Each Monday we present brief excerpts of recent posts from five of Canada’s award­-winning legal blogs chosen at random* from sixty recent Clawbie winners. In this way we hope to promote their work, with their permission, to as wide an audience as possible.

This week the randomly selected blogs are 1. Social Media for Law Firms 2. Canadian Privacy Law Blog  3. Ontario Condo Law Blog 4. Michael Spratt 5. Canadian Securities Law

Social Media for Law Firms
Why Google Wants to Rank Facts Instead of Links

According to recent news across the web, Google wants to rank websites based . . . [more]

Today is International Women’s Day. Although there is much to celebrate, there is much more to be done as well.

Natasha Bannan notes that women in the U.S. are still employed in precarious work. Minorities, especially Latinas, are overrepresented in the lowest paid segments of the economy.

The situation isn’t much better in Canada. In some ways, it might be worse.

A new report by the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) slams Canada for its inaction over Aboriginal women. The study was prompted by inquiries by the Feminist Alliance for International Action (FAFIA) and Native Women’s . . . [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.

CONSTITUTIONNEL (DROIT) : Les arguments constitutionnels invoqués par des commerçants anglophones de la région de Montréal ayant enfreint les dispositions de la Charte de la langue française en ce qui concerne l’affichage, l’emballage et la commercialisation au sein de leur entreprise sont tous rejetés.

Intitulé : Quebec (Attorney General) c. . . . [more]

One of the key characteristics setting family law apart from other civil matters is the extent to which outcomes are based on a fog of factors not necessarily obvious from the plain text of the legislation. The only result I would ever guarantee to a client involved in a family law dispute was the amount of child support that would payable, and I would only make this guarantee if: the child was under the age of majority; the payor was not self-employed; the payor earned less than $150,000 per year; the payor was not a stepparent; the child’s special expenses . . . [more]

After many hundreds of Friday Fillips, I’m going to try something different in this space. For the next while I’m going to do a “Boz” and publish a crime novel in episodes. Those of you who read the Fillip for leads to “interesting stuff” I’ve found on the internet needn’t fear: I’ll lift a theme out of each episode and interpolate notes on fresh findings that touch on that theme. I’m also going to gather the accumulating episodes on another website, so that people coming late to the Fillip can catch up with the story. My . . . [more]

In a February 6 article in the Toronto Star, Olivia Carville stated that Ontario law schools are failing in providing domestic violence training for their students.

Unfortunately, the outcome of her article was predetermined by the narrow scope of her question. Her focus on whether there is a mandatory subject in which the topic is addressed cannot capture the many things that law schools do, in curricular and in extracurricular ways, to help students learn about and respond to domestic violence and violence against women. What is worse, the ‘single compulsory course’ inquiry is based on a too simplistic . . . [more]

It is rarely that I read the opinions and perceptions of Gary Rodrigues and not almost entirely agree. This was very much the case with his article Legal Publishing and Market Research – Getting It Right, in which he succeeds in identifying “form over substance” motives in some publishers’ research and in so doing highlights something short of honesty behind much of it. It set me thinking about the extent to which, in more general terms, form over substance is a familiar feature of the actions, decisions and priorities of some of the legal and professional publishers. Whether or . . . [more]

George Raine, a recent graduate of the Faculty of Information’s Master of Information program at the University of Toronto, has created the Snowden Surveillance Archive, a searchable database of all the publicly released classified documents leaked by former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

The leaks reveal the widespread surveillance practices by security and espionage agencies in the US and allied countries.

Archive project partners are Canadian Journalists for Free Expression and the Politics of Surveillance Project at University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information. Funding came from The New Transparency: Surveillance and Social Sorting, a seven-year Major Collaborative . . . [more]

In Graham v Shear Logic Hairstyling, an employee was awarded $11,400 representing general damages for denigration of her dignity and self-respect, and for psychological and emotional harm she experienced due to discrimination in employment on the grounds of sex and sexual orientation, in addition to sexual harassment. . . . [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.

Be Careful What You Wish For? Terrorism Prosecutions in Post-9/11 Canada

Kent Roach, Professor and Prichard Wilson Chair in Law and Public Policy at the University of Toronto | antiterrorlaw.ca
(2014) 40:1 Queen’s LJ 99

Excerpts: Introduction and Part I

[Footnotes omitted. They can be found in the original via the link . . . [more]

As I put together another Sinch Online Legal Services Conference to be held in May in Sydney, I reflect on how much things have changed with respect to IT and Law in just the last 12 months. Similiarly, a visit to an Apple Store also has an affect on me, but there is uncertainty as to which is greater: amazement at what is possible, and affordable, today; or the fact that there was so much opposition to the “bleedingly obvious” by so many, for so long.

The feeling that one lives in the age of the most rapid technological development . . . [more]

Both Canadian law and American law, through their uniform e-transactions statutes, give a wide definition to ‘electronic signature’ – being essentially any information in electronic form in or associated with a document with an intention to sign the document.

The ‘intention to sign’ requirement aimed to ensure that the same mental element was required for an e-signature as for a handwritten signature.

A recent California Court of Appeal case, J.B.B. Investment Partners v Fair, held that a person who typed his name at the bottom of an email saying ‘ I agree’ to settlement agreement sent to him by . . . [more]