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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.

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.

High frequency talker

Jeffrey MacIntosh
Tuesday, April 15, 2014

"High frequency talker: Author of ‘Flash Boys’ has succeeded in demonizing an innovation that saves investors $9-billion a year"

Jeff MacIntosh, Special to Financial Post | April 14, 2014 7:51 PM ET
 

If high frequency traders are such bandits, why have so many gone out of business?

Michael Lewis’ book, “Flash Boys” – an ostensible indictment of high frequency traders (HFT) – has transformed Mr. Lewis into the undisputed heavyweight champion of the international talk show circuit. Media personalities around the world, including Canada’s own CBC, have been falling all over themselves to give Mr. Lewis a platform to carve up HFT in public. And, by-and-large, they have been uncritically swallowing his alarmist message that financial markets are “rigged.”

What a shame.

Perhaps the most important datum in this story is that alarmism sells. If Mr. Lewis had written a well-documented, impassioned defence of high frequency trading based on solid empirical evidence, his book would likely be well reviewed, sell a few thousand copies, and then quickly be forgotten. But who needs facts when you can get rich peddling soggy half-truths?

Access to Pharmaceutical Data, Not Data Secrecy, is an Essential Component of Human Rights

Trudo Lemmens
Tuesday, April 8, 2014

Recent media reports rightly point to Canada’s abysmal record when it comes to transparency of pharmaceutical data; this notwithstanding numerous calls and recommendations for urgent action, including in a 2012 Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology Report. A recent announcement by Health Canada that it was publishing a ‘summary report’ of data about the controversial acne pill Diane-35 (6 months after it announced it would do so) does little to reassure that we are really catching up with other countries.

Getting women on corporate boards: Canada's middling approach just might work

Anita Anand
Tuesday, February 25, 2014

By Anita Anand

Published in the Globe and Mail on February 21, 2014

Board diversity is a hot topic in corporate Canada. With various European countries passing mandatory quota legislation to increase the number of women on boards and our federal and provincial governments calling for a balanced gender complement, regulators have faced increasing pressure to take a close look at the issue.

But recent evidence suggests that Canadian companies are already responding by voluntarily making changes around the boardroom table. Executive search firm Spencer Stuart has released a study indicating that Canadian companies may be surpassing their American counterparts in women’s representation on boards.

In 2011, the two countries were neck and neck, with 17 per cent women directors on the boards of Canada’s 100 largest companies and comparable U.S. firms. In 2013, Canadian companies were up to 20 per cent, while the U.S. percentage remained unchanged.

This is good news, but should not be confused with the overall picture. For example, of the 445 firms that responded to a recent consultation by the Ontario Securities Commission, nearly 60 per cent did not have a single woman director on their board.

Poker Players Get Fair Deal

Benjamin Alarie
Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Winning poker players face a tough decision every April—to report or not to report. If they choose not to report their poker winnings as income, they may be on the wrong side of the tax law. If they are found to be professional poker players, they will face interest and penalties in addition to the tax they would otherwise have had to pay on their net winnings. Moreover, they may forever face a higher risk of unpleasant tax audits from the CRA. On the other hand, if they report their poker winnings as income, the CRA will be happy for them to pay tax on their winnings. But by volunteering to pay, they may regard themselves as patsies. The taxation of gambling winnings is a grey area in tax law, and no self-respecting poker player wants to be a patsy.

With a recent judgment by the Federal Court in Radonjic, tax matters are now a little more certain, predictable and fair for winning poker players. Of course, Canadian gamblers have long known that generally their losses are not deductible and gains are not included in income. The grey area surrounds an idea that the courts have also embraced, which is that professional gamblers are taxable on winnings. The courts have yet to find that a poker player is a taxable professional, leaving winning players in the confounding dilemma of deciding whether to report or not to report. This is where the recent Federal Court decision in Radonjic (2013) comes in to clarify matters.

Why cut innovation? Flaherty wrong to slash key research tax credit

Jeffrey MacIntosh
Tuesday, January 28, 2014

The following first appeared in the Financial Post, 5 July 2012, p. FP11

For real estate, it's location, location, location. For national prosperity, it's innovation, innovation, innovation. Unfortunately, Canada still sets up shop in the low-rent district. We do lots of great R&D, which then sits on the shelf and collects dust.

The recent federal budget recognizes the problem and makes generous commitments for the support of innovation commercialization. There may be a fly in the ointment, however. The government plans to shift money out of the Scientific Research and Experimental Design tax credit (SR&ED - pronounced "shred" by aficionados) and into "direct" assistance, such as government-administered grants. This has the potential for harming rather than helping commercialization efforts.

A mini-bubble in bio-energy stocks?

Jeffrey MacIntosh
Thursday, January 23, 2014

Jeffrey MacIntosh, Financial Post · Nov. 2, 2011 | Last Updated: Nov. 2, 2011 3:08 AM ET

Medieval alchemists laboured like Trojans to turn lead into gold. More recently, the drive for energy security and low-carbon footprint fuels has produced a new generation of bio-alchemists. These modern-day Merlins spend their midnight hours seeking to turn biomass, or better still, sunlight, carbon dioxide and water, into "drop in" fuels that will power our planes, trains and automobiles with little or no modifications to either engines or infrastructure. A very Brave New World, indeed.

There are too many variations on these technologies to come close to an exhaustive enumeration in a short compass. However, what we're talking about is mostly designer strains of algae, yeast and bacteria (including e. coli). These Frankenbugs have attracted a sultan's ransom of government, venture capital, corporate and public funding. Promoters and underwriters routinely dangle the lure of a trillion-dollar energy market before mesmerized investors. But is there really an algal bloom in our collective energy future? Or a looming vapourware bust, reprising the bubble disasters of a decade ago?

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