Just Call Me Chief Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin sat down for a fireside chat with TVO’s Steve Paikin this week. Asked how she should be addressed, McLachlin noted, in the first of several light-hearted moments, that “most people call me Chief.” (Paikin apparently missed the memo directing counsel to stop calling the justices “my lord” or “my [...]

With 9/11 trial, bad facts will make bad law Further to the news that Khalid Sheikh Mohammad will be transferred to New York for trial in civilian court, David Feige, writing in Slate, has turned his mind to who will defend the alleged 9/11 mastermind. “No jury on this continent is going to acquit their client, the government [...]

NY Trials 9/11 for Plotters Still A “State-Always-Wins” System U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other 9/11 defendants will be tried before civilian courts in New York, the city that The Christian Science Monitor calls the “terror trial capital of the US.” Salon’s Glenn Greenwald would no doubt disagree [...]

Iacobucci on Historical Redress “If anything is to be done with the Indian, we must catch him very young,” wrote N.F. Davin in an 1879 report commissioned by the Canadian federal government with the end of emulating the system of American Industrial Schools for natives. Unfortunately, the Canadian government followed Davin’s wretched advice. Slaw’s Omar [...]

Italian Judge Convicts CIA Officers in Rendition Trial Judge Oscar Magi of Court of Milan on Wednesday convicted 22 former CIA agents and a U.S. Air Force colonel on kidnapping charges for the 2003 “extraordinary rendition” of terror suspect Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr. Jurist reports that the nearly three-year trial is the first in the [...]

Supremes Drawn into Securities Fight The federal government recently pulled the Supreme Court into the middle of its spat with the provinces over whether Ottawa has the power to create a national securities regulator. “In the best courtroom manner, the Harper Conservatives are taking care to ask a question to which they already know the [...]

Sotomayor’s Sartorial Splendor The clothes make the justice, or so the White House seems to think, suggests Jennifer Forsyth over at the WSJ Law Blog. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, known for her gift of gab, told a private audience at her 30th Yale Law School class reunion that the White House tried to script her entire [...]

Cooper v. Hobart, U.S. redux Two victims of Bernard Madoff, the fraudster who ran a multi-billion dollar Ponzi scheme and is now serving a 150-year prison sentence, are suing the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for negligence, Law.com reports. The complaint argues that the SEC had “countless opportunities to stop the Ponzi scheme Madoff operated [...]

Quite possibly the single most entertaining jurisprudential moment of 2009 happened this Tuesday, when Judge Clay Land of the U.S. District Court in the Middle District of Georgia finally lost his judicial temper at the antics of Orly Taitz. Orly Taitz is now infamous for her championing of the “birther” cause, whose adherents believe that [...]

Sotomayor vindicated Given the recent furor in certain quarters over Justice Sotomayor’s “wise Latina” remark, it was only a matter of time before the topic of gender and judging attracted additional scholarly gloss. A law and economics quartet has trudged through mounds of U.S. judicial data and concludes that “female judges are less qualified, based [...]