Subscribe by RSS

First jail sentence in Canada for foreign corrupt practices

Kenneth Jull
Saturday, May 31, 2014

Nazir Karigar, a former agent of an Ottawa high-tech company  was sentenced on May 23, 2014 to a penitentiary term of three years for conspiring to bribe several Indian government officials in the first Corruption of Foreign Public Officials Act (the “CFPOA” or the “Act”) case to go to trial. The conspiracy to bribe had as its purpose the winning of a tender for a multi-million dollar contract to sell facial recognition software to Air India, a state enterprise. Facial recognition software may play an important role in preventing the boarding of planes by unauthorized persons.

Sophisticated bribery schemes result in jail sentences

Superior Court Justice Hackland ruled that Karigar “had a leading role in a conspiracy to bribe Air India officials in what was undoubtedly a sophisticated scheme to win a tender for a Canadian based company.” The Court issues the following warning: “Any person who proposes to enter into a sophisticated scheme to bribe foreign public officials to promote the commercial or other interests of a Canadian business abroad must appreciate that they will face a significant sentence of incarceration in a federal penitentiary”.

European Medicines Agency's Proposed Data Release Policy: Promoting Pharma's Control Over Data

Trudo Lemmens
Friday, May 30, 2014

[Note: this Blog was originally written for and appeared as Guest Blog in PLoS' Blog "Speaking Of Medicine" (May 30, 2014) Reproduced here with permission]

Things were looking good recently in Europe for data transparency, a necessary, albeit not sufficient, tool to promote integrity of pharmaceutical data. The European Court’s Vice-President overturned in November 2013 two lower court interim suspensions of EMA’s data access decision in relation to Abbvie’s drug Humira and Intermune’s Esbriet, which had stalled EMA’s data release approach. Shortly after, Abbvie withdrew the Humira lawsuit. Then in April 2014, the European Parliament approved the new Clinical Trials Regulation that introduced a requirement to register all clinical trials and make all clinical study reports in relation to EMA approved drugs publicly available. These developments put EMA again in the driver’s seat for the further implementation of its promised prospective data release policy.

Library's concrete envelope removed

Wednesday, May 28, 2014
west side of former law library with exterior concrete removed

Layer by layer, the exterior concrete envelope of the law library is disappearing. The site is busy with an enormous crane lifting the envelope pieces up and away, the excavators digging to ready the site for foundational shoring (which you can see on our webcam), and a caisson driller prepped to get started.

 

 

 

concrete prepped for crane lifting

 

Wide shot of crane lifting the concrete block up and away

 

Crane shot from Philosopher's Walk

Seeing through the law library from Philosopher's walk to Queen's Park

Rubble in the Rotunda

Friday, May 23, 2014
view to rubble in what used to be the lower rotunda

It's getting a little more difficult to orientate ourselves about what used to be where in the remnants of the former Bora Laskin Law Library. This is the view looking down to what was the Lower Rotunda. The door to the old locker room is towards the bottom right.

 rubble in former lower rotunda area of law library

 

rubble close up in the former lower rotunda

Here's a closer look at the locker doorway. The caisson driller has arrived, and is parked on site. Next week, the drilling starts as we enter the initial phase of the foundation work for the new Crescent Wing of the Jackman Law Building.

 

Understand The 'Law' Behind The Schoolgirl Kidnapping And Dare To Redefine It

Anver Emon
Thursday, May 22, 2014

By Anver Emon

This article was first posted on The Huffington Post on May 12, 2014.

Boko Haram, the group behind the horrific kidnapping of more than 300 schoolgirls in Nigeria, says its goal is to implement Islamic law - also known as Sharia. Meanwhile, in the small Southeast Asia nation of Brunei, the Sultan has declared Sharia law that calls for punishing adultery, abortions and same-sex relationships with flogging and stoning.

Both draw upon historical tradition that they believe reflects how things ought to be.

Boko Haram draws upon a legal tradition that permitted war captives (e.g. women and children) to be treated as slaves and sold as chattel. The legal context of this rule had to do with designating certain classes of people as protected in warfare, namely women, children and the elderly. Those who could not fight or posed no military threat were to be protected and not targeted in battle. But once the opponent was defeated, all that was theirs became part of the Muslim imperial coffers. Those who were protected in war subsequently became treated as the spoils of war, and thus relegated as slaves who could be sold. When Boko Haram, therefore, invokes Islamic legal rules to frame their abduction of schoolgirls and to justify their sale to others as wives, they are drawing upon a historical tradition about the economics of warfare and conquest.

Ten Cases that Changed the World

Mayo Moran
Wednesday, May 21, 2014

So what are the ten cases that have had the biggest impact, not just on the law, but on our collective life more generally?  The world is a big place so I am going to try to focus on cases that have had the greatest impact on our own lives which means that there will  be more focus on jurisdictions that we interact with most—thus not the legal world in its true sense.  But unlike many of the articles and materials I’ve looked at, I don’t want to only consider cases in our home legal system. 

I sat down to sketch a few ideas about the cases that seemed to stand out to me in terms of large scale impact.  Here are some preliminary thoughts:

Of course, I must include Donoghue v Stevenson—the case with the marauding gastropod which not only has intriguing facts but which also began the slow displacement of contractual obligations as the dominant means of organizing  relations, forcing contract to ‘share the field’ with more generalized duties of care.  The fallout continues….as Lord Buckmaster predicted.

Canada’s investment industry behemoths – aided by misguided regulators – are plotting to shut out upstart competitors to the detriment of investors

Jeffrey MacIntosh
Wednesday, May 21, 2014

National Post, 21 May, 2014, p. F11

Canada’s investment industry behemoths – aided by misguided regulators – are plotting to shut out upstart competitors to the detriment of investors

In his magnum opus “The Wealth of Nations,” Adam Smith, the über mensch of competitive markets, famously opined that “people of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” It turns out that Canada’s securities dealers have been doing quite a bit of partying lately. The remarkable thing is that, in their proposed amendments to the Canada’s securities market trading rules released last Friday, Canada’s securities regulators are supplying the beer and wine.

The core principal underlying today’s fragmented securities market, and the engine of competition and innovation, is the “order protection rule” (OPR). As the regulators’ report states, this rule ensures that the “best-priced displayed orders should generally be executed before inferior-priced orders.” The rule is advantageous for a host of reasons beyond merely giving investors the benefit of the best price possible.

A friendly separation

Thursday, May 15, 2014
Workers separating Flavelle House from the library building

Work is now underway to separate the Bora Laskin Law Library building from Flavelle house.  The photos are of the demolition of the connection point of the two building on the west side.  The building separation is a necessary step in the construction to preserve the heritage building throughout the renovation of the library and the construction of the new wing. 

Separating Flavelle from the library building

Grey, wet day for the crew at work

Tuesday, April 29, 2014
two large excavating rigs tear exterior off law library building

The vibration monitor has been installed and the exterior demolition is being carefully watched and measured with this equipment. It's a grim, wet, cool spring day and the large excavators with supersized shears are back at work, crunching up the concrete, slicing steel and ripping down building materials. Salvageable materials are separated for recycling.

"Demolition is continuing and the reinforcing of the existing pavilion structure is taking place," says Eastern's project manager Dean Walker. "The shoring will commence in a couple of weeks with caisson footings to follow. These caisson footings at the far end of the building will carry the weight of the cantilevered part of the new structure."

In the mean time, the crew is busy finalizing the structural demolition and building cut lines. Watch the crew in action on our live webcam feed.

Markingson Case Update: How an institution can transform a request for an ‘Independent Inquiry’ into another institutional procedural shield.

Trudo Lemmens
Thursday, April 24, 2014

In an earlier blog of October 15, 2013, I reported on the controversy surrounding the death of Dan Markingson, a patient who participated in a controversial clinical trial of anti-psychotic medication, in a University of Minnesota hospital. (To get a sense of the wider concerns the case raises about clinical trial practices and human research protection, see the earlier blog, various links there, and recent blogs by Bill Gardner, Dale Hammerschmidt and Kirstin Borgerson). I was happy to report in a follow-up blog in December that a request for an independent inquiry, supported by more than 170 scholars in health law, research ethics, medicine and other relevant disciplines, and directed at the University of Minnesota Senate, appeared at first sight successful.

Faculty Blog
Subscribe by RSS