The All Writs Act 28 USC s. 1651 is a United States statute that authorizes the federal courts to "issue all writs necessary or appropriate in aid of their respective jurisdictions and agreeable to the usages and principles of law." The original incarnation of the statute dates back to the ...
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On June 1, 2004, Parliament proclaimed in force the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 2001, SC 2002, c 13 relating to the conduct of the preliminary inquiry in criminal cases in Canada. The legislation enacted what is now s. 536.3 of the Criminal Code which provides that a statement be provided ...
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When American and Canadian lawyers talk about privacy, they often cast the conversation in terms of a reasonable expectation of privacy. We go there because constitutional jurisprudence drives the conversation in that direction by the application of the reasonable expectation test in Fourth Amendment doctrine and under s. 8 of ...
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The conduct of pretrial conferences in criminal cases continues to generate concerns among defence lawyers in Alberta. I will join the discussion. In this post I will consider the legal regime governing pretrial conferences and the ethical considerations that bear upon the conduct of criminal defence lawyers in these judicial ...
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It has been a hot week on the privacy front! So let's get caught up. On September 23, 2015, an opinion by Yves Bot, the advocate general of the European Court of Justice, was released in Schrems v Data Protection Commissioner, Case C-362-14, often referred to in the media as ...
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Is there a right to privacy in public places? And, if so, what language do we use to describe it and its boundaries? I have concluded that we have a reasonable expectation of privacy in public places that has emerged in the language of the leading cases in the Supreme ...
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On September 3, 2015, United States Deputy Attorney General Sally Quillian Yates announced a new policy that requires federal government agents to obtain a warrant before using controversial devices called an International Mobile Subscriber Identity catcher (IMSI) or a cell site simulator. In my post titled Stingray Cell Phone Surveillance ...
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The use of Stingray tracking technology by law enforcement agencies hit a public interest peak in the United States recently when an article by Brad Heath titled Police secretly track cellphones to solve routine crimes appeared in the USA TODAY edition of August 24, 2015. I have written about this technology ...
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May a lawyer communicate privileged or confidential information by cellular telephone, email or text message? We read daily reports about email accounts being hacked. We've seen an op-ed in The New York Times by prosecutors seeking to justify limitations on rights of encryption. We have become almost immune to new ...
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On August 11, 2015, The New York Times published an op-ed titled When Phone Encryption Blocks Justice by five prosecutors led by Manhattan district attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. The op-ed was co-authored by Francois Molins, Paris chief prosecutor; Adrian Leppard, commissioner of the City of London Police; and, Javier Zaragoza, ...
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