Since the passage of the Canada Health Act in 1984 and its prohibition of extra-billing, there has been an extremely limited role for private health insurance in Canada as a mechanism to pay for medically necessary physician or hospital services. In the aftermath of the landmark Supreme Court decision Chaoulli v. Québec, this may change.

During the 40 years since the US Supreme Court decision in Doe versus Wade and Doe versus Bolton, restrictions on termination of pregnancy (TOP) were overturned nationwide. The use of TOP was much wider than predicted and a substantial fraction of reproductive age women in the U.S. have had one or more TOPs and that widespread uptake makes the downstream impact of any possible harms have broad ...

This article re-examines two historic Supreme Court’s decisions—the 1964 Times v. Sullivan and the 1974 Gertz v. Welch—as they apply to the digital era. The Court’s decision in Sullivan established the federal legal guidelines for a victim to prove a libel case including actual malice. In Gertz v. Welch the Court established three categories of public figures who must prove actual malice in a l...

A criminal defendant has a constitutional right to a “meaningful opportunity to present a complete defense.” Grounded in several different constitutional provisions, this right has been invoked as a defense to criminal charges in a variety of contexts and has been sustained by the Supreme Court on several occasions. Probably no context, however, has been as controversial and difficult for the c...

The U.S. Supreme Court considered an appeal by the defendant, General Electric Co., in a products liability action. The appeal resulted from the ruling by the Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit that overturned the district court's exclusion of evidence of cancer causation. The Supreme Court held that questions of the admissibility of such evidence are reviewable under the same standard--...

This paper aims to report on the judgment of Cristiano Paes de Castro v. United Nations and Brazil case (RE 1.034.840) regarding jurisdictional immunity international organizations, highlight its most relevant contributions repercussions so far, inquire whether matter is finally set before Brazilian courts. The Supreme Federal Court reasserted rule established a binding thesis prescribing obser...

In Wyeth v. Levine, decided in March, 2009, the United States Supreme Court concluded that the plaintiff's failure to warn claim against the makers of the drug Phenergan was not impliedly preempted by the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act. In doing so, the Court rejected the argument of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that tort claims of this nature stand as an obstacle to federal regulat...