Les droits de superficie et l'imprécision du langage juridique

This comment points out a confusion among both French and Canadian authors about the real nature of the right of superficies. Under the single name of this jus in re, two institutions must be distinguished. One should more aptly be called "superficiary property" ; it bears on the upper portion of the land, excluding the soil but including a consecutive right of accession, within the meaning of art. 414 of the Civil Code. The other institution subsumed under the same name is the "right of superficies" proper, conferring ownership of the buildings or improvements made on the land, but without implying any conveyance, from the owner of the land to the beneficiary of the right of superficies, of property in the soil. In that sense, the right of superficies stands in relation to the ownership of the land as a dismemberment of that ownership, which is incomplete since the right of accession under art. 414 belongs to another party

Les trois phénomènes de la mutation des biens meubles en biens immeubles

On September 30th, 1977, the Supreme Court of Canada has delivered a judgment in the case of Cablevision (Montreal) Inc. v. Le Sous-ministre du Revenu de la province de Québec, where the fundamental problem of the qualification of things has once more been reviewed. In this instance, the Court had to qualify a network of wires and various apparatus belonging to the appellant and fixed, under a lease, by this corporation to poles being the property of the Bell Telephone Co. and the Hydro-Québec Corporation, as well as an antenna, also belonging to Cablevision, fixed to the roof of the Montreal skyscraper Place Ville-Marie, the property again of a third party. All these things, formerly moveables, have been held by the Supreme Court to have become immoveable by nature, due to their close attachment to the buildings to which they were affixed. This judgment will have to be distinguished from the former leading case of Nadeau v. Rousseau which held that the incorporated moveable had to become part of the building itself or be indispensable to its natural use. Since a TV antenna fixed to a building is not an essential part ofthat building nor even useful to it, the Court must fall back on the test of close attachment in order to determine its character. The writer of this paper feels this decision is sound reasoning, and recalls the true nature and origins of property immoveable by its nature. Since only land is a real immoveable by nature, buildings are held so only because of their attachment to the land. Again, things immoveable by their destination are held to be so mainly because of their close relationship to the building. The test of physical attachment is then the only true objective test to qualify moveable things when affixed to an immoveable

L'informatique juridique : en progression vers un processus d'intelligence artificielle

This paper deals primarily with computer-assisted legal research. It attempts to sketch the current state of the art, mainly in the United States and Canada, with special reference to systems oriented towards the processing of legislative data. The author suggests a checklist of the main requirements the systems of the 80's will have to answer to, in order to fulfill the growing needs of the new computer-minded generations of law graduates. Along these lines, this paper deals also with the second generation systems dedicated to automated legal research ; these could be expected to show some form, albeit elementary, of humanlike intelligence. Four prototypes of such systems are considered; they are the American Bar Foundation's and Jeffrey Meldman's systems, as well as the well-known JUDITH and TAXMAN systems. The paper concludes on a glimpse of the Third Wave of computerized legal research, in the belief that the legal profession will meet the challenge of the computer age, will learn to live and work with this new technology, and will master the artificial but sometimes acute intelligence of our new friend, the Robot