From the Pacific a significant decision has prompted a new Grundnormon the judgment of the Fiji Court of Appeal which resulted in the President suspending the constitution and reappointing the interim executive that came to power in the coup. Here is the judgment appealed from. . . . [more]

From last week’s Publishers’ Weekly, a good overview of how the trade publishing industry is employing Indian coders to embed .xml into works. But a paragraph on Innodata Isogen, which I thought of as doing law firm outsourcing shows just how globally linked the outsourcing of the production of legal information has become.

No KPO (knowledge processing outsourcing) project is too complex for Innodata Isogen. Take a recent job that entailed producing marketable Dutch jurisprudence information within the guidelines of European laws, which prohibit the disclosure of any information that could identify the parties involved. “The anonymization

Once you’ve recovered from the stimulation of LegalIT 3.0 (April 20, Montreal), you can sign up for the Canadian Institute for the Administration of Justice’s annual conference, this year on “Taking Remedies Seriously” (September 30 – October 2, Ottawa). A listing of some of the overarching topics will give you a sense of what’s in store:

• Private Law and the Remedial Imagination
• The Relationship Between Rights and Remedies
• Remedial Issues for the Future
• Administrative Law and Remedial Choices
• Remedies Against Public Bodies
• Remedies Available to Administrative Agencies

Today I am at the second day of the mesh conference. mesh is arguably Toronto’s premier social media/business conference, now in its fourth year. These notes have been “liveblogged” during Rob Hyndman’s session “Legal Bootcamp for Web Startups”. Rob Hyndman is principal of Hyndman Law, and one of the five founders of the mesh conference. Any inaccuracies or omissions in the notes below are purely my mistake and not Rob’s. Note this is not legal advice, but general discussion only. The main audience for this talk is start-up owners/those in the market to start up a tech company. . . . [more]

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

The most recent issue of Reform, the journal of the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC), is devoted to Native Title.

As noted by Professor David Weisbrot, ALRC President, in his Comment, the Commission has played an instrumental role in advancing the ideas of native title in Australia (based on Indigenous customary land tenure).

However, he writes that most observers feel that the framework developed for resolving native title disputes has developed many weaknesses:

“Mabo [ (1992) 175 CLR 1 ] and the subsequent Wik case established the basic common law principles, but the detailed laws and procedures

I teach a Directed Readings in Law Reform course at Osgoode Hall Law School. The assignment (not my creation, but used the first year the course was taught and I thought it a good idea) is to develop a law reform proposal, ostensibly to the Law Commission of Ontario. Thus the students are to use the LCO’s mandate and take into account its values and principles and approaches to the analysis of law reform projects. Although the LCO’s mandate explicitly includes the consideration of technology to increase access to justice, none of the students — who are “regular” age law . . . [more]

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada has a splendid project available online on the practice of deep packet inspection, or DPI (not to be confused with “dots per inch”). Essentially, DPI involves the examination of a message sent over the internet at the deepest level, a level ordinarily assumed to be private, and is usually done by governments concerned about security or law-breaking or by internet service providers seeking to extract (or introduce) marketable information. DPI is the basis upon which, for example, service providers might “throttle” some flows in favour of others that are, typically, more lucrative. . . . [more]

As of this morning all European internet service providers must store details of user e-mails and net phone calls for at least a year. This is due to Directive 2006/24/EC of 15 March 2006 on the retention of data generated or processed in connection with the provision of publicly available electronic communications services or of public communications networks. It applies to traffic and location data on both legal entities and natural persons and to the related data necessary to identify the subscriber or registered user. It doesn’t cover the content of electronic communications, including information consulted using an electronic . . . [more]

Apparently fed up with judges who sit on decisions for ever and ever, the government in Guyana is bringing in legislation, the Judicial Decisions Bill, that will place a 120 day absolute limit on how long after the conclusion of a civil trial a judge may take to release the decision. The statute requires a judge to give a decision as expeditiously as possible after the end of a trial, and persistent failure to abide by the ultimate limit may result in the judge’s removal from office.

Are there any such legislative requirements in Canada? I couldn’t find any with . . . [more]

Last week Canada was all about new funding for VCs; but this week in the U.S. saw Essex Woodland Health Ventures close a new(-ish) $900 million bio fund , and even Google will apparently put some of its new $100 million venture fund into bio investments.

This week also saw one of my personal annual Canadian highlights: the 2009 Gairdner Award winners were announced. Here’s one area where we don’t need to trumpet anything to be world-class. 73 Gairdner winners in the last 50 years have also become Nobel laureates. Keep an eye out for the 50th . . . [more]

CBC News this morning, “Canadian Private Member’s Bill Targets Cyberbullying,” tells us this:

A Vancouver MP wants to amend the Criminal Code to target children and teenagers who use mobile phones and the internet to bully others. Currently, the code makes harassment, libel and spreading false messages criminal offences.

Do we need a law on harassment by electronic media, to go along with the general Criminal Code prohibition [s. 264]?

Do we need all our laws amended to say “by electronic means”? or a general statute that says “whatever the law prohibits, that prohibition applies as . . . [more]