Talk:List of Canadian lower court cases

Introductory text

We should give some thought to revising the introductory text before the list. First, are any of those cases actually from an inferior court? I'm pretty sure that county courts were superior courts. (Incidentally, in that context "superior" and "inferior" should not be capitalized.) Secondly, the phrase "adopted across all provinces" is not strictly accurate. Better phrasing would be "influential on courts in other provinces/territories". Finally, none of these cases are "famous decisions" among the general public. Even among Canadian lawyers, you would be hardpressed to find a lawyer who could identify more than two or three of the cases on this list. However, it might be fair to say that each of these cases is well known by Canadian lawyers who focus on the particular area of law (e.g. IP for the Snow case).

For the O'Donohue case, it did go to appeal but the Ont.C.A. dismissed the appeal and adopted the reasoning of the trial court judge. If that's true for some of the other cases in the list, it would be worth commenting on in the intro.
--Mathew5000 18:40, 10 June 2006 (UTC)

You make a number of good points. I'll try to clean it up a bit. To my knowledge I believe Bettel v Yim is inferior court but the rest are either superior court or federal court. To clarify, the sentence with the phrase "famous decisions" is attempting to describe how the list captures both legally significant cases, like Bettel v Yim, as well as the notorous or "famous" cases that are not legally significant, like the air india trial (or similar). Though the list is heavy on the IP/IT cases I wouldn't say they were not recognizable by the legal profession. Just about every law school in Canada spend at significant time on each of these cases in their relevant courses. Each of them are THE leading case in their respective areas. --PullUpYourSocks 01:06, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

I don't think it's true that "just about every law school in Canada" spends a significant amount of time on each of these cases in their relevant courses. For one thing, law schools in Quebec wouldn't cover the tort cases. But aside from that, you might be overestimating the importance of some of these cases. For example, perhaps Bettel v. Yim is considered important by Ontario law schools, but law schools in other common-law provinces are more likely to teach cases from their own province that make the same point. --Mathew5000 05:13, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

On second thought I guess I'm wrong about Bettel v. Yim not being taught in law schools outside Ontario; a Google search [1] turns up cans from UVic, UBC, and UNB.--Mathew5000 05:38, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

I like the edits you made; I just changed "all provinces" to "other provinces". I take your point about "famous decisions in their own right"; perhaps the Glad Day case falls into that category. Wikipedia doesn't have a separate article on the Air India Trial (it just redirects to the article on Air India Flight 182) but I agree with you that an article like that would belong in this list by virtue of the trial getting a lot of press coverage even though from a legal perspective it isn't a leading case. --Mathew5000 05:33, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

It's true that the net is cast quite broadly in this list. Especially where mixing legal significant cases with just the cause celebre. I remember a discussion a while back on another law article about determining when a case significant enough to warrant an article. The test that was proposed was where the case recieved treatment in more than one authoritative texts. I think this rule should be kept in mind when adding to this list. To my knowledge, all of them fall into that category. --PullUpYourSocks 16:30, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

Wei-Zhu case

Another case to consider adding is actually from an inferior court (B.C. Provincial Ct): Zhu v. Merrill Lynch HSBC [2] [3] [4] [5] --Mathew5000 18:50, 10 June 2006 (UTC)