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 [...]

It all started at around the time of the terrorist attacks in New York City. He was a prominent dentist. She was an attractive blonde woman. Sitting the dentist’s chair in Dr. Jeffrey R. Burkes’ office in midtown Manhattan, Shari Perl Herman was getting her wisdom teeth removed by Dr. Burkes. It was supposed to [...]

During a November oral argument about a California law that would restrict minors from buying violent video games, Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel A. Alito squared off on constitutional originalism. These two United States Supreme Court justices debated whether the ratifiers of the First Amendment would have included portrayals of violence in video games as [...]

As the month of May is quickly coming to an end, theCourt.ca is taking a moment to reflect on the national and international events that have made headlines – from the assassination of Osama bin Laden to the federal elections in Canada (see last week’s post). The former event, particularly bin Laden’s death photos, prompts [...]

“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 [...]

Those who have seen Louis Theroux’s BBC documentary, The Most Hated Family in America, and wondered whether Westboro Baptist Church was inevitably headed for a lawsuit, were vindicated when Albert Snyder finally brought the infamous Phelps family to court after they protested at the funeral of his son.  Marine Lance Corporal Matthew Snyder was killed [...]

Originally argued in front of the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) last fall to lively online and media debate, the recent decision of NASA v. Nelson (2011) 562 U.S. (pdf link) was released on January 19, 2011 to considerably less fanfare in the blogosphere. As discussed in my prior post about this case, [...]

This March, the United States Supreme Court (“SCOTUS”) will consider whether to certify the largest employment discrimination class action in the country’s history.  For nearly ten years, Betty Dukes and five other representative plaintiffs have held the “David v. Goliath” title after they brought a lawsuit against Wal-Mart on behalf of all women employed by [...]

In a previous post on the U.S. Supreme Court decision, Bilski v. Kappos (“Bilski”), I discussed how SCOTUS alluded to the possibility that “business methods” could be patented in the United States – a case that did not outline precisely what kinds of business methods entailed protection. Canadian courts, by contrast, had shut the door [...]