Death of Ex-Supreme Court of Canada Justice Charles Gonthier

The Honourable Mr. Justice Charles Doherty Gonthier, who sat on the Supreme Court of Canada from 1989 to 2003, passed away on July 16th.

He was 80.

Justice Gonthier was called to the Quebec Bar in 1952 after graduating from McGill Law.

He was named a judge of the Quebec Superior Court in 1974. During his tenure, he became president of the Canadian Institute for the Administration of Justice.

He was appointed to the Quebec Court of Appeal in 1988, and joined the Supreme Court of Canada the following year.

After retiring from the country's highest court, he became:

• Chair of the Board of McGill's Centre for International Sutainable Development Law
• Wainwright Senior Research Fellow at the same University
• Commissioner of the Communications Security Establishment, Canada's national cryptologic agency

Personal note: I met Justice Gonthier in February 2003 when he was on the panel judging the Gale Cup Moot national competition at Osgoode Hall in Toronto. My little sister was a member of the Université de Montréal team that won first prize, ahead of 15 other Canadian law school teams.

Law Commission of New Zealand Issues Paper on Privacy

The Law Commission of New Zealand has released an issues paper on the protection of privacy.

It is part of a public consultation process the government has asked the Commission to undertake.

The main focus is the adequacy of both New Zealand’s civil law and criminal law to deal with invasions of privacy.

The paper also examines:

• the state of privacy protection in other countries such as the US, the UK, and Australia
• the impact on privacy of the emergence of technologies such as closed circuit TV, GPS, RFID and spyware

Video Introduction to Global Legal Information Network

The Law Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., has produced an 8-minute video introducing the work of the Global Legal Information Network:

"The Global Legal Information Network is a database of the official texts of laws and other complementary legal materials from a growing number of jurisdictions throughout the world. From their offices at The Law Library of Congress, GLIN Director Janice Hyde and Comparative Law Specialist Hanibal Goitom explain the principals and practices of this network that shares its laws in order to promote global legal understanding."

Canadian Privacy Commissioner Finds Flaws with Facebook

The Privacy Commissioner of Canada today released a report that found that the popular social networking site Facebook needs to improve many of its privacy practices to comply more fully with Canadian law.

The report concludes an investigation by the Commissioner that was prompted by a complaint from the Ottawa-based Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic.

Close to 12 million Canadians have accounts with the site.

The report found that:

• Facebook information about privacy settings was often confusing or incomplete
• there were many concerns around the sharing of users’ personal information with third-party developers creating Facebook applications such as games and quizzes
  
• the site indefinitely keeps the personal information of people who have deactivated their accounts – a violation of the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), Canada’s private-sector privacy law

According to the report, Facebook has agreed to adopt many of the Commissioner's recommendations or has proposed reasonable alternatives to the measures recommended. However, it has not yet agreed to implement all of the recommendations.

Supreme Court of Canada Live Webcasts: Preliminary Comments

The Osgoode Hall Law School blog The Court today published a commentary on live webcasts by the Supreme Court of Canada.

Since February 2009, the Supreme Court has provided live streaming of oral arguments and judges' questions in authorized cases. The webcasts are archived.

On The Court, Daniel Del Gobbo writes favourably of the experience:

"Observers may be emboldened by the transparency of the Supreme Court’s new initiative, the comprehensibility of oral arguments, or the sensitivity of justices in asking questions. Further, observers may better understand that the process by which the court’s decisions are made involves an intricate weighing of opposing arguments and mitigating social, operational, and policy factors. This understanding may engender an appreciation for the process which runs deeper than that which they could feel reading case commentary, whether it be in one of Kirk Makin’s columns, the Canadian Abridgment Digest, or even – dare I say it – on TheCourt.ca. For these reasons, transmitting oral arguments via webcast cannot help but instill greater public confidence in the judiciary."

CIPO Intellectual Property Teaching Kit

The Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO) has created a series of six intellectual property case studies for post-secondary institutions. The series was produced in collaboration with McMaster University in Hamilton:

"These teaching tools are designed to reflect realistic career situations for students, particularly those studying engineering, science and business. Using a 50 to 90 minute in-class discussion format, each case study can be easily integrated into an existing course. "

"CIPO is offering these teaching tools to post-secondary institutions across Canada as of the 2009 fall semester, in collaboration with the Alliance for the Commercialization of Canadian Technologies (ACCT Canada)."

Case study summaries can be found on the CIPO website.

For information about the package, e-mail casestudies@ic.gc.ca

[Source: CultureLibre.ca]

Sweeping New Study of U.S. Supreme Court Nominee Sotomayor's Record

The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law has released a new comparative study of 1,194 constitutional cases decided by the Second Circuit (federal appeals court) during the decade that Judge Sonia Sotomayor served on it.

Sotomayor, U.S. President Obama's nominee for a vacant Supreme Court seat, faced her first day of confirmation hearings in the American Senate today.

The Brennan Center study concludes that Sotomayor, far from being a "judicial activist", is squarely within the mainstream of the Second Circuit:

"Using measures for testing judicial activism and deference developed by academics in recent years, the Center analyzed Judge Sotomayor's decisionmaking and compared her record to that of her colleagues on the Second Circuit. We looked at various measures of the relative deference or "activism" of a judge's action in a particular case:

1. Whether the judge's vote was in accord with his or her colleagues on the bench;
2. How often the judge upheld the action of another branch of government, such as a statute or other governmental action;
3. How often the judge deferred to the lower court or agency decision under review."
   

"We also looked at whether Judge Sotomayor's decisionmaking and that of her colleagues varied according to the substantive area at issue in a particular case, specifically cases involving civil rights, criminal law, due process, or the First Amendment (...) "

"Based on this exhaustive review, the conclusion is unmistakable: in constitutional cases, Judge Sotomayor is solidly in the mainstream of the Second Circuit. After we analyzed every constitutional case in the Second Circuit over the past decade, what was striking was the degree of unanimity and consensus on a court roughly evenly split between Democratic appointees and Republican appointees."

Earlier Library Boy posts about the Sotomayor nomination:

• Resources on Obama's First US Supreme Court Pick (May 31, 2009)
• Compilation of News and Analysis on Sotomayor US Supreme Court Nomination (July 5, 2009)
• U.S. National Archives Release Material on Supreme Court Nominee Sonia Sotomayor (July 12, 2009)

Law Library of Congress Comparative Study of Habeas Corpus

The Law Library of Congress has published a study of the right of habeas corpus in 13 countries:

"Under the concept of habeas corpus as developed in Anglo-American jurisprudence, persons who are deprived of their liberty have the right to challenge through judicial inquiry the legality of their arrest or detention."

"The right to challenge one’s arrest or detention is now incorporated in international human rights standards. This right may be exercised through the extraordinary process of habeas corpus in the countries which belong to the Common Law system, or through the normal procedural process, including appeals and motions for retrial in the civil law countries."

"This report analyzes the right available to persons in Canada, Egypt, France, Germany, Iraq, Italy, Japan, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Syria, the United Kingdom, and Yemen to challenge the legality of their arrest or detention."

U.S. National Archives Release Material on Supreme Court Nominee Sonia Sotomayor

Anyone following the confirmation process for U.S. Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor will be interested in heading over to the website of the U.S. National Archives which recently made available thousands of pages of Presidential records about her.

The material dates back to the terms of former American Presidents Bill Clinton and George Bush Sr.

Earlier Library Boy posts about the Sotomayor nomination:

• Resources on Obama's First US Supreme Court Pick (May 31, 2009)
• Compilation of News and Analysis on Sotomayor US Supreme Court Nomination (July 5, 2009)

Day in the Life of Cardiff University Library

The Information Services at Cardiff University (capital city of Wales) have created a series of day in the life vignettes that illustrate the "range and depth of modern library work, from archives to databases, and from training students to managing £1m budgets for information resources".

An interesting marketing tool.

The site reminds me of the Day in the Life photo contest organized by the American Association of Law Libraries.

Supreme Court of Canada Library: New Titles

The list of new library titles added to the Supreme Court of Canada collection for the period of June 16th to 30th, 2009 is now available on the Court website.

The web page explains: "The Supreme Court of Canada Library does not lend materials from this list, which is provided for information only."

But, once the material goes into the general collection, after about a month, the works do become available for inter-library loan to authorized libraries.

It is possible to subscribe via e-mail to receive the list.