Last week, the Supreme Court of Canada released an important decision explaining when summary judgment rules can be used to resolve civil litigation disputes. Omar Ha-Redeye posted about the decision last week.

Some Supreme Court decisions are targeted at the litigants in a case. Other times, Members of Parliament who have to write new laws. Although the decision has messages for everyone, I think the Supreme Court’s decision in Hryniak is aimed in many ways at Ontario’s court system itself.

The Supreme Court of Canada extensively discussed “tools to maximize the efficiency of a summary judgment motion,” concluding . . . [more]

Back in October, I wrote about a case where the plaintiff’s lawyer accepted an offer to settle from the defendant, knowing full well they had no instructions to do so, in the hopes that they could in turn convince their client to accept the (already accepted) offer.

When the plaintiff refused to accept the offer, the defendant brought a motion to enforce the settlement. Justice Price held, correctly, that it would not be fair in the circumstances to bind the plaintiff to an offer that her lawyer accepted without her instructions and dismissed the motion. In doing so, Justice Price . . . [more]

The 2008 Law via the Internet conference got things started; October 3, 2011 marked the first meeting specific to the EuroLII initiative. January 2014, the EuroLII Observatory site launched with the aim at answering the question of how European countried promote and improve free access to law.

The site provides a jumping off page to the European Law overview page at WorldLII which helps searchers determine data coverage as well as search.

Some of the new content added to WorldLII January 28, 2014 includes:

Portuguese Constitutional Court Summaries
Portuguese Constitution 2005
Vatican City Laws
Bulgarian Laws
Azerbaijan Laws
Albanian Constitutional . . . [more]

The Manitoba Court of Appeal recently held, in Ducharme v. Borden, 2014 MBCA 5, that electronic evidence did not require expert support for a judge to deal with its admissibility.

We do not endorse the judge’s view that electronic media evidence is of no value unless supported by expert evidence. Expert evidence is limited to information which is likely outside the experience and knowledge of a judge or jury.(para 15)

On the other hand, the issues with such evidence did not make it a matter for judicial notice, either.

While the burden of authenticating evidence for admission was . . . [more]

The Supreme Court of Canada released a decision this week in Hryniak v. Mauldin which revamps the judicial approach towards summary judgments in Ontario. The decision replaces the previous decision by the Ontario Court of Appeal in Combined Air Mechanical Services Inc. v. Flesch, a special five-judge panel to hear five appeals over Rule 20 which then created a “full appreciation test” for summary judgment motions.

The reason for the detailed analysis of summary judgment motions in Ontario largely stems from changes to the Rules of Civil Procedure in 2010 which were intended to make civil litigation more affordable . . . [more]

The Russian Federation is the fourth country to ratify the United Nations Convention on the use of Electronic Communications in International Contracts (the ECC). The UNCITRAL press release gives the details.

The other countries now in the Convention, and among which it is in force, are Singapore, Honduras and the Dominican Republic. Russia’s ratification is a step towards spreading the benefits around, and several other countries are moving towards ratifying too.

Should Canada be interested? The Uniform Law Conference discussed the policy questions about how it might be implemented here, in 2010, and adopted a uniform implementation statute in . . . [more]

Access to justice is a quasi-constitutional right in Quebec where the Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms guarantees “a full and equal, public and fair hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal.” However, numerous stakeholders, including many in the legal community share a growing concern that access to justice is increasingly posing challenges to those who need it, and obstacles such as time, expense and representation stand in the way of securing this right for all Quebec citizens.

There are frequent complaints about the costs of resolving disputes in Canada’s courts. It is prohibitively expensive for many Canadians to hire a lawyer to take their case to court.

On Thursday, the Supreme Court of Canada will release two decisions that will explain the test for obtaining summary judgment in Ontario. These cases were decided under Ontario’s new rules for summary judgment that came into force in 2010. The new rules were prompted by findings and recommendations made in 2007 by the Honourable Coulter A. Osborne, Q.C. , having “access to justice” as an overarching issue. The changes . . . [more]

Although Quebec’s Bill 60 is before committee it is already coming under immense scrutiny by the public and legal experts. This week two reports were leaked to La Presse, prompting the opposition Liberals to demand disclosure of the legal opinions behind the Parti Québécois initiative to enact a Charter of Values.

The legal opinions are likely to be protected by parliamentary privilege, and Bernard Drainville, the Minister responsible for Democratic Institutions and Active Citizenship, still appears confident that the Bill will pass constitutional challenges. Once again, he cited the support offered for the Bill by former Supreme Court Justice, Claire . . . [more]

I’m on for a little rant today but this is significant topic, courtesy of one of my LRW students conducting some research on the Nadon appointment to the SCC (on the plus side this does drive home the point I continually try to make that you cannot exclusively rely on one source or the web all the time). Interestingly, I thought we were getting rid of all the print government publications because the Interwebs are so much more efficient and effective? Well try and find SC 2013, c 40 which received Royal Assent on December 12, 2013, over a month . . . [more]

Part 2: The failure of the Federal/Provincial Task Force on Uniform Rules of Evidence to have its Uniform Evidence Act enacted, because the piecemeal amendment of the law of evidence is preferred

Late in 1977, because of the “mixed” reception that the Law Reform Commission of Canada’s proposal for an Evidence Code to replace the Canada Evidence Act had received nationally, the Federal/Provincial Task Force on Uniform Rules of Evidence had been formed under the sponsorship of the Uniform Law Conference of Canada (the ULCC), which body provides the mechanisms and procedures by which federal, provincial, and territorial government . . . [more]

Nearly missed in the relative quietude of late December was opening of the next chapter in the ongoing Google Books litigation. As it promised it would, The Authors Guild Appeal initiated an appeal of Justice Denny Chin’s judgment (which substantially dismissed The Authors Guild’s summary judgment motion and granted Google’s motion). Michel-Adrien Sheppard wrote about that ruling back when it was released back in November.

On December 23, The Authors Guild filed its bare-bones Notice of Appeal (uploaded to Scribd by infoDOCKET) of Justice Chin’s judgment.

Publishers Weekly wrote (Dec 30) a nice summary of the litigation thus far, tying . . . [more]