Law Commons^™

Achieving A (Copy)Right To Repair For The Eu’S Green Economy, Anthony D. Rosborough, Leanne Wiseman, Taina Pihlajarinne

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

• The Right to Repair is a global movement in favour of rebalancing the relationship between manufacturers and end users of products and devices. As part of the European Union (EU) Green Deal and the Circular Economy Action Plan, EU legislators have made the Right to Repair a key policy aim. To date, however, the EU’s Right to Repair policy focus has been predominantly consumer law–oriented.

• This article sheds light on another key dimension of the Right to Repair—IP (and principally copyright law). It canvasses the ways in which copyright can inhibit repair activities, including curtailing access to repair information and …

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Warrant Canaries Beyond The First Amendment: A Comment, Jonathon Penney

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Warrant canaries have emerged as an intriguing tool for Internet companies to provide some measure of transparency for users while also complying with national security laws. Though there is at least a reasonable argument for the legality of warrant canaries in the U.S. based primarily on First Amendment "compelled speech" doctrine, the same cannot be said for the use of warrant canaries in other "Five Eyes” intelligence agency countries — United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia — where the legality of warrant canaries has yet to be examined in either cases or scholarship. This comment, which provides an overview …

Access To Justice And The Ethics And Politics Of Alternative Business Structures, Richard Devlin, Ora Morison

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Despite ongoing concern about access to justice in Canada, the problem persists. Meanwhile, the basic model for legal practice in Canada is the same as when the profession first emerged centuries ago in England. Only lawyers can own and control legal practices. This is not the case in other common law jurisdictions where rules have evolved to allow nonlawyers to own the companies that provide legal services. Based on a comparative analysis of the development of these alternative business structures (ABSs) in Australia and the United Kingdom, and the nondevelopment of ABSs in the United States, the authors argue that …

Ontario’S Administrative Tribunal Clusters: A Glass Half-Full Or Half-Empty For Administrative Justice?, Lorne Sossin, Jamie Baxter

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Claimants who come to administrative tribunals in Canada, as elsewhere, expecting a convenient forum to resolve their problems may discover that institutional resources and expertise, their own knowledge of the system, and their statutory entitlements and legal rights are fragmented between agencies with diverse norms and mandates. The provincial government of Ontario in Canada has recently enacted a novel strategy called tribunal clustering to confront these challenges. This paper explores the structure and rationales behind Ontario’s new tribunal clusters and compares these with reform models in Australia and the United Kingdom. The authors argue that tribunal clusters offer a flexible …

Defining Civil Disputes: Lessons From Two Jurisdictions, Elizabeth Thornburg, Camille Cameron

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Court systems have adopted a variety of mechanisms to narrow the issues in dispute and expedite litigation. This article analyses the largely unsuccessful attempts in two jurisdictions - the United States and Australia - to achieve early and efficient issue identification in civil disputes. Procedures that rely on pleadings to provide focus have failed for centuries, from the common (English) origins of these two systems to their divergent modern paths. Case management practices that are developing in the United States and Australia offer greater promise in the continuing quest for early, efficient dispute definition. Based on a historical and contemporary …

The Price Of Access To The Civil Courts In Australia: Old Problems And New Solutions - A Commercial Litigation Funding Case Study, Camille Cameron

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In the past decade litigation funding companies have assumed an increasingly prominent role in commercial litigation and class actions in Australia. The growth of commercial litigation funding is a predictable response to various features of Australia’s costs and fee allocation rules and practices, including the “loser pays” rule, the prohibition on lawyer’s charging contingency fees, the hourly billing practices of lawyers, and the open-ended and unpredictable nature of much civil litigation. This chapter explores the growth of commercial litigation funding in Australia and uses it as a window through which to view how Australia’s costs and fee allocation rules operate …