Following the tragic death of Rehtaeh Parsons, a special meeting by the Provincial and Federal Ministers of Justice decided to investigate the state of the law around the distribution of images of an intimate nature without consent. Many observers believed that the provisions under the Criminal Code are insufficient in dealing with this growing problem among young Canadians.

The subcommittee of the Cybercrime Working Group (CWG) responsible for this released their report this week. The report notes that the traditional response in Canada to cyberbullying relies heavily on education initiatives and promoting public awareness and support among families and communities. . . . [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: Barrister and solicitor conflict of interest / Defamation and single publication rule / CPP disability benefits / HIV and consent to sexual intercourse / Sentencing and time already served:

Is clicking ‘OK’ on a web site the equivalent of a signature, or just an act of assenting with legal effect, e.g. to accept an offer to contract? Is there a useful or meaningful distinction any more between a signature and an act of assent (at least when the signature is intended to show assent)?

Recently an appellate court in the US found that clicking OK to a web form satisfied the requirements of the Copyright Act (US) that a transfer of copyright had to be in writing and signed by the transferor. The court relied on the Electronic Signatures . . . [more]

I like reading in bed. In fact it’s got to the point where I must read before falling asleep, even if it’s only a line or two. It probably all started with being read to as a child, a bedtime ritual both pleasurable and soporific, and a fitting introit to the land of dreams. At some point that ritual became self-administered, though the stories were rather more exciting as I recall — exciting enough that I, like so many of you, read on under the covers with a flashlight after the official “lights out.”

In bed at the end of . . . [more]

[I begin this column with an aside. Because I will be discussing The Canadian Abridgment, the nonpareil of Canadian legal information, I want to give any non-Canadian readers some context. For American colleagues, The Canadian Abridgment (published by Carswell and now in its third edition) is similar to West’s digest system (General Digest, Decennial Digest), with Canadian counterparts of Shepard’s Citations and the Current Law Index included for good measure. The Abridgment’s Australian counterpart is the Australian Digest. The foregoing digest services are all published by that jurisdiction’s local Thomson Reuters law publisher. The closest . . . [more]

To add to to your summer reading list:

The 2013 Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction goes to Stanford law professor Paul Goldstein for his novel Havana Requiem:

“The novel chronicles efforts by a lawyer, recovering alcoholic Michael Seeley, to help a group of aging Cuban jazz musicians and their families reclaim copyrights to their works. When his main client, Héctor Reynoso, goes missing, Seeley begins to realize that there is more to the story than music, and that a far deeper conspiracy is involved that might include both the Cuban secret police and his former law firm.”

The . . . [more]

According to CNET, Google may be experimenting with the encryption of files stored within its Drive service. If true, Google would be following the lead of services like SpiderOak and encrypting the files they store. One possible intention here being to restore user confidence in a post-Prism environment.

It’s a nice idea — that users can encrypt files that the cloud-company cannot access; and subsequently is unable to turnover to the government (or courts?) — but this seems like an “optics” play to me. It’s also likely not possible, at least for now… The CNET article interestingly identifies the . . . [more]

Last week, Exigent graciously invited me to a small lunch gathering of Torontonians to discuss the changing legal industry. Exigent, a major LPO based in South Africa, does business predominantly in the UK and Australia and has recently landed in Canada.

First, I’m happy that a major international LPO has finally seen Canada as worthy of investment.

Second, the arrival of Exigent means that change in the Canadian legal industry will – finally – begin to accelerate. Canadian law firms and clients will view the arrival of an international LPO as further validation for using non-Canadian lawyers to do work . . . [more]

Le Service du développement et du soutien à la profession du Barreau du Québec has compiled a series of resource packages associated with different areas of law, skills, knowledge and types of practice to help lawyers thrive in the province of Quebec.

SmartChicago is a group formed with the aim of using technology to better the lives of Chicagoans. Among other things, they support centres that help citizens get access to their health records, they promote free broadband access, they work to improve citizens’ technological skills — and they try to make relevant laws easier to understand.

To assist with this last aim, they’ve done a very practical and perhaps surprising thing: they’ve opened an account on the Rap Genius site, a place to go to learn the meaning of a lot of rap lyrics — or poems, or items in the . . . [more]

[This is the second part of my two-part column pondering the relationship between access to law schools and access to justice in Canada. Part I was posted on May 15, 2013 and can be read here.]

As mentioned in Part I of this column, Canadian law schools have made significant strides in increasing their ethnic, cultural, and gender diversity profiles over the past decade. Though much remains to be done to mirror the diversity profile of Canadian society, law schools have been eager to report on their progress. They have been less eager, however, to report on the subject . . . [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.

Core Values: Professionalism and Independence Theories in Lawyer Regulation
Noel Semple
http://ssrn.com/abstract=2262518 [This paper is part of a book project with the working title Justicia’s Legions: Legal Services Regulation at the Crossroads.]

Excerpt prepared by the author.

[Footnotes have been converted to endnotes here.]

 

North America is the common law . . . [more]