The CBA’s Legal Health Checks, which has been previously mentioned by Yves Faguy here, just released two new checklists in employment law.

One is for hiring for small businesses, and covers contentious issues such as employee/contractor distinctions and employment standards. The other is geared towards workers, and covers the law for non-unionized employees, and covers employment contracts, discrimination and harassment and wrongful dismissal.

Obtaining accurate legal information remains a challenge for the public, and efforts by our legal organizations to make this information more readily accessible is part of our professional mandate.

These checklists are also . . . [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.

PÉNAL (DROIT : La règle interdisant les condamnations multiples ne s’applique pas au cas de l’appelant, reconnu coupable de conduite durant une interdiction et du non-respect d’une condition d’une ordonnance de probation, en l’occurrence une interdiction de conduire; même s’il est question dans les deux cas d’une interdiction de conduire, . . . [more]

Summaries of selected recent cases are provided each week to Slaw by Maritime Law Book. Every Sunday we present a precis of the latest summaries, a fuller version of which can be found on MLB-Slaw Selected Case Summaries at cases.slaw.ca.

This week’s summaries concern:
Administrative law – Courts – Family Law – Civil Rights – Criminal Law – Practice

Strickland et al. v. Canada (Attorney General) 2015 SCC 37
Administrative Law – Courts – Family Law
Summary: The applicants applied for judicial review under s. 18 of the Federal Courts Act, seeking to have the Federal Child Support . . . [more]

For the next while the Friday Fillip will be a chapter in a serialized crime novel, usually followed by a reference you might like to pursue. Both this chapter of the book and the whole story up to this point can be had as PDF files. You may also subscribe to have chapters delivered to you by email.

MEASURING LIFE
 
Chapter 21
I’ve Got Your Number

There is a way out for the publisher

At the most recent meeting of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries in Moncton, it was clear that the present, past and future of looseleaf services continue to be a source of angst and concern in the legal research community. This fact has been documented on many occasions, most recently by Louis Mirando in The Curse of the Loose-Leaf Law Book posted on slaw.ca on July 22, 2015. There is no doubt that loose-leaf services are an open wound that can and should be healed.

A sense of loss

The issue is . . . [more]

Each Thursday we present a significant excerpt, usually from a recently published book or journal article. In every case the proper permissions have been obtained. If you are a publisher who would like to participate in this feature, please let us know via the site’s contact form.

Defaming by Suggestion: Searching for Search Engine Liability in the Autocomplete Era

By Anne S.Y. Cheung, Associate Professor, The University of Hong Kong – Faculty of Law, in “Comparative Perspectives on the Fundamentals of Freedom of Expression” (Andras Koltay, ed.), forthcoming.

Excerpt: pp 1-14

[Footnotes omitted. They can be found . . . [more]

This fall an estimated 2800 students will begin their three-year journey for a J.D. degree at one of Canada’s 18 Common Law Schools (there are 23 law schools in total in Canada).[1] If they are anything like I was some 23 years ago, these students are excited but apprehensive. The vast majority of new law students have had no contact with the legal system and have not taken any law-related courses. Their knowledge of law comes from popular culture. For me this was L.A. Law, Inherit the Wind, Perry Mason and To Kill a Mockingbird. For today’s law students, . . . [more]

Here’s a cute but telling article on the privacy and security threats posed by wearable technology – things like smart watches and personal health monitors.

It’s a useful reminder that interconnected devices (Internet of Things stuff) are often lacking basic security or have only basic security, and they are often not updatable either. So they may be infected by security attacks that then get walked into an otherwise protected work environment and spring loose behind the firewalls.

Thus the suggestion of a Bring Your Own Fitbit policy. It’s not just the phones any more.

Views? Do you deal with such . . . [more]

From time to time various law enforcement and government types whine that encryption is a bad thing because it allows criminals to hide from authorities. That is usually followed by a call for security backdoors that allow government authorities to get around the security measures.

That’s a really bad idea – or as Cory Doctorow puts it in a post entitled Once Again: Crypto backdoors are an insane, dangerous idea: “Among cryptographers, the idea that you can make cryptosystems with deliberate weaknesses intended to allow third parties to bypass them is universally considered Just Plain Stupid.”

They build in . . . [more]

At the annual meeting of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries last May in Moncton, one of the keynote sessions was on The Future of Legal Publishing. The keynote speakers were Robert McKay and Jason Wilson, moderated by Gary Rodrigues – all fellow Slaw columnists. The opinions offered by these legal information industry experts were informed, insightful and fascinating, and the audience – a roomful of law librarians – was completely engaged. Though each of the speakers had his own vision of law publishing’s future, all were unanimous on one point in particular: there is no future for loose-leaf . . . [more]

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

For this last week:

1. Royal Bank of Canada v. Trang, 2014 ONCA 883

[55] A current mortgage balance is not publicly available information. Just because the legislature chose to make the details of a mortgage publicly available at the beginning of the mortgage relationship does not strip a mortgage balance during the course of a mortgage relationship of the sensitivity it would ordinarily have – . . . [more]

Summer vacations give us time to relax, recuperate and reconnect. But eventually we also have to deal with reality.

If you’re back at the office trying to recall what it was like to spend the morning reading a novel instead of an opinion letter, here are a few ways to ease your transition back into work mode.

Before you leave

• Jot down a to-do list sorted by priority and deadline.
• Communicate clear expectations about your availability while away. Some lawyers refuse to create vacation alerts, lest clients or colleagues think they’re human. Don’t fall into this trap – you won’t