Available as of today on SSRN, “Dissents from the Bench: A Compilation of Oral Dissents Issued by U.S. Supreme Court Justices“, by Jill Duffy and Elizabeth Lambert, identifies 117 instances where justices of the the United States Supreme Court issued oral dissenting judgments. Duffy is a research librarian at the Court and Lambert is a staff attorney at the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York. The authors examined all decisions from 1969 to the present day. Curiously perhaps, oral dissents are not officially recorded as a matter of course, and some were only . . . [more]

Last week I came across the news story on the YorkRegion.com News website: Libraries fight proposed Internet Blocking (June 10, 2009). It talks about a private member’s bill in Ontario that proposes the use of Internet filters to block pornographic websites from children, and how Ontario libraries are standing up against it. Considering the Bill has been sitting at First Reading since November 19, 2008, I tried to find out why it was making the local news once again. My research did not turn up satisfactory results. . . . [more]

Here are the ins and outs of biotech this past week:

As far as Merck was concerned, Xenon Pharmaceuticals was in, with a new deal that has Merck providing R&D funding for new small-molecule cardiovascular drugs and getting an option on any output. Neuromed was out, with Merck pulling out of a collaboration looking for NCE’s targeting N-type calcium channels.

Online medical resources are in, with new offerings from the Canadian Medical Association for patients with diabetes and an information upgrade from the Ontario Hospital Association at myhospitalcare.ca. But the Ontario Health Quality Council’s 2009 Annual . . . [more]

We’ve talked half a dozen times on Slaw about the United States Border Services’ practice of instituting suspicionless searches of travellers’ laptops, recommending basically that lawyers take nothing but a clean machine across the border.

Now the American Civil Liberties Union has made a formal request under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act for records setting out or touching upon policies establishing and governing this practice, as well as data as to the number of searches, the characteristics of persons whose devices were searched, and so forth. The official request adumbrates the ACLU argument that these searches may infringe the . . . [more]

Issue 12 of the News & Views on Civil Justice Reform, from the Canadian Forum on Civil Justice, released a few days ago, has a piece by Jordan Furlong, “This is Not the End of Lawyers …but this is the End of the Traditional Legal Business Model” [PDF], responding to an excerpt from Richard Susskind’s book, The End of Laywers?, in the same issue.

Furlong wisely would have lawyers construe their coming (already here?) loss of control of the marketplace for their services as an opportunity to transform the practice of law. As always, he writes . . . [more]

Robert Cribb has a story this morning about the high-profile charges against some Canadian plastic surgeons.

But it also reveals that at least one of the initial complaints against Dr. Behnaz Yazdanfar of the Toronto Cosmetic Clinic were allegedly initiated by the fiancee of a competing surgeon,

Using the name Abby Nash, Hodgson allegedly posed as a patient “for the purpose of filing a spurious claim with the College of Physicians and Surgeons.”

…After her visit to Yazdanfar’s clinic, Hodgson filed a “slanderous” complaint with the college alleging that Yazdanfar “misrepresented her medical accreditation and medical training on the Cosmetic

Few would argue that the outsourcing of legal services by law departments to LPO companies offers the law departments a number of benefits — the most notable of which are significant cost savings, productivity and efficiencies. The big question however that is yet to be definitively answered is how does outsourcing of legal services by law firms benefit the law firms? Until this question is settled, I think it’s safe to assume that law firms are going to drag their heels on implementing a LPO strategy.

Let’s face it, law firms are businesses. It’s that simple. Law firms, like any . . . [more]

I’ve been attending classes this week at the University of Victoria’s DHSI. From the website:

The Digital Humanities Summer Institute provides an environment ideal to discuss, to learn about, and to advance skills in new computing technologies influencing the work of those in the Arts, Humanities and Library communities.

Perhaps the only institute of its kind, attendees come from all over the world (in my class there are people from Europe, the US, and Thailand as well as Canadians from all parts). We have grad students, professors and librarians.

To get an idea of the content, have a look . . . [more]

When I was young and lived for a while in Washington D.C. I had a revelation about penguins. The zoo there had — may still have — a glass-walled penguin area: you saw the comic creatures shuffle like hobbled waiters, and watched as they dived into the pool — where you saw them magically turn into bullets, streamlined torpedoes of muscle that could dart and swerve and race with astonishing grace. I suspect that someone from Festo, the source of today’s fillip, must have had a similar early experience, because that company is all about understanding and reproducing the . . . [more]

I’m borrowing (or plagiarizing) this piece from my partner Mark Edward Davis

On Tuesday, June 9, 2009, Facebook, an extremely popular social networking website based in the United States, announced that beginning Saturday, June 13th at 12:01 a.m. EDT, users of the Facebook website will be allowed to create personalized URLs for their Facebook pages in the format (facebook.com/yourname). Currently, a Facebook user’s webpages are identified by an id number. While this change allows users to personalize their URL, it also creates the potential for Facebook users to misappropriate a trade-mark as their username (facebook.com/trade-mark). To prevent the unauthorized . . . [more]

…flu, that is.

The WHO has declared a pandemic. Most of the increasing numbers of sufferers are to be found in the UK, Australia, Japan and Chile. (See the BBC story, which has a video of WHO’s Dr. Chan making the declaration.)

It is the first time in 40 years that a flu pandemic has been declared. Unlike the one in 1968, however, which killed over a million people, this outbreak seems to result mostly in mild illness. A pandemic is a description of the widespread nature of an illness and not an indication, necessarily, of the severity of . . . [more]

Slate ran a story yesterday on what research says about how gender — or sex — influences judging, “In a ‘Different’ Voice” by Deborah Rhode. This interest was sparked, of course, by the fuss over Judge Sotomayor’s remark in a speech eight years ago about how a “wise Latina woman” might judge. If the effort is to see whether a judge’s nature affects how that person would decide certain issues, it’s surely wasted effort: you don’t have to be of the “what the judge had for breakfast” school to know that judges are not fungible automatons. But drawing . . . [more]