Family

  • June 11, 2026

    Supreme Court of Canada says it’s business as usual while judges & staff move to temporary facilities

    The Supreme Court of Canada says it will continue to provide the bar, litigants and the public with all its usual services from its historic courthouse in Ottawa while its judges and registry staff undertake a phased move to the court’s temporary facilities across the street during the months of July and August.

  • June 11, 2026

    Feds unveil sweeping social media, AI-chatbot bill aimed at online harms & enforced by fines & AMPs

    The federal Liberal government’s expansive new bill targeting online harms to children from social media and AI chatbots also takes aim at terrorism and violent extremist content, content that foments hatred and intimate content communicated without consent. Introduced in the House of Commons June 10 by Marc Miller, the minister of Canadian identity and culture, the 92-page Safe Social Media Act (Bill C-34) would enact two other statutes: the Digital Safety Act and the Digital Safety Commission of Canada Act.

  • June 11, 2026

    xAI violated privacy law by enabling sexualized deepfakes through Grok: privacy commissioner

    Elon Musk’s xAI and social media platform X violated federal privacy law by launching Grok’s image-generation tool without adequate safeguards, which allowed users to create and share non-consensual sexualized deepfakes, Privacy Commissioner Philippe Dufresne said on June 11.

  • June 11, 2026

    Newfoundland’s Unified Family Court expansion puts Ontario to shame

    There is a particular kind of institutional embarrassment that arrives quietly, without fanfare, in the form of a provincial news release.

  • June 11, 2026

    Revisiting Ahluwalia: Why mitigation and thin skull concerns miss the mark

    In his recent piece on Ahluwalia v. Ahluwalia, 2026 SCC 16, Gary S. Joseph raises concerns about how concepts such as mitigation and the “thin skull rule” will operate in the context of intimate partner violence tort claims (“More concerns about the SCC’s Ahluwalia decision”). He frames these as open questions left unresolved by the Supreme Court, suggesting they could make litigation more complex. As someone who works outside courtrooms but has spent considerable time helping women who live inside the realities the decision describes, and who has lived there myself, I was intrigued by these questions.

  • June 11, 2026

    Am I a U.S. citizen if I was born abroad to a U.S. citizen parent?

    The United States constitution defines a U.S. citizen as any individual who is a citizen of the United States by law, birth or naturalization. But this isn’t always as clear as it may seem, as some individuals — particularly those born abroad to one or more U.S. citizen parents — may or may not be considered a U.S. citizen, sometimes without even knowing it.

  • June 11, 2026

    Recognizing homelessness as a ground of discrimination advances justice

    A recent judicial ruling recognizing homelessness as an analogous ground of discrimination under s. 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms has come under fire as “judicial activism.” (Waterloo (Regional Municipality) v. Dugas, 2026 ONSC 2971.)

  • June 10, 2026

    Top judge backs Jordan juggernaut, warns bar against filing fake AI-generated precedents in court

    The Supreme Court’s controversial Jordan decision, which has sparked the dismissal of thousands of cases due to unconstitutional trial delay, is still good law, but stays of proceedings are not a cure for undue systemic trial delay, Canada’s top judge says. “One stay of proceedings is too many,” Supreme Court of Canada Chief Justice Richard Wagner stressed at his annual press conference in Ottawa June 9.

  • June 10, 2026

    Ahluwalia: Understanding, identifying and proving coercive control

    For far too long coercive control was an insidious yet unrecognized form of social depravity and abuse, largely perpetrated against women in intimate relationships. Until recently, coercive control was ignored by professionals, including lawyers, though this is rapidly changing.

  • June 10, 2026

    Ontario names 3 new judges to provincial court bench

    Ontario Attorney General Doug Downey has appointed Boris Bytensky, Carson MacDonald Coughlin and Vincent André François Paris as judges to the Ontario Court of Justice, effective June 18, 2026.