Wrongful conception po raz pierwszy na wokandzie Sądu Najwyższego

The article closely analyses the very first wrongful conception action brought before the Polish Supreme Court in 2003. The court recognized the case as a precedent. When justifying its verdict it largely referred to the foreign case law and doctrine. The judgment clearly distinguished between the sheer fact of a baby being born as a generally positive event and the possible liability of a medical professional in wrongful conception cases, which allows for such cases to be heard before Polish courts. The judgment also established the scope of possible compensation as all expenses related to the pregnancy and birth and the loss of income stemming from them. Furthermore, the court established the right to seek moral compensation as a part of wrongful conception action claims. The judgment served as a trailblazer for future wrongful conception and wrongful birth verdicts.

Rethinking Fairness: The Scope of Assignor Estoppel Doctrine After Minerva

Assignor estoppel, a common-law doc- trine, may prevent the former employee, as the patent assignor, from asserting the patent invalidity defense. The doctrine prevents unfair practices where, after assigning all the patent rights, the assignor claims the invalidity of the assigned patent such that she may exploit the invention without infringement. This article discerns the breadth of assignor estoppel doctrine and its implications after a recent Supreme Court case Minerva Surgical, Inc. v. Hologic, Inc., 141 S. Ct. 2298 (2021).

Supreme Court halts Biden's company vaccine mandates

Headline UNITED STATES: Court halts Biden's vaccine mandates

Court questions White House employer vaccine mandate

Headline UNITED STATES: Supreme Court and vaccine mandate

Role of the Plenum of Russian Supreme Court in the judicial practice formation

The subject. The article considers the role of the Plenum of Russian Supreme in forming judicial practice on the example of giving qualification to the crimes committed against sexual freedom and inviolability, as well as against property and public health.The objective of the article is to conduct a complex analysis of the function of the decisions, taken by the Plenum of Russian Supreme Court, in the formation of a unified vector of judicial practice. The authors dare to refute the hypothesis hat judicial practice can be recognized as a source of law.The methodological basis of the research is the dialectical theory of development and interrelation of phenomena. Historical, formal-logical, systematic methods of knowledge have been identified as relevant to the topic of the study.The main results, scope of application. The authors draw attention to the problem of evaluative features used in the process of law enforcement when interpreting the norms of the Special Part of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. A norm with such signs acquires an unformalized essence from the point of view of the boundaries of criminalization of a particular phenomenon. On the other hand, the nature of crimes is so diverse that without the flexibility of criminal law regulation (allowing the use of evaluative features), the application of the norm taking into account specific circumstances in a particular case may not be possible. The authors also consider issues related to the characteristics of the objective side, the end time of these crimes, the application of the formula of a single ongoing crime and its separation from related compounds. The process of law enforcement is based on such guidelines as the norms of law, judicial discretion, established judicial practice, the position of the Plenum of Russian Supreme Court. Attributing an explanatory role to the decisions of the Plenum of Russian Supreme Court does not completely eliminate the shortcomings inherent in legal technology. Correcting the current situation with the help of judicial discretion is not always justified, since this is possible only if there is a legitimate alternative. Assigning the status of a precedent to a judicial decision may lead to the substitution of the law by decisions taken in a particular case.Conclusions. The judicial practice concerning these issues is completely different. Despite the existence of similar situations, courts, as a rule, qualify an offense using various norms of the law, which negatively affects compliance with the principle of legality. The issue related to the function of the decisions of the Plenum of Russian Supreme Court in the formation of a single vector of judicial practice has been and remains debatable. The continued addition of new articles to criminal legislation, on the one hand, indicates the desire of the legislator to bring it to perfection, but, on the other hand, forms a mechanism for clarifying the rules of its application, which sometimes leads to their contradictory interpretation. At the same time, crime and punishment should be determined only by legislation.

Additional procedures in cassation and supervision proceedings of civilistic procedure

The subject of the research is the additional powers of the Chairman of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation in relation to cassation and supervisory complaints.The purpose of the article is to substantiate the necessity or redundancy of certain additional powers of the Chairman of the Russian Supreme Court taking into account the nature of such powers and the conditions for their application.The methodology. Analysis and synthesis, dialectical method as well as formal legal interpretation of Russian legislative acts and judicial practice of Russian Supreme Court were used.The main results. Since the transformation of the three-tier supervisory proceedings into a system of two cassation and one supervisory instance, as well as the liquidation of the Supreme Arbitration Court, the powers of the Chairman of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation have spread to a fairly wide range of relations that allow influencing the movement of the case in the cassation and supervisory instance, and on itself initiation of a case in a supervisory instance. Moreover, such activities are far from always regulated by the norms of the law.The Chairman of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation (or his deputy) currently has leverage over the possibility of considering a case in the cassation instance of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation (Judicial Collegium of the Supreme Court) and in the supervisory instance (Presidium of the Supreme Court). These possibilities are called control and substitute in the article. Control powers should include: 1) regulation of key deadlines in cassation and supervisory proceedings; 2) interference in the procedure for filtering complaints. The procedure and conditions for the use of these powers are not regulated in the procedural codes. Having such powers in relation to procedural terms, the President of the Supreme Court actually influences the very possibility of initiating a case in a court of cassation or supervisory instance, as well as the duration (and, accordingly, the quality) of the examination of the complaint. The intervention of the Chairman of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation in the procedure for filtering complaints has a clearly pronounced discretionary nature, moreover, it is selective. It would not be superfluous to point out that such as "order" in itself creates conditions for its abuse both by the participants in the case and by the courts. The substitute authority is the right of the Chairman of the Supreme Court to initiate supervisory proceedings on his own initiative, contrary to the basic rule of civil proceedings based on the principle of discretion (the case is initiated by the person whose rights have been violated). Supervisory proceedings are currently intended to appeal against judicial acts adopted by the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation itself when considering cases in the first, appeal and cassation instances. However, among the objects of appeal there are also acts of the Judicial Collegium of the Supreme Court, applications to which are possible with complaints against acts of any lower courts, with some restrictions on the decisions of justices of the peace (Article 390.4 of the Civil Procedure Code; Article 291.1 of the Arbitration Procedure Court). In this regard, the supervisory authority must continue to be viewed as the final link in the system of reviewing judicial acts. However, the system for reviewing judicial acts is very contradictory. On the one hand, there are a number of strict rules that cut off certain types of judicial acts from appeal; filtering complaints in the second cassation and supervision; establishing special rules for the jurisdiction of complaints. On the other hand, it is possible not to comply with these strict rules and directly contact the Chairman of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation.This extraordinary power of the Chairman of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation has been preserved, precisely because the Russian legislator firmly and consistently adheres to the conviction that it is necessary to leave at least one official who is not a party to the case the right to initiate an audit of a judicial act.Conclusions. The extraordinary powers of the Chairman of the Supreme Court are of an extra-procedural nature, at best they are based on the rules of record keeping (instead of the law), are selective and opaque.

‘Within or outside Canada’: The Charter’s application to the extraterritorial activities of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service

Since the swift passage of the Anti-Terrorism Act in 2015, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) has had the unprecedented and highly controversial authority to take ‘reasonable and proportionate’ measures to reduce threats to Canadian security. While there are some limits to the types of measures CSIS can employ, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service Act permits the use of measures that would otherwise contravene the laws of Canada or limit a right protected by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms so long as they are judicially authorized by the Federal Court. As new threats proliferate around the world, it is anticipated that CSIS will increasingly carry out this mandate overseas. Yet review bodies tasked with monitoring CSIS’s use of threat reduction measures (TRMs) report that CSIS has never sought judicial authorization to conduct a TRM. Why? One answer may be that CSIS has concluded that the Charter does not govern actions carried out abroad, and, as such, their extraterritorial conduct falls beyond the reach and oversight of the Federal Court. Whether the Charter applies to CSIS’s overseas conduct ostensibly lies in the Supreme Court of Canada’s leading case on the extraterritorial application of the Charter, R. v Hape. This article canvasses domestic and international law, as well as intelligence law theory, to explain why that presumption is wrong. Wrong, not least because the majority opinion in Hape is deeply flawed in its analysis and application of international law. But also, because intelligence operations are so distinguishable from the transnational criminal investigations at issue in Hape, the Court’s findings are inapplicable in the former context. In short, this article demonstrates that applying Hape to the actions of CSIS officers not only leaves their actions beyond the scrutiny of Canadian courts but also creates a significant human rights gap.