Ah, the unreported judgment…or in this case Order. Sometimes, interesting tidbits come out of discussions that flow to my ears via conversations from our lunchroom.

The walls of the Harvey A. Bodner Q.C. Lounge, named after one of my favourite former bosses, recently absorbed a conversation regarding a Masters order that an student-at-law heard about in passing from a professor regarding an order for substitutional service via Facebook.

The rumour made its way to me and thanks to the great memory of many individuals, including Professor Billingsley who supplied me with an action number, and our students who never complain . . . [more]

Europa – the European Union’s official website – has just had a makeover.

The major idea was to separate laws and other technical material from more general information.

As well, the layout has been simplified and the site has been divided into 6 main themes:

• About the EU (history, structure, institutions)
• Policies and Activities (policy areas, grants, tenders)
• Your Life in the EU (work, study, consumer rights, health, rights of residence)
• Take Part! (online debates, blogs, YouTube videos)
• Documentation Centre
• Media Centre

A navigation menu reflecting those 6 themes appears on all pages to make it easier to move . . . [more]

If you litigate civil claims in Ontario and do not yet have a quality means of processing electronically stored information, your time may soon run out. This post describes why, explains what processing of electronically stored information is about and links to some key resources.

I’d like to deal with terminology first, because “processing” is an ambiguous term in e-discovery. It is often used in a narrow sense, to describe the process of manipulating paper or electronic records so they can be read by litigation support software. I use it here in a broader sense, to describe the process of . . . [more]

Although SEO specialists have long denied that metatags matter, there have been lawsuits over them for a number of reasons, including trademark infringement, attempt to divert business, and even defamation.

Dany Sullivan of Search Engine Watch outlines some of the major American suits over metatags.

Google’s Matt Cutt publicly confirmed yesterday for the first time that their search algorithm does ignore metatags. See the video here.

Eric Goldman of Santa Clara Law says,

Although occasionally judges have gotten it right (see, e.g., Standard Process v. Banks). most courts still treat the presence of a third party trademark in

I won’t be posting on Slaw for a few weeks and so will use this post to identify upcoming developments at the LCO.

We’ve got a number of consultation papers coming out in the next little while. The first one is in our family law process project; it is really a consultation paper about how we’ll do consultations in that project. On that front, it is worth noting that the Attorney General has announced initiatives in family law process possible as a result of increased legal aid funding over the next four years. Obviously, we’ll be watching these developments as . . . [more]

Just in time for Fall, some branching out in biotech this week:

• Two companies branched out, with collaborations that showed the increasing value of science and technology in India and China,
• The market for biopharma IPOs branched out, with no less than three planned offerings moving forward!
• The Ontario government is branching out, presenting new information on the Emerging Technologies Fund and the Biopharmaceutical Investment Program at an OBIO-sponsored panel.
• Even the Cross-Border Biotech Blog branched out this week with some original reporting: anonymous sources gave us some good info about NRC’s IRAP program (which may

A new site launched less than a month ago was brought to my attention recently. Persuasive Authorities is a blog by faculty at various American law schools. But it was the Canadian contributors that I’ve encountered previously that really caught my attention.

I know Richard Albert of Boston College through political activities in Canada. With an impressive resume that includes law degrees from Yale, Harvard, and Oxford, he also clerked in the Supreme Court of Canada. His latest post on the site is about his first class at Harvard, where Duncan Kennedy described how law travelled around the world.

Comparative . . . [more]

The Toronto Star reports that on the first night of Future Shop’s “Beat the Clock” contest (September 14), entrants got more – or less – than they bargained for. In what some Future Shop spokespersons are calling a “time-zone glitch,” users were given access to a two-thirds discount on Xbox 360 video games, for longer than the intended 15 minutes. The discount deal was not cut off after the winners claimed their rewards, and was subsequently offered to other customers. Those customers received an order confirmation by e-mail, but later received another e-mail cancelling their order as a “misprint.”

Future . . . [more]

In an article in the current New York Review of Books, “The Torture Memos: The Case Against the Lawyers,” Georgetown law professor David Cole examines the role and culpability of the lawyers of the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, who, under the Bush administration, wrote memoranda approving of and authorizing torture by the CIA. Cole says,

The OLC lawyers had the opportunity, and the responsibility, to prevent illegal conduct before it occurred. The lawyers involved in drafting the “torture memos”—Jay Bybee, John Yoo, Daniel Levin, and Steven Bradbury—failed to live up to these obligations. In

Neither a for-profit nor a charity, the Community Interest Company is a new form of corporation, one that is run for the benefit of the community. Unlike a charity, it can generate profits, so long as they are used for the purposes identified in its constitution. The UK now has a legal form, regulations, and a registrar for them, but Canada does not. The CIC is an example of the Social Enterprise, a concept that has been current since 2001, and is still being explored. It might help solve problems like this one. . . . [more]

The government of the United Kingdom is thinking about instituting a ‘single publication’ rule for online defamation. Here’s a story about that issue, with a link to the government’s consultation paper.

The single publication rule is an American rule that makes a limitation period for defamation run from the first publication of the defamatory statement. If the defamation remains available, say through the continuing availability of a book or through a newspaper archive, that does not restart the limitation period. US courts have applied that rule to Internet publications.

Canadian and British courts do not have a single publication rule . . . [more]

This is a stub posting on this morning’s Bell decision from the Supreme Court (with the headnote) until we can figure out what its implications are: Bell Canada v. Bell Aliant Regional Communications, 2009 SCC 40, . . . [more]