The British Columbia Court of Appeal (Cojocaru v. British Columbia Women’s Hospital and Health Center 2011 BCCA 192) has overturned — 2-1 –the ruling of a judge whose written reasons for judgment:

. . .cannot be considered to represent his reasons, do not meet the functional requirement of public accountability, and do not allow for meaningful appellate review.

The judge in question adopted 321 paragraphs of his 368 paragraph judgment “almost word-for-word” from the respondent’s written closing submissions and did not acknowledge the borrowing.

It’s by no means unheard of for judges to adopt counsel’s written submissions as . . . [more]

. . . [more]

In the Globe and Mail this morning, I learn that researchers have found that the songs of male humpback whales change from year to year and, indeed, propagate throughout the world community of humpbacks, rather in the way that pop tunes spread among human beings — or the way that negative advertising infects ever larger portions of the polity. It seemed like a day to go with the whales, rather than the pols, so I hunted up these travelling humpback songs for you, finding them in the Wired story on this cetacean phenom.

A travelling sound more… melodious to our . . . [more]

In 1994, Ontario adopted the grandly named Crown Forest Sustainability Act (CFSA). A long, bruising environmental assessment (the Timber Management EA) had shown that we were ravaging Crown forests with a short term focus on extracting the most timber now, damaging the future of the forests and everything that lived there. It will be better now, the government said. The CFSA begins with impressive (if wordy) promises:

1. The purposes of this Act are to provide for the sustainability of Crown forests and, in accordance with that objective, to manage Crown forests to meet social, economic and environmental needs of

The Supreme Court has wrapped up its two-day hearing into the federal government’s request that the Court rule on the constitutionality of proposed legislation to create a national securities regulator.

Appeal courts in Alberta and Quebec have ruled that the proposal would violate the Constitution because it would intrude on provincial powers.

The facta of all the parties and intervenors of the case are available on the Court’s website.

As well, the hearings were broadcast via webcast and the webcasts are archived.

The Department of Finance has posted background material on the issue, as well as links to . . . [more]

As mentioned earlier this month on Slaw, the UNCITRAL Secretariat has published WP.107 for its meeting next month, setting out the first draft of a set of rules for procedure in online dispute resolution (ODR). That document is available online. With the same link you will find the report of the first meeting of the Working Group on ODR, from December 2010, to see how the group got to where it is now.

The principle of the draft rules is that they should apply readily to low-cost, high-volume disputes, so they should be simple and accessible and allow . . . [more]

I recently received at my work email address a link to a YouTube video of a very popular Irish television show, Mrs Brown’s Boys. In my opinion, this is the best comedy show that has come from the BBC in a very long time. The episode in question, “Mrs. Brown gets a bikini wax”, was so funny to me, I was crying from laughter at my desk. My first impulse was to share the video with some of my co-workers who have a similar sense of humour. However, I hesitated before I pressed the send button, and I . . . [more]

In my last post on young people’s legal capability, I explored how NGOs such as PLEnet and IARS are piloting innovative Public Legal Education (“PLE”) programmes to enable individuals to take control of their own legal problems. One of the main arguments that I made for PLE is the long term pecuniary advantage to be gained from empowering (young) people to resolve their own legal problems before they reach the stage at which the state might need to step in and provide legal aid funded support. I also made the point that PLE is not a panacea that completely . . . [more]

The United States Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal released its decision on Monday in FACEBOOK v. CONNECTU, INC., dismissing the claims of the Winklevoss twins, who wanted to renege on a cash and stock settlement deal with Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg.

The twins claim that Facebook hid information from them during settlement negotiations, estimated at $65 million. They are depicted in the 2010 Hollywood movie, The Social Network. . . . [more]

This is not about the election – it is about the need to consider this issue carefully before passing any new laws.

Michael Geist and David Fraser (here and here) have written detailed articles on this issue that I concur with and recommend. I want to weigh in as well as this is an important issue. I have a problem with legislation that erodes privacy and requires ISP’s or others to retain information for the sole purpose of government access to it. And when that access is not tempered by the need for a warrant.

Issues include erosion . . . [more]

The topic has entered my ken a couple of times recently from unconnected sources (here at the ABA TechShow and in the Economist), so I figure the time may be ripe to do something about the plague of verbiage that infects the bottoms of many emails sent by “important” firms and people. I’m talking about the disclaimers that tell the recipient — often in 8 point type — that the email may contain privileged information, is meant only for the person to whom it is addressed, and should be eaten if it winds up in the wrong hands.

Although . . . [more]

The ISO has been Studying ZIP

Annex A of "New Work Item Proposal on Document Packaging" (April 12, 2010), ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34 N 1414, said:

Today many electronic documents are embodied not in wholly proprietary formats, but in formats built on the foundation of standards.

One increasingly common approach is to specify formats in which XML documents and other digital resources are stored together in an archive based on a minimal implementation of what is known as the “ZIP” format.

Examples of document-centric formats which take this approach include:
• ISO/IEC 26300 (Open Document Format for Office Applications)
• ISO/IEC