On July 12, 2012, a two-to-one majority dismissed the appeal, upholding the ruling that Portsmouth diocese is liable to pay for alleged wrongdoings of its clergy. This ruling according to many legal experts paves the way for similar claims and far reaching implications.

As time marches on it is clear that one of the most important recent cases of the Supreme Court of Canada in the field of copyright law has been CCH Canadian Ltd. v. Law Society of Upper Canada, [2004] 1 S.C.R. 339 (“CCH”) in which the Court breathed real meaning into the fair dealing exception, now called a user’s right.

CCH was preceded by Théberge v. Galerie d’Art du Petit Champlain inc., [2002] 2 S.C.R. 336, where the Supreme Court of Canada explained that copyright law provides a balance between creators and users, namely:

the purpose of

. . . [more]

A discussion on the Canadian Association of Law Libraries list this morning strikes me as worth a share here. Dawn Urquhart drew subscribers’ attention to a National Post – Legal Post article published on the web yesterday, “Court decisions may be lost in translation.” The article appears in today’s National Post with the somewhat less fair title, “Quebec decisions isolated by lack of translation,” and the even less fair lede, “Lawyers outside Quebec can’t read useful judgments.”

The author cites Ted Tjaden’s excellent post here on Slaw from last year, wherein Ted noted the limited overlap in . . . [more]

Elections Ontario has just disclosed that they lost USB drives containing personal information on as many as 2.4 million voters. The USB drives were supposed to be password-protected, encoded and kept in a locked area accessible only to specific staffers – but were not. The Ontario Privacy Commissioner, Ann Cavoukian, is investigating. Her initial comment:

I am deeply disturbed that a breach of this extent, the largest in Ontario history, involving millions of individuals, could happen at Elections Ontario — the agency charged with protecting the integrity of our electoral process. . .

It is my expectation that personally identifiable . . . [more]

I am a horse for a single harness, not cut out for tandem or team-work…for well I know that in order to attain any definite goal, it is imperative that one person do the thinking and the commanding.
–Albert Einstein, quoted in Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain

A new book called Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking has rocketed to the New York Times bestseller list. The author, Susan Cain, is a former Wall Street corporate lawyer. I got an early taste of Susan’s . . . [more]

It was at first a surprise to me to see this headline: “New Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is pregnant”. Was this really newsworthy? But it became clear very quickly that the story was significant, if only for the fact that it reveals some of the challenges still faced by women in the workplace.

As reported by Fortune, Ms. Mayer has known of her pregnancy since January when she was still with Google, got the initial call from Yahoo in mid-June and disclosed her pregnancy in late June:

Mayer first disclosed to the Yahoo board that she is pregnant in

. . . [more]

Some Slaw readers may soon become members of a class that is suing one of the leading sources of online legal information in Canada. In 2010, Lorne Waldman, a Canadian attorney, filed a statement of claim against Thomson Reuters Corporation for infringing Waldman’s moral right to control the reuse of his writings included in Thomson’s “Court Documents Collection” (CDC) database (available via Carswell Litigator). CDC permits subscribers to download documents Thomson copied from court files in Canadian cases. The court files include briefs and other documents written by Canadian lawyers, including Waldman. Thomson does not ask the authoring lawyers for . . . [more]

Becoming a lawyer is a long process with many hurdles to overcome.

Your undergrad grades and LSAT score need to be good enough to get you into law school. Law school grades, rightly or wrongly, are by and large what determine if you can land an articling position which is, of course, a requirement to be called to the bar. Throw in the bar admission course and exams, which change every few years it seems, and you are almost there. However, licenses to practice law are only given to those who are of “good character”. For most, this requirement is . . . [more]

An Ontario lawyer notified us that his office started receiving emails from Florida from people who had responded to a Craigslist ad advertising for a local office assistant. The ad said the lawyer was Ontario-based but looking to conduct transactions in Florida and needed someone to run an office, book flights, etc. Because the ad used a Hotmail address instead of a proper law office domain name, some responders grew suspicious and contacted the lawyer directly.

Here is the message received by those that replied to the ad (which has since been removed). . . . [more]

Here are the three most-consulted English-language cases on CanLII for the week of July 8 – 16.

[Note: it’s likely that people accessing the Supreme Court pentalogy on copyright released this week will have used the SCC site hosted by Lexum, which probably explains why they’re not among the top three opinions.]

♨ 1. Rubin v. Home Depot Canada Inc. 2012 ONSC 3053

[1] This is a motion for summary judgment brought by the plaintiff. On the day he was fired from his job, Eric Rubin signed a release. It is his view that, given the circumstances in which it

. . . [more]

This morning my Toronto colleague Martha Foote was awarded the Thomson Reuters Westlaw Award for Career Achievement, the big award at the Special Libraries Association Legal Division breakfast. The award is designed to recognize a member who has provided significant service to the Division.

Martha is a past chair of the SLA Legal Division and has also served on the executive board of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries. When not serving the profession on a volunteer basis, she currently serves as Board General Manager of LibraryCo, the central management for the Ontario county courthouse library system.

Congratulations, . . . [more]

The story of the commercial, professional and administrative uses of electronic communication is a search for trust. Who are we dealing with? How do we know? How certain can we be – or do we need to be? I have reviewed the basics in my column on Authentication and Trust .

Trusted technology

Sometimes the search focuses on the technology that purports to offer trust. This can be described in terms of a specific technology, such as dual-key encryption in the framework of a public key infrastructure (PKI ), for example. At other times the focus attempts to be . . . [more]