If you’re ever at a loss for a hit of quasi-judicial material that’s easy on the brain and fun to read, try the adjudications of Britain’s ASA (no, as Michael lines would say, not that ASA, or that, or that or…), the Advertising Standards Authority. The association’s adjudications are made available on a well-designed website, week by week, set out with brevity, and linked to the particular standard that was alleged to have been violated. The one that caught my interest involved a broadcast ad by Moët Hennessy UK Ltd. that:

showed a man sitting on a couch with

From the CCC (no, not that CCC, or that one, or that one…), a list of 2009 must-reads set in Canada… See the full list here

Michael Blair, Depth of Field: A Granville Island Mystery
Little does Tom McCall know how much he will regret accepting an assignment from the beautiful Anna Waverley to photograph her boat for a potential buyer. Double-booked, he turns the assignment over to his partner and best friend, Bobbi.
When Bobbi is brutally beaten and left for dead, McCall is determined to find out who did it. When he learns that Anna Waverley doesn’t actually . . . [more]

Oddly, it’s still winter. And I can’t stop myself from gazing longingly down at the south, far south. So I’ve decided that this Friday, we’ll be flying down to Rio. It’s 27 degrees there at the moment and will be warmer tomorrow. I’d hoped to take you there via a webcam, but sadly I can only find working webcams there for traffic, so I’ll take you a bit further south to Santos, where there’s a webcam on the beach.

Anyhow, getting there so abruptly would cause us to miss out on half the fun — at least, it . . . [more]

The American Bar Association’s ABA Journal has posted the Blawg 100, the top 100 law blogs as chosen by their editors, in various categories and is asking readers to vote for their favourites. Our own Slaw has been nominated in the “technology” category. A number of friends of Slaw are also in the running, including Law 21 by our own contributor Jordan Furlong in the “careers” category.

Head on over to vote for your favourite! If you have already voted on a previous day you can vote again. . . . [more]

I dare say more than a few SLAW readers will have a New Year’s resolution that, in one form or another, has at its core, a goal of getting to an empty inbox. Unfortunately, there is no magic button – it takes a lot of time and effort to get to an empty, especially if you have hundreds (or even thousands of messages) in your Inbox.

I won’t focus on cleaning up older messages in this post. My LAWPRO Magazine article Surviving the E-mail Onslaught has some quick tips. Probably the best collection information on this topic is the Inbox . . . [more]

As part of our current awareness services, we troll the Ontario Gazette looking for regulatory changes of interest. I found in the December 27 issue an amendment to the Rules of Civil Procedure which I think may provoke some interesting discussion before it comes into force on January 1, 2010.

RULE 4.1 DUTY OF EXPERT

DUTY OF EXPERT

4.1.01 (1) It is the duty of every expert engaged by or on behalf of a party to provide evidence in relation to a proceeding under these rules,

(a) to provide opinion evidence that is fair, objective and non-partisan;

(b) to provide . . . [more]

I wrote two weeks ago about privacy issues related to the log files that are created and retained by internet companies. The moral of that story was that there is a significant amount of information that is collected in these logs and when they are retained and collated, they can reveal a lot of personal information. I concluded by saying:

I don’t think it’s too far fetched to think of a day when it will become standard for all investigations involving the internet to include a warrant served on Google or Yahoo! or Microsoft for all logs related to a

Twitter developers, rather like life itself, are plunging into every possible nook, cranny and crevice for a foothold on this latest development, and twit apps proliferate. All this in aid of the blurt — but I digress. Now for those who truly belong to the twittering classes comes TweetGrid, which lets you monitor multiple flows of info in one screen on your browser. You can choose the grid pattern that suits you, anywhere from a single (1 X 1) stream, up to a frenzied 9 panel (3 X 3) spray. In each panel of your grid, you can enter . . . [more]

I forgot to celebrate the winter solstice, when the days start to lengthen once more and sunlight seems to be a thing you can bank on even though brutal January and February lie ahead. But if time “creeps in this petty pace from day to day,” so does this lengthening of light; a measly 38 seconds got tacked on to yesterday, for example. I know this because of SunPosition.com, a business in Barrie Ontario that specializes in locating the sun in the sky — anytime, anywhere.

Knowing how Sol was (or will be) there (or here) can be of . . . [more]