Doubtless our friends at The Court will be on this but Binnie J (writing for a court of seven) handed down today in Canada (Privacy Commissioner) v. Blood Tribe Department of Health a decision which confirms the importance of legal professional privilege, and confirmed that the Privacy Commissioner, while an Officer of Parliament, lacks the authority of a judge to make determinations of privilege. . . . [more]

Because a lot of what we do in law (pretty much everything?) has a connection to crime, potential or actual, I thought readers of Slaw might be interested to note that according to The Daily, in 2007 Canada’s national crime rate for police reported crimes declined for the third year in a row. Not only are crimes against property down, but there were fewer serious violent offences as well. Ontario continues to have the lowest rate of reported crime, and Toronto has the second lowest rate of all 27 municipalities studied.

I hope that the current government and the . . . [more]

Following up on a post earlier by Connie, and with a BIG hat tip to David Fraser, it seems Google & Viacom have agreed to anonymize the IP data being turned over from the server logs, and that Viacom has agreed not to attempt to decipher.

Link: Stipulation filed with the Courts

And since I’m totally cribbing off David’s post anyway, here’s the extract he pulled:

IT IS HEREBY STIPULATED AND AGREED, by and between the undersigned counsel of record:

1. Substituted Values: When producing data from the Logging Database pursuant to the Order, Defendants shall substitute values

Linda Greenhouse, who covered the U.S. Supreme Court for The New York Times for 27 years, is retiring this week.

Here at the Supreme Court of Canada, we have had the pleasure of monitoring her articles for our current awareness service dealing with significant foreign court judgments.

She reflected on her career in Sunday’s edition of the Times in an article entitled 2,691 Decisions.

During her years covering the U.S. Supreme Court, she won a number of major journalism awards, including a Pulitzer Prize for beat reporting in 1998.

In January, she will begin a new job at Yale . . . [more]

If you look at the BBC’s news website, the headline item is the Khadr interrogation video released as a result of Minister of Justice, Attorney General of Canada, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and Commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police
Appellants v. Omar Ahmed Khadr Respondent – and – British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, Criminal Lawyers’ Association (Ontario), University of Toronto, Faculty of Law – International Human Rights Clinic and Human Rights Watch Interveners, in which the court held that

The appellants must disclose (i) all records in any form of the

While we have mentioned situations where important provisions have been dropped into miscellaneous statutes, the NYT, Volokh and the ZDNet blog is reporting a quite extraordinary case where the litigants and the US Supreme Court appear to have completely overlooked a relevant statutory provision¹, for a couple of reasons:

it got dropped into an elephantine budget measure for military appropriations
the major legal databases apparently scant the relevance of military law

Both sides and the Judges involved in a recent U.S. Supreme Court judgment missed the applicability of an explicitly on-topic Act of Congress: the military justice provisions

Library and Archives Canada has a new online exhibit devoted to the life and career of one of the architects of Confederation, Canada’s first Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald:

“As well as presenting an exhibition of photographs, documentary art and other unique records held at Library and Archives Canada, this Web project introduces tens of thousands of pages from Macdonald’s political papers and correspondence that will be made available online for the first time in 2008, enabling all Canadians to learn about Macdonald’s life, career and legacy.”

It is also possible to read his biography in the Dictionary . . . [more]

In the U.S., some Members of Congress have started reporting about their activities on the floor using social networking tool Twitter. In a blog comment, Texas-based Christopher Glenn explains the meaning of this to him as a U.S. citizen:

So in June, I was made aware that the House of Representitves Congressman for my district, John Culberson just started using Twitter. Just because it seemed interesting, I added him (www.twitter.com/johnculberson).

Shortly thereafter, he tweeted “I am on the House floor. I am voting yes for Community Health Centers which provide medical care to uninsured Americans.”

This completely

Ann Sherman has presented a study on self-represented litigants in the Supreme Court of P.E.I. to the Community Legal Information Association of that province. The executive summary is available here, and a PDF file of the whole report can be had here. . . . [more]

Les lecteurs du journal du Midi La Provence s’amuseront par le cas d’un criminel accusé qui est invité à servir de juré dans sa propre procès:

Un Aixois doit comparaître en septembre devant la cour d’assises, il est suspecté d’avoir commis un meurtre . . . [more]

Small footnote to the SCC’s recent decision in Simpson v. WIC and Mair.

LeBel J’s concurring judgment mentions blogs:

[73] This is all the more true in an age when the public is exposed to an astounding quantity and variety of commentaries on issues of public interest, ranging from political debate in the House of Commons, to newspaper editorials, to comedians’ satire, to a high school student’s blog. It would quite simply be wrong to assume that the public always takes statements of opinion at face value. Rather, members of the public must be presumed to evaluate comments

A ruling released July 1st in the copyright infringement case Viacom v. Google has created a stir in the online world. Judge Louis L. Stanton in the U.S. federal New York Southern District Court ordered Google to produce to Viacom:

all data from the Logging database concerning each time a YouTube video has been viewed on the YouTube website or through embedding on a third-party website