2024 is off to a good start with several online U.S. legal information stories from the Law Library of Congress.

On January 18^th, 2024 The Law Library of Congress In Custodia Legis blog posted a blog post by Jennifer Davis on the Anniversary of the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act.

““Felix Cohen noted that, “[f]rom the earliest years of the Republic the Indian tribes have been recognized as “distinct, independent political communities’” (Cohen 1941, 122). Despite the early nation-to-nation relations between tribal nations and the United States, self-determination was not codified. After termination policies of . . . [more]

Written by Daniel Standing, LL.B., Content Editor, First Reference Inc.

In a succinct interim decision, 2024 HRTO 225 (CanLII), the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario (Tribunal) explained when it might grant an application to expand the list of respondents to a human rights complaint. It’s not as simple as one might think. In this case, the complainant sought to add a former employer as a respondent in his individual, personal capacity, to her sex discrimination complaint. The targeted individual was a majority shareholder and director of the employer. . . . [more]

Russia’s persecution of thousands of independent journalists, human rights defenders, anti-war dissenters, and opposition politicians in Russia is well known, especially the arbitrary detention and death of Alexei Navalny. Less well known are Russia’s threats and judicial harassment of people living in other countries – including Canada – for sharing views that dissent from official Russian narratives.

For a seven-month period during 2023 and 2024, a permanent resident of Canada, Maria Kartasheva, found herself in fear of lengthy imprisonment in Russia. A Russian court tried and sentenced her in absentia for her peaceful online advocacy exposing Russia’s war crimes in . . . [more]

Several times each month, we are pleased to republish a recent book review from the Canadian Law Library Review (CLLR). CLLR is the official journal of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL/ACBD), and its reviews cover both practice-oriented and academic publications related to the law.

The Law of Affidavits. By John Douglas Shields. Toronto: LexisNexis Canada, 2023. 255 p. Includes bibliographic references, table of cases, and index. ISBN 9780433525004 (softcover) $140.00.

Reviewed by Laura Lemmens
Retired Librarian
Edmonton, Alberta

The Law of Affidavits is the first and only text dedicated to evidence and the drafting . . . [more]

Our lives are increasingly dominated by technology. We communicate by various channels: emails, social media, text messages, WhatsApp, Snapchat, FaceTime, and so forth. But what happens when a litigant obtains evidence by hacking into an account or secretly filming an event? Can this surreptitiously obtained evidence be used?

Although discouraged, sometimes these recordings can be admitted into evidence. It is up to the trial judge to decide whether to exclude the evidence by weighing its prejudicial value against its probative value. (See Fiorito v. Wiggins, 2015 ONCA 729, at para. 22).

In the recent case Chen v. Huang . . . [more]

Over the last three years we have followed Canada’s ongoing battle to protect and reserve it supply management system for dairy and poultry products in place and negotiated for since the original GATT negotiations concluded in 1947. For the most part these trade disputes have been with the United States before NAFTA and Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA) Panels.[1] More recently another of Canada’s trade partners joined the fray – New Zealand.[2] The results were mixed and Canada lost some ground but has been able to preserve its right to maintain and operate its system.

On November 24, 2023,a second . . . [more]

Customer service is in decline. In my opinion, the problem is worse with large organizations.

I skimmed the surface in my last post “The Robots are Already in Control (Part One)“.

Companies that are primarily internet-based are the worst. One of my major pet peeves is a corporate website that has no phone numbers. For many, at best the customer service phone line is almost unfindable – buried four clicks into the site. I’ve even gone so far as to phone the “company” side of the business (the side that deals with shareholders), because there was no . . . [more]

Last year a disheartening record was set for research integrity in scholarly publishing. In 2023, over 10,000 research articles were stamped “retracted” reducing them to ghost research. The previous year the number was short of 6,000, itself a retraction record. Clearly something is amiss in the quiet halls of academe.

When a paper is marked retracted, or rather RETRACTED, on page after page, the journal’s editors and publishers have determined that it has a problem well beyond “correction” or “update.” Corrections, for example, will be issued for a number of Claudine Gay’s articles, as the former Harvard president adds . . . [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 juge de la Cour du Québec ne pouvait faire l’économie de la question du lieu du procès à Kuujjuaq plutôt qu’à Quaqtaq ni du droit de l’appelant d’être jugé dans sa communauté; cela étant, il n’est pas question ici d’une erreur de compétence, et le juge . . . [more]

It’s difficult to find the balance between beating yourself up for a failure and reviewing what went wrong in an attempt to uncover the lessons learned. I try not to stew on past mistakes and quite frankly, rarely categorize less ‘successful’ projects that way. All my project experiences have improved me professionally and helped to fine tune my processes for the next project.

Whether a project is perceived as a success or a failure, I can’t stress enough the value of the debrief. Hindsight really is 20/20. On a project we need a bit of distance to reflect on what . . . [more]

At the beginning of each month, we tell you which three English-language cases and French-language cases have been the most viewed* on CanLII in the previous month and we give you a small sense of what the cases are about.

For this past month, the three most-consulted English-language decisions were:

1. Reference re An Act respecting First Nations, Inuit and Métis children, youth and families, 2024 SCC 5

[64] It is open to Parliament to affirm, as it has in s. 18(1), what it considers to be the constitutional requirements for reconciliation, even if it cannot, by doing so, unilaterally . . . [more]