Faculty Blog

Co-authored with John Chapman, JD student, University of Toronto Faculty of Law.

Did you know that your investment adviser is not bound by an explicit legal duty to act in your best interests? Surprising? Yes, but more curious is the intense debate about whether this duty should be made explicit in the law. Those who represent investors should be bound by an express fiduciary duty. Alas, such is not the case.

First, let’s be clear that the relevant law is a mess. The standard of conduct is cobbled together from provincial securities regulations, common-law principles and industry requirements, so it is difficult to say when a fiduciary duty applies without evaluating each relationship on a case-by-case basis, which often requires a full trial. Another reason that a national securities regulator is a good idea.

The Faculty of Law is pleased to welcome Professors Larissa Katz and Malcolm Thorburn, who officially joined the law school on July 2, 2013. The scholars were hired in 2011 but were on sabbatical at the University of Oxford, then taught for a final year at Queen’s University. 

Larissa Katz holds an Honours Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Alberta; a Bachelor of Laws from the University of Alberta;  and a Master of Laws and SJD from Yale Law School.  She served as a law clerk to Justice Gonthier at the Supreme Court of Canada, and worked as a litigation lawyer with Sullivan & Cromwell in New York for two years prior to entering academia.  Professor Katz works on property law and property theory and publishes widely in that field.  She will teach Property and Trusts.

Originally posted on Prof. Katz's blog

In a lengthy post last week, Barry Sookman responded, and attempted to refute, Michael Geist's analysis of the implications of the recent Supreme Court of Canada's decisions on Access Copyright and its business model. In a nutshell, Michael Geist argued that schools, which already have directly negotiated licenses with numerous publishers, can now "rely more heavily on fair dealing for the copying that takes place on campus and in the classroom. This includes copies made by teachers for students for instructional purposes, copies that previously formed a core part of Access Copyright's claim of the necessity of a licence." Michael Geist never argued that the Supreme Court held that all copying in schools is fair dealing and that a license is never required. Rather, Michael Geist’s essential point is that Access Copyright's very restrictive licenses offer very little beyond what is either already licensed (and often paid for) or what might very likely be regarded as fair dealing anyway.

The Copyright Board of Canada and that various tariffs that it certifies rarely attract media attention. But a tariff recently certified received coverage by most major media outlets. That tariff, mandating payments for playing recorded music in weddings and other events for the years 2008-2012, will be collected by Re:Sound, a private organization representing record companies and performing musicians. If the events include dancing, the fee is double. This unusual media attention, often describing the fees as a “wedding tax” or “dancing tax”, is not surprising because it reflects how undemocratic some aspects of Canada’s copyright system have become. If that is not enough, Re:Sound now contemplates a threefold increase in the “dancing tax” according to its newly proposed tariff for the years 2013-2015.