The Constitutionality of Compelling Medical Treatment of Children On Friday, the Supreme Court of Canada released judgment in A.C. v. Manitoba (Director of Child and Family Services), 2009 SCC 30, a case which navigates the complicated interplay of a mature minor's right to autonomous decision-making and the state's responsibility to keep vulnerable children from harm. […]
Facebook, in another new and creative attempt to set itself apart from its competitors (Twitter and MySpace), now allows users to register their personalized web addresses. Since I have already pontificated in previous posts on the benefits of Facebook and the extent to which Facebook has integrated itself into the lives of not just consumers, […]
Last Friday, the Canadian Bar Association held a conference marking (some 200 days early) Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin’s decade as Chief Justice. One of her comments that struck me as particularly interesting was her statement of pride in the fact that her Court has been unanimous three-quarters of the time, a much higher number than […]
Moving Beyond the Unilateral Duty Last week, I broadly surveyed the benefits and detriments flowing from R. v. Cuerrier, [1998] 2. S.C.R. 371, the case enabling the Crown to prosecute sero-positive individuals who fail to disclose an HIV transmission risk. While Cuerrier’s “duty to disclose” does serve the social imperative that express misrepresentations of serostatus […]
"Privacy is dead - get over it!" First uttered by former Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy, these words may have been a revelation ten years ago, but are now standard in the current mainstream world. These sentiments are not uncommon to the regular Internet user, especially when transmitting sensitive information through the wireless world of […]
TheCourt.ca is very pleased to reproduce the decisions of the Women's Court of Canada. In 2004 this group of feminist/equality Charter activists, lawyers, and academics, decided to do something about what they saw as the sorry state of equality jurisprudence under s. 15. Their solution - rewrite the key decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada […]
Criminalizing Non-Disclosure, Cuerrier and Beyond In September 1998, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in R. v. Cuerrier, [1998] 2. S.C.R. 371 that disclosure of sero-positive status is required to legally validate consent in sexual relations that pose a significant risk of transmitting HIV. What has followed is a lengthy series of HIV-related prosecutions, numbering […]
The practice of environmental law in Canada has always been fraught with an unanswered question: which level(s) of government have the power to regulate environmental issues? The Supreme Court this week agreed to hear an appeal in Moses v. Canada, 2008 QCCA 741, a noteworthy case where the environmental assessment of a proposed vanadium mine […]
Recently issuing judgment in R. v. Craig, 2009 SCC 23 and companion cases R. v. Ouellette, 2009 SCC 24 and R. v. Nguyen, 2009 SCC 25, the Supreme Court of Canada has circumscribed the applicability of the forfeiture provisions for real property related to a designated substance offence under sections 16(1) and 19.1(3) of the […]
Timeline: May 2005 – Accused charged with sexual assault, unlawful confinement and threatening to kill his ex-girlfriend. Mid Sep 2005 – Trial date set. Mid Feb 2006 (Four days before trial) – Forensic evidence revealed that DNA obtained from complainant did not match the accused. Crown elected to proceed by indictment. Sep 2006 – Date […]