The Inquest into the death of Brian Sinclair opened yesterday in Winnipeg. Brian Sinclair was a 45-year old homeless, Aboriginal man confined to a wheelchair due to double amputations. On September 19, 2008, he went to the emergency room of Winnipeg’s Health Sciences with a bladder infection, where he spoke with triage staff and was directed to wait. According to media reports, Mr. Sinclair waited as directed, without receiving care, until he died, some 34 hours after arriving at the hospital.

Provincial Court Judge Timothy Preston will hear testimony over the next several months in the Inquest called under . . . [more]

The Supreme Court of Canada released the decision in Ontario v. Criminal Lawyers’ Association of Ontario last week, dealing with the compensation afforded to amicus curiae. Courts may appoint a “friend of the court,” known as amicus curiae, to assist the court where warranted, and the Attorney General is required to pay the fees for these amicus curiae.

This case involved the appeal of three non-Charter cases in Ontario where the Attorney General disputed the amicus curiae rates as determined by the court, raising constitutional issues about the relationship between the judiciary and the executive and . . . [more]

January 1, 2014, is a new deadline in the application of the Pay Equity Act for Quebec organizations. This is the deadline by which many more employers with 10 or more employees will have to achieve pay equity in their business and have posted the results.

Earlier this year I posted about a French case that held Google liable for search suggestions that pulled up defamatory senses. (Courts in other countries have also held Google liable for this; others have not.)

The highest court in France, the Cour de Cassation, has now held that Google was not liable after all. The search results were completely automated, thus not the expression of anyone’s intention, and thus not able to be the basis of an intentional illicit act like defamation.

As the court said:

la fonctionnalité aboutissant au rapprochement critiqué est le fruit d’un processus purement automatique dans

. . . [more]

In a decision released yesterday, HM Attorney General v Davey [2013] EWHC 2317 (Admin), the High Court of England and Wales gave leave for applications for committal orders for contempt of court against two men, each of whom had sat as a juror in a criminal case and each of whom had used the internet in contravention of instructions not to do so.

Davey posted the following message to his Facebook account at the end of the first day of the trial:

Woooow I wasn’t expecting to be in a jury Deciding a paedophile’s fate, I’ve always wanted to

. . . [more]

In a recent case, Heather Sinclair-McDonald, Human Being, asserted that she had waived her rights as a person under the law and therefore the Income Tax Act did not apply to her. She sought an order requiring CRA to pay back all taxes collected from her over the last ten years.

The CRA was able to have the lawsuit dismissed at the outset on the basis that Ms. Sinclair-McDonald’s claim did not disclose a reasonable cause of action.

The court noted that argument made by the plaintiff, that she is a human being and not a person recognized under . . . [more]

The Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés (CNIL – the French privacy authority) has recently found a company in breach of its duty to protect the personal information of its employees because the company used unduly short passwords that were too easy to guess and that were not changed often enough. (See the story on Le Village de la Justice)

According to the CNIL, the employer should have had a password policy that required longer passwords composed of letters, numbers and special characters, and that also required that the passwords be changed frequently.

It was not demonstrated that . . . [more]

One interesting scrap of legal news that passed under the radar recently was a testy exchange involving Hideaki Ueda, Japan’s human rights envoy to the United Nations at a session of the UN torture committee in Geneva, Switzerland. The donnybrook arose when a fellow envoy called-out the Japanese criminal system for not mandating electronic recording or the presence of counsel at police interrogations. Mr. Ueda sprang to his nation’s defence, only to be met by the audience’s muffled laughter. In true diplomatic fashion, Japan’s emissary responded by telling his esteemed colleagues to “shut up” not once, but twice. . . . [more]

Following the tragic death of Rehtaeh Parsons, a special meeting by the Provincial and Federal Ministers of Justice decided to investigate the state of the law around the distribution of images of an intimate nature without consent. Many observers believed that the provisions under the Criminal Code are insufficient in dealing with this growing problem among young Canadians.

The subcommittee of the Cybercrime Working Group (CWG) responsible for this released their report this week. The report notes that the traditional response in Canada to cyberbullying relies heavily on education initiatives and promoting public awareness and support among families and communities. . . . [more]

Is clicking ‘OK’ on a web site the equivalent of a signature, or just an act of assenting with legal effect, e.g. to accept an offer to contract? Is there a useful or meaningful distinction any more between a signature and an act of assent (at least when the signature is intended to show assent)?

Recently an appellate court in the US found that clicking OK to a web form satisfied the requirements of the Copyright Act (US) that a transfer of copyright had to be in writing and signed by the transferor. The court relied on the Electronic Signatures . . . [more]

One of the final sessions at this week’s American Association of Law Libraries conference offered participants a guided opportunity to work with the yet-in-beta Congress.gov. As THOMAS “himself” confirmed, the venerable THOMAS.gov — now the ripe age of 18 years — is looking to retire:

THOMAS will be retired! Tomorrow at 2:30 PDT we'll tweet about its replacement, #Congressdotgov. #aall13 http://t.co/FIOKzk6K7Q

— Congressdotgov (@congressdotgov) July 15, 2013

As we noted and discussed at the time, the Congress.gov public beta was launched several months ago. It has received several iterative updates since then: inclusion of the Congressional Record, . . . [more]

Last week the Alberta Court of Appeal ruled on a 7 year long custody battle between gay parents. At issue was the constitutionality of the Alberta Family Law Act and Family Law Relations Act.

At the centre of the drawn out family law litigation was the best interests of a 10 year old girl who spent her first 3 years living with her two dads. When the men split up the biological father and the birth mom objected to the non-bio dad having custody and access to his daughter. In his quest to be declared a legal parent and . . . [more]