Just to keep things current with respect to the Thomas Cromwell Pages, here’s a December 23rd update from the Supreme Court on the status of the new member of the Court, Mr. Justice Thomas Cromwell:

The Right Honourable Beverley McLachlin, Chief Justice of Canada, announced today that The Honourable Thomas Cromwell will be sworn in as a justice of the Supreme Court of Canada on January 5, 2009 at a private ceremony. The official welcome ceremony for Justice Cromwell will take place at 10:30 a.m., on February 16, 2009, in the Main Courtroom of the Supreme Court of Canada.

♬ I am the eye in the sky
Looking at you
I can read your mind♬

Words and Music by Eric Woolfson, recorded by the Alan Parsons Project.

Recently my attention was drawn to a little-known feature that Yahoo.com uses both inside and outside the Yahoo network. This feature is known as “web beacons” (http://info.yahoo.com/privacy/us/yahoo/webbeacons/). A web beacon, according to Wikipedia, is a “web bug“. Wikipedia states: . . . [more]

Nimonik is a Canadian outfit that offers to keep companies up to date on federal and provincial environmental regulations, as well as municipal bylaws for Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. The website provides updates on legislation and relevant rulings concerning a wide variety of industrial activities — e.g. air emissions, contaminated sites, emergency situations, fuel transfers, hazardous material management. Members of the site may comment on the material and have those comments restricted to their company’s account. There is the ability as well to integrate a corporate environmental management system register with Nimonik and have it kept up to date in . . . [more]

As we know, law reform can take many forms. The LCO has already undertaken very different kinds of projects. Its division of pensions on marital breakdown project was a relatively straightforward statutory amendment exercise. It could have been more extensive and comprehensive, but we decided, for several reasons, to do a “quick and dirty” job on this issue. We have also begun major, multidisciplinary projects that are ambitious in scope; our older adults project, designed to develop a coherent approach to the law as it affects older adults is an example and it expected to take about three years to . . . [more]

I’d like to update my thinking on the following question:

What is the responsible way to get rid of electronic information that one does not want, or that one has a legal duty to get rid of (like irrelevant personal information)?

Some of the alternatives:

• delete the information from one’s drive. (unlikely to be satisfactory, since ‘undelete’ programs are readily available)
• reformat the drive
• apply a specialized ‘wiping’ program (one or more times)
• destroy the drive physically
• encrypt the data on the drive then destroy the keys

Ontario’s Information and Privacy Commissioner takes the view that the best way properly . . . [more]

Most of our readers would be aware of the ongoing strike at York University led by CUPE 3903. York administrators have also indicated serious financial difficulties.

What people may not have realized is that the strike also affects law students at Osgoode Hall.

A second-year Osgoode student, Thomas Wisdom, shares the challenges some of his peers are facing,

First- and second-year students with summer jobs: A lot of people are ecstatic about the fact that they will be gainfully employed at law firms in the summer months… [but] they face the frustration of renegotiation start dates with

If you’re ever at a loss for a hit of quasi-judicial material that’s easy on the brain and fun to read, try the adjudications of Britain’s ASA (no, as Michael lines would say, not that ASA, or that, or that or…), the Advertising Standards Authority. The association’s adjudications are made available on a well-designed website, week by week, set out with brevity, and linked to the particular standard that was alleged to have been violated. The one that caught my interest involved a broadcast ad by Moët Hennessy UK Ltd. that:

showed a man sitting on a couch with

As part of our current awareness services, we troll the Ontario Gazette looking for regulatory changes of interest. I found in the December 27 issue an amendment to the Rules of Civil Procedure which I think may provoke some interesting discussion before it comes into force on January 1, 2010.

RULE 4.1 DUTY OF EXPERT

DUTY OF EXPERT

4.1.01 (1) It is the duty of every expert engaged by or on behalf of a party to provide evidence in relation to a proceeding under these rules,

(a) to provide opinion evidence that is fair, objective and non-partisan;

(b) to provide . . . [more]

I wrote two weeks ago about privacy issues related to the log files that are created and retained by internet companies. The moral of that story was that there is a significant amount of information that is collected in these logs and when they are retained and collated, they can reveal a lot of personal information. I concluded by saying:

I don’t think it’s too far fetched to think of a day when it will become standard for all investigations involving the internet to include a warrant served on Google or Yahoo! or Microsoft for all logs related to a

I forgot to celebrate the winter solstice, when the days start to lengthen once more and sunlight seems to be a thing you can bank on even though brutal January and February lie ahead. But if time “creeps in this petty pace from day to day,” so does this lengthening of light; a measly 38 seconds got tacked on to yesterday, for example. I know this because of SunPosition.com, a business in Barrie Ontario that specializes in locating the sun in the sky — anytime, anywhere.

Knowing how Sol was (or will be) there (or here) can be of . . . [more]

The open access movement in academic publishing continues to gather steam: two books are newly available free online.

Daniel J. Solove, Berkeley Law Prof, has released “The Future of Reputation, gossip, rumour and privacy on the internet.” Originally published in 2007 by Yale University Press, the book

…offers a fascinating account of how the Internet is transforming gossip, the way we shame others, and our ability to protect our own reputations. Focusing on blogs, Internet communities, cyber mobs, and other current trends, he shows that, ironically, the unconstrained flow of information on the Internet may impede opportunities for

The Law Commission of Ontario doesn’t have a very long period to look back — we effectively began our work in February 2008, having spent the previous four and a half months (that included the holiday break!) since our launch getting organized in one way or another — and we really don’t have that long to look forward (since despite the above, the Agreement that created the LCO began in January 2007 and expires in January 2012 and we are in that sense entering our third year). . . . [more]