Thanks to Yale’s Information Society Project, there are decent summaries available of the speakers’ and panelists’ remarks at the recent Library 2.0 Symposium, held at Yale Law School. (They’re presented something like a slide show, so you click through them a session at a time.)

This will give you some idea of what the symposium covered:

• Panel 1: The Future of the Library
• Panel 2: Ethics and Politics of Library 2.0
• Panel 3: The Challenge of Copyright
• Panel 4: Digitizing Collections

[via Law Librarian Blog] . . . [more]

I had the honour to be interviewed yesterday by the incomparable, estimable, and frankly able Charon Q.C. for his podcast series. We talked about Slaw, of course, and, surprisingly, about Canada and the Canadian legal system: it seems that we are indeed Brigadoon, and once you’re overseas, even in the mother country, you’re within a cloud of unknowing about this country.

The pseudonymous Charon — probably Britain’s premier legal blogger — was charming as always and helped me over my stumbles and occasional gaffes with aplomb; this is his 127th “lawcast,” after all.

You can hear the interview on Insite . . . [more]

The most recent issue of The Walrus has a profile of Beverley McLachlin, Chief Justice of Canada.

The article, The McLachlin Group – How Canada’s first female Chief Justice has taken the heat off the Supreme Court, is by Susan Harada. . . . [more]

That’s the title of my Free Press article for this week. Cloud computing seems to be a popular topic, so thought it was worth posting here. This article talks about the privacy issues of cloud computing from the view of a recent report by the World Privacy Forum.

From the article:

The forum report’s clear underlying message is that users must be diligent in understanding terms of service, how disclosing information to a cloud provider changes their privacy and confidentially rights in that information, and how remotely stored information may not have the legal protection it should have.

The forum . . . [more]

A large crowd to attended the TALL luncheon today to hear Dr. Michael Geist speak on Digital Advocacy. Although his presentation was about an hour long, it seemed far too short. Beginning from his own work using social media to educate people and collect opinion on copyright reform, net neutrality and other information policy issues, Dr. Geist galloped through a multitude of examples of citizens engaging with government (and each other) on issues of public interest. 

Readers of Don Tapscott’s books (especially Wikinomics) will not be surprised at the diversity of the initiatives which featured in the TALL presentation. . . . [more]

Here’s a link to a first chapter by the Advanced Legal Research instructors at Stanford Law School in a work on the history of CALR. I suspect they need to get into the stacks more

It’s interesting as far as it goes, but it doesn’t capture as much of the early detail as Jon Bing’s Handbook of Legal Information Retrieval. Jon’s book led me to Louis O. Kelso’s Does the Law Need a Technological Revolution in 18 Rocky Mntn. L. Rev. 388 (1945-1946) – yes 1946. It discusses the application of computers to the task of legal research. . . . [more]

Family law disputes and brushes with the law under the Provincial Offences Act likely constitute two of the most common ways people come into contact with the legal system (I’m not counting here going to a lawyer to have a will prepared or to buy or sell real estate). The Law Commission of Ontario is undertaking projects in both these areas that should benefit a good proportion of Ontarians. . . . [more]

The Ontario Ombudsman — office of, one presumes — is now on Twitter: http://twitter.com/Ont_Ombudsman

It’ll be interesting to see how this organization uses the tool. The ratio of @ private replies to useful content is running just a trifle high for my taste. There’s got to be a way to exclude these cryptic messages from a stream. . . . [more]

I have just received my copy of Canadian Contract Law, 2d ed (Toronto: LexisNexis Canada, 2009) authored by SLAW’s own Angela Swan (with the assistance of Jakub Adamski).

At 959 pages and the most recent treatise on the topic, it stands to be an important addition to the Canadian legal literature. . . . [more]

The the Intellectual Property Institute of Canada and IP Osgoode have inaugurated an IP Writing Challenge. The winner in each of three categories — law student, graduate student, professional — will receive a $1000 prize and the publication of the work. Works in either English or French are eligible. The precise rules are set out on the IP Osgoode website, but a brief description of the scope of eligible essays is set out below:

Entries must develop a thesis of importance in an emerging area of intellectual property law from a Canadian, comparative or international perspective. Topics can be

In a comment to the recent post by Patricia Hughes, Justice B. T. Granger of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice referred to a set of slides for a presentation he had given at the 2008 CBA Canadian Legal Conference in Quebec City entitled “The Future is Now: Improving Access to Justice: The Need for Lawyers and the Judiciary to Go Electronic.” I thought that this was a presentation that might interest more than a few Slaw readers and got in touch with Justice Granger, who kindly agreed to let Slaw publish the slides.

Of course because this was about . . . [more]

The Canadian Bar Association‘s Young Lawyers interest group has released a podcast episode “Taking the Nightmare out of Networking“, a half hour interview with Pippa Blakemore, Strategic Business Partner at The PEP Partnership LLP, in Reading, UK by Sarah Klinger, Chair, Young Lawyers-CBA on how to get over awkward face-to-face networking. She gives suggestions on how to conduct conversation to draw people in. Well worth a listen! . . . [more]