Government Bill 167, Toxics Reduction Act, 2009, received first reading in the Ontario Legislature yesterday; and the text of the bill is just now available in PDF and HTML on the Legislature website.

This is a substantial piece of legislation aimed at reducing and managing the use by industry of substances designated as “toxic,” and, as the preamble states in part, will require

owners and operators of facilities that use or create the substance to prepare, in specified circumstances, a toxic substance reduction plan for the substance. The plan must include certain matters specified in the Bill, including the

My apologies for starting this post with a pic, but

A woman in a hotel room in Uganda is making judgments ready for the scanner.

It demonstrates graphically the challenges faced in making legal information publicly accessible through a Legal Information Institute. That’s the topic of an excellent blog posting by Kelly Anderson of Southern African Legal Information Institute – SAFLII – over at VoxPopuLII, which is a guest-blogging project sponsored by Tom Bruce and our friends across the lake at the Legal Information Institute at the Cornell Law School.

We may be complacent in North America about our . . . [more]

The Alberta Law Reform Institute has been drafting a new set of court rules for Alberta since 2001. Our previous rules came out in 1968 and after 40 years of use, they are not a cohesive read. A little about the project from ALRI’s perspective:

The project goal was to create rules that are clear, useful and effective tools for accessing a fair, timely and cost efficient civil justice system. The proposed rules are:

* short — arranged and written in plain English,
* clear — describe a logical step-by-step process for carrying out a lawsuit, and
* user-friendly —

The Quebec Government yesterday introduced Bill 18 in the National Assembly.

Officially known as An Act respecting the Compilation of Québec Laws and Regulations, one of its effects would be to give official status to electronic versions of Quebec statutes.

Section 17 of the Bill reads:

“17. The laws published by the Québec Official Publisher on its website, including the Civil Code and the Act respecting the implementation of the Civil Code, are the laws of the compilation and have official status as of (insert the date of coming into force of this Act).”

“Within 24 months following that

An item in the Times Online law section surprised me this morning. It referred to a private member’s bill coming for second reading before the Lords tomorrow “to create a framework of rights and responsibilities for couples in England and Wales who live together but who are not married.” The Cohabitation Bill is promoted by Lord Lester of Herne Hill. (Nothing about this in Lords of the Blog. Perhaps tomorrow. BTW: someone help them get the “wordpress” out of their URL, please: http://lordsoftheblog.wordpress.com Way too amateur.)

I suppose I knew that the U.K. lacked this sort of protection for . . . [more]

The CanLII blog announced that their new legislation system is now live. It is not a Friday.

The main improvements introduced by this new approach are:

* Versions of statutes and regulations reflect real changes;
* Legislative updates are carried out on a weekly basis;
* Versions’ dates correspond to legislative changes, such as entry into force, amendment or repeal;
* You can search a legislative text as it was legally binding on a particular date in the past. Historical coverage is approximately five years;
* You can compare two different versions of a particular document;
* You can

We will be posting news of our new project on our website shortly, but let me give Slawyers advance notice. The Board of Governors recently approved a project on joint and several liability, primarily considering whether the Ontario Business Corporations Act should be amended to eliminate or restrict the joint and several liability imposed on professionals. For example, auditors may be liable if there are misrepresentations or omissions in the financial materials and statements they prepare for their clients and if the other defendants are unable to pay damages awarded for their wrongdoing in the same case, the auditors may . . . [more]

Following up on Simon’s vaccines post from earlier this week comes the encouraging news that on Thursday (happy 200, Charles Darwin) the U.S. Court of Federal Claims issued decisions in three vaccine-related test cases rejecting any causal link between vaccines and autism.

Yet, much like with the Pennsylvania victory in the battle over teaching evolution, I can only manage a half-hearted cheer at this latest triumph of science over superstition and ignorance. That it is even necessary to take this to trial – to say nothing of the refusal of so many to accept the correctness of . . . [more]

The visibility and relevance of foreign state (or sovereign) immunity has grown significantly in recent years. States and state-related entities are playing a growing role in international investment and commerce, while seeking civil remedies against states in domestic courts is increasingly seen as an important tool in holding states accountable for torture or other breaches of human rights.

State immunity, in its most traditional formulation, is the rule that a domestic court will not implead a foreign state in its proceedings without the state’s consent. It is, in effect, the expression of judicial deference to the executive’s responsibility . . . [more]

Just posted to the CanLII blog:

CanLII invites you to a user meeting in Toronto

CanLII is pleased to invite you to a user meeting in Toronto on February 11 2009. On the agenda:

• demo of SATAL – the point-in-time legislative system soon to be launched on CanLII;
• creation of a CanLII users group;
• demo of APIs developed to streamline use of CanLII content by institutional users.

The presentation will be followed by a cocktail. They ask you inform them if you plan to be present.

For more info, check their blog post for time, location and RSVP contact . . . [more]

Yesterday the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador created history when it introduced and passed Bill 75 (now S.N.L. 2008, c. A-1.01), Abitibi-Consolidated Rights and Assets Act. The legislation takes away land and water rights, including ownership of all hydroelectricity rights from the generating station at Star Lake, and timber rights to forests on Crown land, from the U.S.-based company AbitibiBowater as of the end of March 2009 given to the company’s predecessor in 1909. Media are characterizing this both as “expropriation” and “repatriation” of the lands. . . . [more]

The BBC is currently offering its program, “The Draftsman’s Contract,” online. It’s an examination in two parts of “the people who actually write our country’s legislation…” The first part, 15 minutes in length, is available now and for the next 6 days — after which it disappears, I suppose. The second part will be broadcast on December 17 at 20:45, and will presumably be similarly available for a number of days afterwards as streaming audio.

The BBC uses its own iPlayer format, which contains DRM restrictions, and has been the object of much criticism. . . . [more]