University of Alberta Faculty of Law Blog

Genie loophole

Today's Cyanide & Happiness comic:

 

Source: Cyanide and Happiness

Ben West vs. Ezra Levant

Environmentalist Ben West of the Wilderness Committee and Ethical Oil author Ezra Levant argued over the Alberta oil sands, climate change and the ethics of oil in a debate that took place last Thursday in front of a highly partisan crowd in Vancouver:

 

Things really went south in the question/answer session when a member of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation was invited on stage to answer a question:

 

 

 

Another TSA Story

"But if [the United States] is going to sacrifice treating people like human beings in the name of safety, then we have already lost the war.” -- Thomas Sawyer, TSA survivor

Security is important: many people accept that a right to life is a bare minimum from which society should not depart.  Upon that premise, it is supposed that for our own safety we should be subjected to intolerable indecencies at airports.  

It cannot seriously be doubted that this 'security' is illusory: it is some degree of security in respect of one mode of travel, but equally potentially deadly vessels are often afforded little protection.  Consider a passenger train crossing farmland in the middle of the night -- it could be bombed.  Consider a cruise ship whose dock-side security staff may be earning a pittance for their work -- a dangerous package could slip aboard.  Consider, too, that Greyhound screens its passengers in Edmonton, but at the very next stop in Vegreville allows passengers on without any screening -- a person could easily come aboard with a knife.

So, travel security is to a certain degree an illusion, in part because one type of vehicle attracts more attention.  So it goes.  Yet, I challenge even the most cynical person not to be disgusted by the following air-travel story:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40291856/ns/travel-news/?GT1=43001

 

New TSA Checkpoint Sign

 

Sign designed by graphic designer Oleg Volk back in 2008 has been getting some attention.

 

"Goldman Sachs with guns"

An article in the New York Times on Japanese efforts to push the Yakuza out of businesses there:

When the toasts are raised here next year at the opening of the world’s tallest communications tower, yakuza gangsters will not be celebrating.

The yakuza, as members of Japan’s criminal underworld are known, are banned from the construction of the 2,080-foot tower, developers say.

“The mob cannot come here,” said Toru Hironaka, a lawyer who leads a legal team retained by the tower’s developers to bar crime syndicates from the construction project.

The ban is part of a nationwide effort by the Japanese government and the business community to sever the deep-rooted ties between organized crime and corporate Japan, especially in the construction industry.

.....

Many experts say Japan’s crackdown efforts are long overdue. The crime syndicates now operate with such sophistication that Jake Adelstein, who has written extensively about Japanese organized crime, calls the yakuza “Goldman Sachs with guns.”

'Merchant of Death' extradited

Ave Atqve Vale: Henryk Gorecki, 1933-2010

In Spring 1989, while bunking with some Polish students at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow [long story], I was introduced to the music of Henryk Gorecki, who died yesterday.  They (and I) were taken with his Third Symphony, one of the movements from which was inspired by the scribblings of a girl on the wall of a Gestapo prison in southern Poland.  While he was, among the non-clerics in Poland's anti-communist resistance movement, a prominent and esteemed figure, neither he nor his music would become well known or even available in the West for several years.  (Strangely, in retrospect - since it seemed normal at the time - Cold War nomenclature relegated Poland to "the East", while places like Japan and Hong Kong formed part of "the West").  The students I knew in Krakow adored him for having resisted state intrusion into the running of his music faculty in Katowice and for having resigned his professorship when he was unable to overcome the authorities' objections to a proposed visit by Karol Wojtyla.

Courts helping banks screw over homeowners

Matt Taibbi in his lengthy Rolling Stone piece on the foreclosure fraud crisis and Florida's foreclosure courts:

The foreclosure lawyers down in Jacksonville had warned me, but I was skeptical. They told me the state of Florida had created a special super-high-speed housing court with a specific mandate to rubber-stamp the legally dicey foreclosures by corporate mortgage pushers like Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan Chase. This "rocket docket," as it is called in town, is presided over by retired judges who seem to have no clue about the insanely complex financial instruments they are ruling on — securitized mortgages and laby rinthine derivative deals of a type that didn't even exist when most of them were active members of the bench. Their stated mission isn't to decide right and wrong, but to clear cases and blast human beings out of their homes with ultimate velocity. They certainly have no incentive to penetrate the profound criminal mysteries of the great American mortgage bubble of the 2000s, perhaps the most complex Ponzi scheme in human history — an epic mountain range of corporate fraud in which Wall Street megabanks conspired first to collect huge numbers of subprime mortgages, then to unload them on unsuspecting third parties like pensions, trade unions and insurance companies (and, ultimately, you and me, as taxpayers) in the guise of AAA-rated investments.

Take some time to read this - Taibbi does a great job explaining the mortgage fraud.  And here's the unhappy judge - Judge Soud presided over the rocket docket Taibbi sat in on - ripping into Taibbi after he tried talking to the defendant:

I follow her out of the court, hoping to ask her about her case. But the sight of a journalist getting up to talk to a defendant in his kangaroo court clearly puts a charge into His Honor, and he immediately calls Cooper back into the conference room. Then, to the amazement of everyone present, he issues the following speech:

"This young man," he says, pointing at me, "is a reporter for Rolling Stone. It is your privilege to talk to him if you want." He pauses. "It is also your privilege to not talk to him if you want."

I stare at the judge, open-mouthed. Here's a woman who still has to come back to this guy's court to find out if she can keep her home, and the judge's admonition suggests that she may run the risk of pissing him off if she talks to a reporter. Worse, about an hour later, April Charney, the lawyer who accompanied me to court, receives an e-mail from the judge actually threatening her with contempt for bringing a stranger to his court. Noting that "we ask that anyone other than a lawyer remain in the lobby," Judge Soud admonishes Charney that "your unprofessional conduct and apparent authorization that the reporter could pursue a property owner immediately out of Chambers into the hallway for an interview, may very well be sited [sic] for possible contempt in the future."

Let's leave aside for a moment that Charney never said a word to me about speaking to Cooper. And let's overlook entirely the fact that the judge can't spell the word cited. The key here isn't this individual judge — it's the notion that these hearings are not and should not be entirely public. Quite clearly, foreclosure is meant to be neither seen nor heard.

 

 

Parking and Vexatious Litigation

http://www.canlii.org/en/bc/bcca/doc/2010/2010bcca463/2010bcca463.pdf

Mr. Yakov has sent this link: a recent decision of the BC Court of Appeal.

Virtual Justice

Via io9 comes this interesting nugget:

Rutgers University law professor Greg Lastowka has directed us to a free PDF copy of his new book, Virtual Justice: The New Laws of Online Worlds. The book covers the increasingly bizarre legal framework that's encompassing virtual worlds like Warcraft.

Here's how Lastowska describes his book:

Tens of millions of people today are living part of their life in a virtual world. In places like World of Warcraft, Second Life, and Free Realms, people are making friends, building communities, creating art, and making real money. Business is booming on the virtual frontier, as billions of dollars are paid in exchange for pixels on screens. But sometimes things go wrong. Virtual criminals defraud online communities in pursuit of real-world profits. People feel cheated when their avatars lose virtual property to wrongdoers. Increasingly, they turn to legal systems for solutions. But when your avatar has been robbed, what law is there to assist you?

Virtual Justice: The New Laws of Online Worlds

The all-seeing eye

From the Daily Mail:

Even the most law-abiding driver might feel a shiver down the spine when spotting this speed camera at the roadside. 

For as well as detecting speeding, it is packed with gizmos that check number plates to make sure insurance and tax are up to date.

It also measures the distance between vehicles to spot tailgating and takes pictures of the inside of the car – to make sure you are wearing a seat belt.

It is the first to detect multiple offences at the same time and is connected to police computers via satellite, so that prosecutions can be started within seconds of any offence.

Development of the system, known as Asset – Advanced Safety and Driver Support for Essential Road Transport – is being funded with around £7million of European money. 

It is undergoing testing in Finland and is expected to be deployed across Europe from 2013, with each unit costing £50,000.