Lord Shaw of Dunfermline once remarked that if Res ipsa loquitur weren’t Latin, it would never have been elevated to the lofty heights of legal principle.* Eighty years later, the Supreme Court of Canada agreed, and the historic phrase has been banished from law practice in Canada.  T

No, it isn’t a poisson d’Avril, which is how they say “April Fool’s Joke” in Quebec. On April 1 the province’s court of appeal held that, in blowing “flutes” during a three-year labour dispute, picketers did not attempt to “intimidate, threaten, impede or otherwise harm or attempt to

It is such a compelling legal fiction that it has its own celebrated poem, as well as a Latin maxim: Cuius est solum, ejus est usque ad coelum et usque ad inferos, literally, “Whoever holds land holds it all the way to the heavens and all the way to Hell.” As William Empson puts it in