One of the many highlights for me at last month’s American Association of Law Libraries 2012 Conference was the opportunity to meet Priya Rai of the National Law University in Delhi and to observe her presentation, Access to Legal Information in the Digital Age: A Comparative Study of Electronic Commercial Databases and Public Domain Resources in Law.

Ms Rai is an accomplished law librarian and legal research instructor trained in law. One of her accomplishments is participation in the Information Institute of India Project. She attended and presented at AALL 2012 as the recipient of the FCIL Schaffer Grant . . . [more]

[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.

Legal complexity is nothing new. The scope of its unhappy consequences, however, seems to be getting ever wider thanks to the internet. Now texts land right in the living rooms — or the pants pockets — of half the planet at a keystroke. And, as a colleague once complained, computers and the internet “grease the skids of prolixity” where lawyers are concerned: ten words can become a hundred or a thousand at no marginal cost.

The terms of service “agreements” governing almost all the software and services you use are famously long and impenetrable. Just to read privacy policies alone . . . [more]

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]

It has been a number of months since we have blogged about Omar Khadr. The Canadian government promised his return a number of months ago, but they are now delaying.

Senator Roméo Dallaire is running a petition online via the Change.org website:

The case of Omar Khadr—a Canadian citizen and former child soldier—is a stain upon our society and shows a blatant disregard for Canada’s obligations under international law.

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After years of dragging its feet, Canada finally agreed to his return in 2010, so long as he served one additional year in Guantánamo. No one forced the government’s

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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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AustLII, the Australasian Legal Information Institute, has launched the Australasian Colonial Legal History Library, a free online collection of databases containing legal information from the colonial period of Australia and New Zealand.

A recent article explaining the project, Digitising and searching Australasian colonial legal history, has been published on the Social Science Research Network:

“The paper explains the construction, content and features of the first version of the Library, which as of July 2012 contains 12 databases including one case law database from each of the seven colonies (including New Zealand), some of which are ‘recovered’ cases

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On July 25, 2012, British Columbia's Privacy Commissioner Elizabeth Denham published an investigation report recommending changes to the B.C. government's use of criminal record checks to assess current and future employees.

WIPO appears to have resurrected negotiations over its broadcast treaty, which would grant broadcasters a new property right in content they transmit. This treaty has been contentious in the past for obligating signatories to provide a completely unnecessary, redundant and at the same time over-expansive right to guaranteeing broadcasters over the broadcasting of content. This may seriously impact on individuals, particularly as it will be applied to online retransmission:

Granting broadcasters and cablecasters exclusive rights to authorize retransmissions of broadcasts over the Internet will harm competition and innovation by allowing broadcasters and cablecasters to control the types of devices

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A Facebook comment by a juror made before a trial has resulted in a mistrial. CBC news reports that on the first day of a Moncton murder trial of Fred Prosser, the victim’s family brought to the judge’s attention the fact that one of the jurors was a member of a Facebook group against the accused, and had posted comments on it. The judge declared a mistrial to avoid the possibility that this juror had already tainted the rest of the jury.

You can hear David Fraser’s comments in this CBC interview. David comments that many people don’t appreciate . . . [more]

♫ Break down the walls
Yes, we’ll break down the walls…♫

Lyrics, music and recorded by Youth of Today.

 

In June, the Benchers of the Law Society of British Columbia adopted new rules and took some important steps towards expanding the role of paralegals in the province.

A lawyer will be able to designate two paralegals who will be entitled to perform a number of additional legal services. These services will include the giving of legal advice and appearing in court on certain matters.

Specifically there are discussions on holding a pilot project to allow paralegals to appear . . . [more]