The Ontario Superior Court of Justice rendered a judgment on the Ikea Monkey in September and it is just as weird as you would expect. However, this decision and others dealing with the custody of animals raise questions regarding animal welfare, the move towards protective rights legislation, and the remaining roadblocks to accepting notions of animal rights under the law.

The Ikea Monkey:

Most of you will remember the story of Darwin, the macaque who escaped from his owner’s locked car last December and made his way into a Toronto area Ikea store, wearing a diaper and winter coat . . . [more]

One of the features that I really, really like in the LEGISinfo service is a wee little link in the right panel of the Status Overview for a Bill. The link is titled “Similar Bills Introduced in Previous Sessions”. It is extremely useful to look at previous iterations of legislation and likewise to see how long something has been on Parliament’s agenda. I use this information regularly, most recently for a Slaw post.

Since I was on a plane last week, the title of Bill C-3 which was introduced on Friday caught my eye: “An Act to enact the . . . [more]

As with so many things, the legendary — and ofttimes apocryphal — Yogi Berra said it best: “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” Still, there are developments that seem to be certainly portentous, even if we can’t say what shape the portents will assume tomorrow and the day after that. All of which wriggling is appropriate to a discussion of quantum computing, if only because the very nature of quanta is elusively probabilistic.

But what might any of this have to do with law? Here’s the simple thought: we can see that as information technology becomes more . . . [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 technology, research and practice.

Technology

Using Windows XP SP3 and Office 2003 After April 8, 2014 Will Expose You to Security Dangers
Dan Pinnington

Microsoft will no longer be supporting Windows XP SP3 (Service Pack 3) and Office 2003 (SP3) as of April 8, 2014. After this date there will be no new security updates,winxplogo non-security hotfixes, free or paid assisted support options or online technical content updates from Microsoft. Your computer will still . . . [more]

Do you have a giant client that gives you more than 50% of your revenue? That can be good news and the bad news. The good news is you can concentrate on the needs of that client giving them exceptional work and client service. The bad news is they consume your time and you have nothing left to develop other clients. Which leaves you with the looming question… “What would happen to my business if they took their work someplace else?” That one can keep you up at night! I know from experience the sleepless nights and the havoc it . . . [more]

A release usually forms part and parcel of any settlement. Most of the time there is little or no dispute over the wording that goes into the release. However, a recent case is notable for giving a quick refresher (or crash course) in the law of releases.

To put it shortly, the case law is clear that where a settlement is reached, it is normally implied, absent some agreement to the contrary, that an executed final release will be given.

On the other hand, parties are not bound to execute a complex or unusual form of release. While the duty . . . [more]

In a recent post the prolific and insightful Lee Rosen suggested that a cloud provider’s market dominance shouldn’t be your sole criteria when assessing the company’s prospective longevity. Instead, Rosen suggests a lawyer should adopt the Regan-era mantra of “trust, but verify,” and assess — essentially, audit — a cloud computing provider’s financials to prove out the company’s financial health. Rosen uses his diligence on his practice’s cloud provider, Salesforce.com, as providing a high degree of financial visibility that helped him gain a level of comfort with placing his practice’s data in the company’s hands.

Rosen closes his post with . . . [more]

Cyber criminals and identity thieves want to steal your personal information to commit fraud. They may try to get a credit card in your name or to access funds in your bank account. On top of directly losing money, your credit status can be damaged and it can take a great deal of time and expense to restore your good name.

And this goes beyond being an issue of personal concern. LAWPRO has seen situations where law firm bank accounts were hacked and where law firm bank account information was used on counterfeit cheques.

There are many different ways to . . . [more]

The fall-out from the Snowden revelations and the evident powers of the UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) continues in the UK this week. Lawyers and the Law are being portrayed in the press in a different light. See this article in the Guardian – “Parliament Has Forsaken our liberty. Law is the Last Resort.” . . . [more]

North American courts are not really sure what to do about web scraping, where someone uses automation to take information in bulk from a web site and puts it on his/her/its own site in competition with the original site. Sometimes (but not often) doing this is held to be trespass to chattels. More often it has been held to violate the terms of use of the victim site, even if those terms are ‘webwrap’, i.e. never explicitly consented to. (In fact, it is freakishly rare for webwrap conditions to be upheld except against scrapers).

The federal court in Illinois recently . . . [more]

Each Monday we present brief excerpts of recent posts from five of Canada's award-winning legal blogs chosen at random* from forty-one 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. University of Alberta Faculty of Law Blog   2. Thoughtful Legal Management   3. Le Blogue du CRL   4. Michael Geist    5. First Reference

When is an author not the author?

The publication of the twenty fifth annual edition of Tremeear’s Criminal Code by David Watt and Michelle Fuerst raises an obvious question about the naming tradition in legal publishing. Why name a new edition of a book after someone long deceased, who had nothing to do with its creation.

Specifically, why name an annotated Criminal Code prepared by Justices Watt and Fuerst Tremeears Criminal Code?

The making of a “tradition”

Over the past century or two, a practice evolved whereby legal publishers launched new editions of established works under the name of . . . [more]