Every week we present the summary of a decision handed down by a Québec court provided to us by SOQUIJ and considered to be of interest to our readers throughout Canada. SOQUIJ is attached to the Québec Department of Justice and collects, analyzes, enriches, and disseminates legal information in Québec.

PÉNAL (DROIT): Une peine de 90 jours de détention assortie d’une probation de 30 mois est imposée à un accusé âgé de 18 ans qui s’est reconnu coupable de possession de matériel de pornographie juvénile.

Intitulé : R. c. Drouin, 2022 QCCQ 3474
Juridiction : Cour du Québec, Chambre criminelle . . . [more]

In a recent decision by the Court of Queen’s Bench of New Brunswick, an employer was found to have constructively dismissed its employee when it haphazardly told him he was to be “furloughed” and sent him home without pay for an indefinite period of time. The employer’s behaviour was not a legitimate temporary layoff but was instead a clear breach of its obligations under its employment contract. While the employer may have intended to temporary layoff the employee in response to the serious repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic on its business, its careless verbal notice and failure to provide a . . . [more]

In a recent decision, the Federal Court was asked to instruct the Canadian patent office on the proper framework for assessing whether inventions are patentable subject matter. The court held that the three part test proposed by the Intellectual Property Institute of Canada (IPIC) that includes asking whether the construed claim as a whole consists only of a mere scientific principle or abstract theory that should be rejected as unpatentable, or a patentable practical application that may employ a scientific principle of abstract theorem.

This decision, Benjamin Moore & Co. v. Canada (Attorney General), 2022 FC 923, arose . . . [more]

Each Wednesday we tell you which three English-language cases and French-language cases have been the most viewed* on CanLII and we give you a small sense of what the cases are about. La version française suit.

For this last week, the most-consulted three English-language decisions were:

1. Hutton v. Hutton, 2022 ONSC 3918 (CanLII)

[60] The analysis does not, however, end there. Both stages of the Miglin analysis require this Court to assess the extent to which the Marriage Contract took into account the factors and objectives of the Divorce Act at the time the agreement was executed and . . . [more]

What is the most important part of your job? Can you answer that question immediately, or do you struggle to articulate just one aspect that is the most important? Did you choose the part that is the most important for you or the most important for your organization as a whole, or for your clients/students/library patrons?

Last week I was challenged to reassess the tasks that make up my job. As a law librarian at an academic institution in the third year of this pandemic, my team can be susceptible to the same feelings of burnout that are plaguing workers . . . [more]

When it comes to intellectual property, the question of integrity more often comes up around the ownership of the work than on the quality of the property itself. Yet in my work on scholarly communication, I have made the case to consider how the concept of intellectual property arose, long before such an idea existed in law, out of an intense consideration of a work’s intellectual qualities or properties. It was through a long history of scholarly inquiry into such properties, dating back in the West to medieval monasticism, that we have come to take for granted that a text . . . [more]

Here are excerpts from the most recent tips on SlawTips, the site that each week offers up useful advice, short and to the point, on practice, research, writing and technology.

Research & Writing

Note Up Older Legislation
Susannah Tredwell

Noting up legislation is straightforward. On CanLII you enter the name or citation of the act in the note up field; in Lexis Advance you enter the citation of the section you are interested in preceded by cit: (e.g. cit: SBC 2011 c 25 s 160) and in Westlaw Canada you enter the citation of the section you are interested . . . [more]

Early this year, Justice Little of the Federal Court released the much-awaited decision in Ocran v. Canada (Citizenship and Immigration), 2022 FC 175 (CanLII). I am not aware of any study permit judicial review litigation that attracted the attention of Canadian immigration lawyers as much as Ocran. The notoriety of this judicial review litigation was based on the fact that it was a test case that the Department of Immigration, Refugee and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) sought to use to obtain judicial approval for its use of the controversial Chinook software in processing of immigration applications. That approval . . . [more]

Every week we present the summary of a decision handed down by a Québec court provided to us by SOQUIJ and considered to be of interest to our readers throughout Canada. SOQUIJ is attached to the Québec Department of Justice and collects, analyzes, enriches, and disseminates legal information in Québec.

RESPONSABILITÉ : Le juge de première instance n’a pas commis d’erreur lorsqu’il a rejeté le recours en dommages-intérêts d’un homme qui estimait avoir été victime d’une erreur judiciaire; ce dernier n’avait pas démontré que la poursuite avait délibérément omis de lui communiquer des renseignements importants lors d’un procès pour meurtres . . . [more]