Posts Tagged ‘Canada’

France makes “psychological violence” a crime

But only when it’s aimed at one’s spouse, according to the report. [BBC, Barbara Kay/National Post, Ann Althouse] For the active campaign in the U.S. to create rights to sue over “bullying”, psychological and otherwise, in workplace, school and other contexts, see this tag. Quebec has enacted a law to ban “psychological harassment” at work, explained in part here and here.

Canada: bogus forensics took woman’s son, sent her to jail

Testimony by now-disgraced forensic pathologist Charles Smith sent Sherry Sherret-Robinson to jail for a year on charges of infanticide, and resulted in the permanent loss of her other child. Ontario’s highest court has cleared her, but it is rather late. [Jonathan Turley via Radley Balko; Wikipedia on Charles Randal Smith, CBC and more]

December 4 roundup

  • Insurance mandate or no, New Jersey specialists tending to duck out of high-legal-risk procedures like mammography [Amy Handlin, Gloucester County Times via NJLRA]
  • Audi redux, or something different this time? L.A. Times endorses charges of sudden acceleration against Toyota [Holman Jenkins/WSJ, FindLaw “Injured“]
  • Ghastly idea of the year: Rep. Waxman wants federal government to be “responsible” for fixing journalism [Coyote, Bainbridge]
  • “Arkansas Judge Tosses Defamation Lawsuit Against Dixie Chicks Over ‘West Memphis Three’ Letter” [Citizen Media Law, Longstreth/American Lawyer]
  • Judge Weinstein: falsification by arresting officers seems “widespread” in NYPD [Balko, Greenfield]
  • U.K.: Carbon ration cards? [Krauthammer]
  • Nova Scotia, Canada: “A Couple in their 70s Wave at A Kid…And In Swoop the Cops” [Free-Range Kids]
  • Barbra Streisand loses suit over aerial photo of her Malibu home taken by environmental group; by suing, she ensures that many thousands more people will see the photograph, in what is dubbed “Streisand effect” [six years ago on Overlawyered]

John Endean, “Canadianized Labor Law?” (Forbes)

New at Forbes.com: John Endean has an important article demonstrating that while American unionists seek to use Canada’s pro-union labor laws as a model for their proposed Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), they seldom mention that Canadians themselves have found it advisable to rethink and retreat from some of those laws. It’s a condensed adaptation of a paper that will soon be published here as the first in a planned Manhattan Institute series on labor policy. Check it out here (cross-posted from Point of Law).

On the lam, and on the dole

Mark Steyn calls this news clip from Canada “the descent into societal madness distilled into one perfect paragraph”:

People with outstanding warrants will be denied income assistance in British Columbia as soon as next year if legislation introduced yesterday is passed into law, said Rich Coleman, Minister of Housing and Social Development. “People who have outstanding warrants shouldn’t be getting welfare until they clean up the problem,” said Mr. Coleman, adding that to qualify, warrants must be for indictable offences such as murder, sexual assault and drug trafficking. But Mr. Coleman said the government will not run criminal background checks on welfare applicants to enforce the policy. Instead, it will rely on criminals to disclose their outstanding legal issues when they make an application.

October 14 roundup

  • Uh-huh: new report from federal Legal Services program calls for gigantic new allocation of tax money to, well, legal services programs [ABA Journal]
  • “Judge: Man’s a ‘vexatious litigator'” [Cincinnati.com]
  • Wisconsin governor signs bill requiring prescription to buy mercury thermometer [Popehat]
  • “Injured by art?” Woman sues Museum of Fine Arts Houston after fall in artist-designed light tunnel [Mary Flood, Houston Chronicle “Legal Trade”]
  • On Carol Browner and the cry of “environmental racism” (a/k/a “green redlining”) [Coyote]
  • New York: “Lawyers implicated in $9 million mortgage fraud” [Business Insider]
  • In Canada, as in the U.S., medical privacy rules hamper police investigations [Calgary Herald]
  • Stalin’s grandson loses lawsuit in Russia against newspaper that supposedly defamed the dictator [WSJ Law Blog, Lowering the Bar, Volokh]