The Utah Supreme Court this week held that electronic signatures gathered through a web site were valid signatures for the purpose of nominating a person to run for elected office: Anderson v Bell 2010 UT 47 June 22, 2010.

To run for governor in Utah, one needs a nomination document signed by one thousand people. The would-be candidate submitted a nomination form with a combination of hand-written and electronic signatures, the latter appearing on the form only as a list of typewritten names. The state election authority refused to accept the electronic signatures, thus reducing the number of signatures to . . . [more]

The Star reports today that the provincial  legislature cabinet passed a new law on June 2 without any debate. That wouldn’t be such a big deal, except that it won’t even be published in The Ontario Gazette until July 2, 2010, after it’s revoked on June 28, 2010.

Considering the nature of the regulation, it’s worthy of closer scrutiny.

Ontario Regulation 233/10 was made pursuant to ss. 1(c) and 6 of the Public Works Protection Act, and designates the now-infamous fenced-off area in downtown Toronto as a “public work.” But it’s not just the general area:

Everything described in…

. . . [more]

Risk allocation is rarely the impetus for entering into an outsourcing, but it is often a critical element in long term, complex outsourcing contracts, particularly where business transformation is involved. Risk allocation can be addressed in an outsourcing contract in the same traditional manner as in any commercial agreement (such as representations, warranties, limitation of liability, and so on). You rarely, if ever, see a provision in the contract that lays out the allocation of risk between the parties. 

So how exactly is all of this related to the game of hockey?

Getting to the Playoffs

The teams have lined . . . [more]

This is the first week for a couple of Field Law students. At my office we request that the students start on the same day and we have a formal week long student orientation program. Our program structure hasn’t changed much over the years, except that the librarian face time has doubled to a full half day.

Our students are invited to attend the Head Start program that is organized by the Edmonton Law Libraries Association so our orientation week library session is a half day refresher of our firm specific resources and writing protocols rather than a general research . . . [more]

The Supreme Court of Canada rendered judgment today, granting application for appeal in PHS Community Services Society v. Canada, the case of the Insite supervised injection site in B.C. I attended the hearings in Vancouver at the Court of Appeal last summer and posted my notes here on Slaw.

The 2-1 ruling, released in January, upheld the trial level decision allowing the clinic to remain open.

Coverage of the case is available at The Globe, CBC, and the Vancouver Sun. . . . [more]

Downtown Toronto because of the G20 or the GTA’s various “Little Italys” because of the World Cup result?

 Italy was just eliminated in the first round. Didn’t win a game. Lost to Slovakia? and the Swiss. (Oops, Spain lost to the Swiss. Italy tied New Zealand. That would be like Canada tying with Khazakhstan in hockey. Were the Vatican guards playing for Switzerland?) I could understand that if this were hockey, but football? France? It pancaked yesterday, pouting.

Italy and France eliminated early sounds like a scorecard for a mid to late 2d millenium European war. 

The bars in Toronto . . . [more]

The Public Legal Education and Information Service of New Brunswick (PLEIS-NB), celebrating more than 20 years of service, makes its information pamphlets available online. (Because New Brunswick is a constitutionally bilingual province, there’s a version of the site en français aussi.)

What drew my attention to the site now was the announcement that PLEIS-NB is “helping the public know the law — one tweet at a time!” Of course, advice in 140 characters might be a trifle curt, so they’ve adopted the interesting strategy of tweeting questions, the kind that non-lawyers might ask, and linking those tweets to their longer . . . [more]

The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) has ruled on the Conrad Black case in a decision released today.

Black had argued that the “right to honest services” was stretched to fit the crimes and was originally intended for public servants. They relied on Yates v. United States in seeking the verdict to be set aside when it is impossible to tell what ground a jury was selected when there are several grounds for conviction. The government’s positions was that the jury were given proper instruction regarding honest services fraud and the conviction should stand. The Court . . . [more]

As you might know, investigations against Google Street View are now underway in Canada, the United States and at least 17 other countries. The investigations aim to determine whether Google engaged in “unfair and unlawful collection of data” as well as “invasion of privacy and individual liberties”.

A Slaw exclusive: Jason Wilson in lengthy conversation with the VP of Tech at Thomson.

Bizarro robot cartoon

Lawyers have not been thinking about robots as long as cartoonists, science fiction writers (Isaac Asimov’s Robot series being perhaps the best known) or engineers (Geoff Simons, Are Computers Alive? Evolution and New Forms of Life 1983 – but see P. Sw irski, “A case of wishful thinking”). A political scientist anticipated some legal issues in the early 1980s (S.N. Lehman-Wilzig,””) notably about potential criminal liability that future technology would threaten.

However, we have been catching up in the past ten or fifteen years. This column is a partial survey of some of the interesting questions . . . [more]

The Ottawa Citizen recently ran a series on the capital’s crack cocaine problem.

An article that ran on Saturday, June 19, 2010 as part of the series examined the city’s Drug Treatment Court that works to divert small-time drug offenders away from jail and into addiction treatment programs:

Offenders in Drug Treatment Court are always facing jail for the petty theft that feeds their habit. After a rigorous assessment, they are accepted into the program and begin treatment with Rideauwood Addiction and Family Services. First they are required to plead guilty to any charges they face.

Addicts in the

. . . [more]