• Fall 2018: Osgoode Hall Law Journal releases a Special Issue: “Reforming Defamation Law in the Age of the Internet” with papers from the LCO’s 2018 Conference. Volume 56, Issue 1, features guest editor Professor Jamie Cameron and an introduction by LCO Project Head Sue Gratton.
  • June 2018: The Defamation Law project was  cited in the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision Haaretz.com v. Goldhar. The decision is available here.
  • June 2018: NSW Professor says LCO’s Defamation Project is the “best example of how a review should be conducted”. Read the article here.
  • May 17, 2018: the LCO hosted a panel at RightsCon Toronto 2018 called Reforming Intermediary Responsibility: Testing a Human Rights Centred Framework Beyond the Liability and Immunity Divide. Panellists included:
    • Dr. Sue Gratton, LCO Defamation Project Head;
    • Emily Laidlaw, University of Calgary, Faculty of Law;
    • Hilary Young, University of New Brunswick, Faculty of Law;
    • Paul Schabas, Blakes LLP;
    • Joris van Hoboken, Vrije Universiteit Brussels;
    • Michael Geist, University of Ottawa, Faculty of Law
    • Bertrand de la Chapelle, Secretariat of the Internet & Jurisdiction Policy Network;
    • Daphne Keller, Center for Internet and Society, Stanford University; and
    • Sunita Bose, Change.org
  • May 2018: See LCO conference speaker Professor Jamie Cameron blog, Networking the Law of Defamation, posted at the Centre for Free Expression website.
  • On May 3, 2018, in partnership with Professor Jamie Cameron and Professor Hilary Young, we hosted our conference, Defamation Law and the Internet: Where Do We Go From Here? Approximately 150 people participated either in person or through the live webcast. The conference featured a strong roster of Canadian and international experts, in various areas of defamation law. More information about the conference, including a program and speaker biographies can be found here.
  • In April 2018, the LCO made a submission to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC) in response to its draft position on online reputation. The LCO’s submission addresses the relationship between PIPEDA – interpreted by the OPC to address harm to online reputation – and defamation law in Ontario. The LCO recommends further study before the OPC implements a de-indexing and source takedown regime in Canada.
  • On November 6, 2017, the LCO released the project’s Consultation Paper. We kicked off consultations with a public lecture and interactive panel featuring Dr. Daithi MacSithigh (Professor of Law and Innovation at Queen’s University Belfast) and John D. Gregory (Advisory Group member and former General Counsel, Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General).
  • On October 31, 2017, project head Sue Gratton appeared on 6 live radio morning shows across Ontario: Windsor, Thunder Bay, London, Kitchener-Waterloo, Sudbury and numerous rural communities in Southern Ontario. Sue had the opportunity to tell listeners about the project and to encourage the public to participate in the project’s consultations process.
  • In October 2017 project head Sue Gratton was interviewed by CBC Go Public in a story about legal protections for consumers who post online reviews and businesses who are the subject of online reviews. A print story was published on October 27, 2017 and the story was also aired on CBC’s The National on October 30, 2017.
  • October 9, 2017: Congratulations to LCO Commissioned Researcher, Dr. David Mangan, for winning the prestigious Best Paper Prize, UK Society of Legal Scholars, for his paper “Reconsidering Defamation as a 21st Century Tort”. Dr. Mangan’s paper was based on research supported by the LCO as part of our Defamation Law in the Internet Age project.
  • On September 18, 2017, a Canadian Lawyer article featured Emily Laidlaw’s LCO commissioned paper on new legal approaches to online defamation.
  • A Lawyer’s Daily article on August 10, 2017, talks about the project, and the release of our commissioned research papers.
  • In July and September 2017, we released the five issue papers commissioned by the LCO for this project.
  • In a Lawyer’s Weekly article on August 12, 2016 project head Sue Gratton described the intention of the project to re-examine the balance between the values underlying defamation law – protection of reputation and the Charter right to freedom of expression – in light of social and technological developments over the past 35 years. Advisory Group member Daniel Burnett identified some key issues in the project including the issue of intermediary liability for defamatory content uploaded by others and the possibility of introducing a serious harm requirement as has been adopted in the United Kingdom.
  • The LCO has contributed a brief submission to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner (OPC) consultation on Online Reputation. Although the OPC project  is focused on privacy rather than defamation, both of our projects seek to address the problem of online reputational harm while protecting the Charter right to freedom of expression. Our submission is intended to ensure that the OPC and LCO are aware of and may benefit from each other’s work.