Generally speaking, advertisers are in the business of making promises. Occasionally, it falls on courts to determine when businesses will be held to the promises they make, even if they had no intention of keeping them. In Leonard v. PepsiCo Inc., 88 F Supp 2d 116, a favourite of first year contracts students, the US […]
The clichéd David vs. Goliath depiction is one which is often used when describing legal cases. But Ecuador’s Lago Agrio community vs. the Chevron Corporation is one legal battle which aptly fits the analogy. The controversial case has a long history, involving alleged environmental violations in Ecuador’s Amazon region by Texaco (now Chevron) from 1964 […]
For over a century, common law courts have grappled with the question of whether or not to recognize a cause of action in tort for invasion of privacy. In 1937, Latham CJ held in Victoria Park Racing that “any person is entitled to look over the plaintiff’s fences and to what goes on in the […]
Costa Concordia: A Sea of Suits The RMS Titanic struck an iceberg on her maiden voyage from England to New York City. The ship sank on April 15, 1912. History repeated itself nearly 100 years later when the Costa Concordia hit a rock off the Coast of Italy and sunk on January 13, 2012. As […]
On May 26, 2011, the international publication The Economist featured an article about moose in Canada. In particular, they focused on moose in Newfoundland and Labrador. These "lumbering giants" are wreaking havoc on the roads, resulting in over 700 collisions every year, many of which are fatal. Having no natural predators, their population has soared […]
Over the holidays, in a series of concurrently released decisions, the Supreme Court of Canada ("SCC") considered how a citizen could sue the Crown to financially recover on a wrong committed by an administrative decision maker. The question before the Court was whether one may bring the action directly, or did the lawfulness of the […]
The tragic case of a father killing his estranged family, then himself, underlies the Supreme Court of Canada’s ("SCC") recent decision in de Montigny v Brossard (Succession), [2010] 3 SCR 64. In this case, the SCC allowed punitive damages in the absence of a deterrent effect. This case marks a turning point in how courts […]
Ontario employers can rest easy as a result of the Ontario Court of Appeal’s recent decision in Piresferreira v. Ayotte, 2010 ONCA 384. The appeal revisited the issue of an employer’s duty to protect an employee against mental suffering in the workplace. The Court of Appeal held that restricting an employee’s ability to hold an […]
The Supreme Court of Canada ("SCC") will hear a series of seven appeals later this week to clarify a mess of case law that has grown around the juicy-sounding doctrine of collateral attack. (Coincidentally, "24" premieres this week, though I do not expect Jack Bauer to have any involvement in this particular saga.) The fact that […]
As the federal and provincial governments rolled out their vaccination programs for H1N1 flu last week, health ministers, doctors, and other government representatives have all been answering questions about the vaccine's safety and efficacy. There has recently been much debate about the wisdom and effectiveness of population-wide vaccination: for example, see this month's cover story […]