Blog

2015

• Regulating “Psychosurgery” in the 21st Century

  Psychosurgery has a bad name for a good reason.  It is often associated with the mid-20^th century prefrontal leucotomy (or lobotomy).  This procedure garnered its inventor, Egon Moniz, the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1949, and it went on to be applied to thousands of people around the world.  In its heyday, the best known promotor of the procedure, Dr. Walter Freeman, travelled widely in his “lobotomobile” performing transorbital lobotomies across the US.  

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• Constitutional Issues Complicate the Trans-Pacific Partnership

  

  The negotiating phase of the Trans-Pacific Partnership is over. Trade ministers from a dozen countries, representing nearly 40 percent of the global economy, announced the deal in Atlanta in early October. Negotiations took over 5 years, required concessions from everyone and fuelled public controversy. During negotiations, only select industry insiders were privy to secretive information about negotiations, while the rest of us relied on leaks. With the text finally released, the public has only just begun to grapple with the agreement’s complexities. And now comes the hard part: implementation.

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• Drones in Canada: Who Can Regulate What? Or, Why Potatoes might be Good for Drone Regulation

  

  Canada has been an early adopter of flexible regulations for limited commercial drone operations. The Canadian Aviation Regulations require all commercial Unmanned Air Vehicle (UAV, or “drone”) operators to obtain special permission from Transport Canada before their respective flights. But, in 2014, Transport Canada carved out an exception to this requirement to allow some commercial operations to proceed without the delay. These rules address safety concerns. Other than a brief hat-tip to privacy and a reminder to follow the law, there is no discussion on Transport Canada’s drone webpages or in its rules of the myriad other issues arising from the increasing prevalence of drones in the skies, including privacy, property rights, liability, noise pollution, enjoyment of public space, impact on local businesses, and so on.

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• Access to Justice for Consumers of Telecommunications Services

  

  Consumer rights in telecommunications are of growing importance for Canadians, since access to telecommunications services is practically universal in Canada. Telecommunications services are pervasive in the daily lives of Canadians regardless of their socio-economic status. Telecommunications services are more than a consumer service—they serve as an important access point for social and economic participation, public legal education, content creation, and citizen engagement. When consumers experience problems with telecommunications services there is a spillover effect on the other aspects of their lives. 

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• Prevention of social media radicalization

  

  No one can deny the significant development of security measures after 9/11 all over the world in order to try to prevent threats of terrorist attacks. However, terrorist groups have developed their strategies by not relying on sending terrorists to other countries. Instead, they remotely work on radicalizing teenagers and young people in other countries through social media. The people working to remotely radicalize teenagers and young people using online social media websites exploit the minimal level of control of published content and the strong values for freedom of expression and against censorship.

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• Documenting the Locker Room?: The Dalhousie Dentistry Scandal

  

  A highly publicized scandal rocked Dalhousie University in December 2014 when some of the contents of the all-male “Class of DDS 2015 Gentlemen” Facebook page were made public. Contents included: a poll by one fourth-year male dentistry student asking his male colleagues which of their female peers they would “hate fuck”; an invitation from the same student to vote on which of their peers they would like to “sport fuck”; a photo of a bikini-clad woman captioned “bang until stress is relieved or unconscious (girl)” followed by the comment “Can you tell me what chloroform smells like?”; a post defining “penis” as “the tool used to wean and convert lesbians and virgins into useful, productive members of society”; and one member’s comment on the penis definition post saying “by productive I’m assuming you mean it inspires them to become chefs, housekeepers, babysitters, etc.” (Task Force Report, pp. 5-7).

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• Judges (or future judges) Blogging?

  

  Unmistakably — and whilst the exact degree of requisite expertise remains to be determined — judges must possess some understanding of the fundamental notions of technology in order to grasp the related issues permeating cases and to adequately filter and assess evidence. As well, as online communication itself increasingly forms the subject of legal dispute, judges best acquire the aptitude for understanding not only by gaining some facility with (fundamental) technical aspects of the digital revolution but also through experiencing Internet culture. They are at the same time invited to avoid excessive reliance on and disclosure to support staff or ‘experts’, which can be problematic and threaten their independence to a certain degree. 

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• La marque de commerce dans les réseaux sociaux et sur le Web

  

  Retenir l’attention du public, voilà le mot d’ordre de toute entreprise qui cherche une clientèle, de tout artiste qui veut faire apprécier son art.  Désormais, pour accroître la visibilité d’une compagnie ou d’une personne, les réseaux sociaux sont des incontournables. Tous, entreprises, artistes, célébrités, gagnent à être présents sur les réseaux et les plateformes, qui se multiplient : YouTube, Facebook, Google +, LinkedIn, Twitter, Yahoo, Hotmail, pour ne nommer que les principaux. En certains cas,  ce sont les recommandations des utilisateurs dans les réseaux sociaux, qui ont l’impact le plus grand sur la popularité d’un œuvre, d’un produit ou d’un service. Certains artistes d’ailleurs décident de s’occuper eux-mêmes de leur publicité, en devenant leur propre producteur et animateur radio sur les réseaux sociaux; finie la dépendance aux  méga-entreprises de l’industrie culturelle. 

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• Emerging Legal Issues in the Smart Cities Context

  

  The term “smart cities” refers to urban spaces that are networked and sensor-loaded. The data harvested in these ‘smart’ urban environments is used in analytics aimed at improving efficiencies, informing planning, and enhancing service delivery. Data sources are multiple and diverse, from data routinely generated by municipal operations to smart cards used in public transportation, smart metering of utilities, and the use of traffic cameras and other sensor networks.

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• The Arrival of Artificial Intelligence and “The Death of Contract”

  

  Like it was yesterday (it was in fact 1990), I remember when I was a 1L studying the law of contract.

  The inimitable G.H.L. Fridman stood front and centre at the podium, a little man with a big British accent and all pomp and circumstance of a royal coronation. There he was, ready to deliver an hour-long introduction to our year-long subject matter—a single sentence, it seemed, comprised of many subordinate clauses, peppered throughout by a series of parenthetical remarks. 

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