This is the 26th edition of This Weeks’ Biotech Highlights, which means Slaw has been hosting my ramblings for exactly half a year. Thanks! Other things I’m thankful for:

• Takeda Canada, which opened in Mississauga in March, got the ball rolling with their Canadian business by buying back rights to a diabetes drug from Eli Lilly.
• The National Research Counsel’s IRAP program, which received a tonne of Canadian stimulus money and has been making a lot of biotech investments lately.
• LOM and BioQuest, who created some excitement about Canada’s biotech industry by announcing a new joint

A couple of days ago I was at the Supreme Court to discuss potential improvements to the Supreme Court decision website. Some of you probably noticed that over the last year LexUM greatly expanded the scope of decisions available on this site. We now have everything back to 1949, as well as everything from Ontario and BC back to 1876. If everything continues to go according to plan, all of the decisions ever published in the Supreme Court Report will be freely available online before next spring. With content becoming exhaustive, we are now looking to improve the feature . . . [more]

That’s the lesson from a recent Ontario Superior Court case.

The plaintiff was hired by the defendant on November 28, 2005 for the position of full-time receptionist and was promoted to the position of Executive Assistant in 2008 at an annual salary of $36,000. Her employment was terminated on November 28, 2008 at which time she was presented with a severance package that provided, in part as follows:

You will receive an additional five months pay in lieu of notice of termination as per our obligations under the Employment Standards Act of Ontario.


The Employment Standards Act would have . . . [more]

. . . [more]

Simon makes a very good point. Some footnotes from this week’s internet eye:

How difficult is it to disappear, now that most routine life events require a login? Wired article:

Financially he was beyond overextended. A gadget lover whose spending always seemed to exceed his income, he had begun shifting his personal expenses to his corporate credit card — first dinner and drinks, then a washer and dryer, then family vacations. In early February, when an Eaton official emailed to inquire about his expense reports, he felt everything closing in. He began devising a plan to escape.

Even . . . [more]

This is just a quick note to say that I’ve added announcements of recent Supreme Court decisions to the roster of Twitter feeds at CanCourts (cancourts.ca). As with announcements about court of appeal judgments from Ontario, British Columbia and Quebec, these are provided by the RSS feed from CanLII, and so they are a week or more behind the actual release date.

I should mention that this link between the RSS feeds and Twitter depends upon a free service provided by RSS2Twitter.com. They depend on donations, so if you use these feeds you might feel like supporting . . . [more]

The Ontario Human Rights Commission today released its annual report for 2008-2009.

This has been the first year under a new structure and mandate.

On June 30, 2008, the Human Rights Code Amendment Act, 2006 came into effect.

From that date, all new complaints were to be filed with the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario. There was a transition period during which people who still had complaints with the Commission after June 30, 2008 could either continue with this direction until December 31, 2008, or could opt out and file an application directly with the Tribunal up to June . . . [more]

The New York Review of Books has a series of podcasts online, one of which is of legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin interviewed by Hugh Eakin of the NYRB editorial staff. Dworkin addresses the formulaic nature of the hearings and particularly the notion, much mooted at the time, that a judge’s personal opinions should be irrelevant and her only task ought to be to faithful to the law.

Dworkin says at one point:

There’s a great myth abroad in America which is that a judge can decide cases by just saying I will apply the law whatever it is and my

With the copyright reform hearings and public input now in full gear, I thought it would be interesting to get a feel for where readers are at with this issue. So I created this quick, clearly unscientific poll. Copyright issues are really about balancing the interests of creators, users, and society as a whole, and are far more complex than a short question – but lets see which side of the larger debate readers fall on.

Take the survey

Survey results . . . [more]

I had earlier asked about efforts to organize the increasing amount of legislation being digitized as a result of various efforts by academic and courthouse law libraries.

While conducting such historical legislative research online I stumbled across the Canadian Legislation Online page at the Great Library and I don’t think SLAW has yet commented on their page.

Kudos to the Great Library. They provide links to a number of the historical material, including:

– Revised Statutes of Canada, 1970

– the Canada Gazette (soon to be from 1841 to 1997) (via Library and Archives Canada) (the site works great and . . . [more]

We learned this morning of the death of Professor Hugh Lawford, a legend in Canadian legal information. He will be mourned by many students who studied with him at Queen’s University Law School, and his passing should be noted by every Canadian lawyer, because Hugh and his colleagues revolutionized how law is practiced. . . . [more]

I spent most of the last week moderately involved in a somewhat different model of law reform, the annual meetings of the Uniform Law Conference of Canada, held this year in Ottawa, hosted by Justice Canada. (The website does not include this year’s proceedings, but you can find last year’s reports, resolutions and other documents there.) One of our fellow slawyers, a long term ULCC full participant, was also there as an Ontario delegate. The delegate to the ULCC are mainly senior or middle-level bureaucrats from the provincial, territorial and federal governments, but law commission representatives and others (such . . . [more]