On October 10th, 2012 the Supreme Court of Canada heard arguments in the case of Ivana Levkovic v Her Majesty the Queen. The next day, the SCC heard arguments in the case of Her Majesty the Queen v ADH. Both cases involved women who had left their foetuses after giving birth. In Levkovic, the foetus [...]

Yesterday, after weeks of incessant prodding by Apple, I finally decided to upgrade to the latest version of iTunes. Before doing so, however, a window emerged before me with a dizzying and seemingly endless block of text. Like most people faced with an ominous set of “Terms and Conditions,” I scrolled directly to the bottom [...]

The one-two punch of the Quebec government trying to control the student strikes and the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) being threatened with back to work legislature have turned Canadian attention to the state of union workers. The rights and privileges of workers when on strike have become a constant stream of headlines. Another controversial union [...]

Twitter Ordered to Hand Over User’s Private Information The nature of privacy rights in the digital age are being challenged once again after a judge in the United States ordered the social media site Twitter to surrender information that was allegedly obtained by hacking into police websites to the Boston district attorney. The decision came [...]

Proposed Internet Security Legislation Generates Public Outcry Public Safety Minister Vic Toews recently generated a media frenzy when he introduced a controversial new bill that proposed to provide police departments with the ability to access personal information about Canadian Internet users without a warrant. While the proposed legislation is controversial in itself, Toews caused further [...]

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 [...]

They have done away with the nightmarish scenes from George Orwell’s 1984. They have done away with the unnerving language of insidious dangers around the corner. They have even done away with hypothetical scenarios involving round-the-clock surveillance of each other. The decision that the nine justices on the United States Supreme Court reached last week [...]

The oral argument in the case of U.S. v. Jones before the US Supreme Court started off with an odd imaginative exercise. Chief Justice Roberts asked the court to impose the allegedly unconstitutional actions of the police onto the justices of the Court, and mull over the implications of such an imposition. That is, Chief Justice [...]

“We trust that AT&T won’t take it too personally,” wrote Chief Justice Roberts of the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) regarding the outcome of a case concerning corporate privacy rights. Flowing from a spate of privacy cases at SCOTUS (most notably, Snyder v. Phelps covered by fellow Contributing Editor, Alysia Lau here and our Amici Curiae [...]

In R. v. Gomboc, 2010 SCC 55, the Supreme Court of Canada was once again asked to consider the application of the right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure under section 8 of the Charter. This case has been discussed at great length on this website. Early last month, I offered my thoughts on [...]