonstrates a vindication of fair dealing, online innovation, technical neutrality and general common sense.

In brief and lacking any nuance, the Court’s decision in Entertainment Software Association v. SOCAN, 2012 SCC 34 seems to imply some interesting developments in copyright law:

Online distribution of video games should not be impeded with additional tariffs for musical works embedded in the games simply because the games are sold ‘by means of telecommunications’. The . . . [more]

A recent US Court of Appeals decision has caused some concern in banking circles. Here is a blog description with a link to the case, Patco Construction v People’s Bank. Essentially the court held that the business customer’s losses from online fraud had been caused by negligent security practices at the bank, so the bank was liable for them.

As the blog entry (by a noted electronic security expert) points out, while consumers have traditionally been protected in dealings with their banks (so the banks have devised a number of security measures to protect against loss), business clients have . . . [more]

As was SCOTUS last week, the Supreme Court of Canada is a focus of some attention this week, with an historic appeal yesterday that might nullify an election and tomorrow’s release of a pentad of copyright-related decisions which will say a lot about fair dealing. None of this is of the server-crashing magnitude and political impact of the SCOTUS Affordable Care Act decision, but it does highlight what works well with the SCC and its judges:

This is one of those weeks where I beam in admiration for our highest court, and its judges. I am in awe of the . . . [more]