Omar Khadr’s lawyer is currently arguing before the Supreme Court of Canada (you can watch/listen to it live). He just now (10.10 a.m.) announce to the Court that he learned an hour ago that the U.S. Military Commission prosecution of Khadr, which had been stalled, is to continue. . . . [more]

What is it that Slaw does not do, lawyers do only discreetly, and everyone else does pretty much all the time?

Advertise, of course. And what’s one of the big names in that trade?

ساعاتجي.

Saatchi, that is. Well, Saatchi and Saatchi, actually: brothers Maurice (the Baron) and Charles (Mr. Nigella Lawson). This isn’t about their careers in advertising, however — though that’s an interesting tale all in itself. No, it’s a fillip about a small portion of the home page of Charles’ Saatchi Online site, which is an offshoot, so to speak, of his Saatchi Gallery of contemporary art. . . . [more]

The Library Journal reported:

A Harvard University Task Force on University Libraries has released a report [PDF] aimed at building a 21st-century library, knitting together the university’s robust and disparate library units, collaborating with peer libraries, and emphasizing access to materials rather than acquisition.

It is budget planning season at my firm. I like to offer our firm management creative solutions for keeping costs low while offering exceptional services and maintaining a collection so lawyers a Field Law have resources at hand to find the best solutions four our client. In the decade that I have shared . . . [more]

Today’s Halifax Chronicle Herald reports that the current mayor of Cape Breton municipality, John Morgan, is about to face a disciplinary hearing by the Nova Scotia Barristers Society for professional misconduct. He’s not accused of bad lawyering (he hasn’t been practicing since becoming mayor in 2000), but of being discourteous to the bench in media interviews in connection with a particularly contentious lawsuit brought by the municipality against the province for a greater share of equilization funds. From the Herald article:

“Specifically, the charges allege that the member failed in his duty to encourage public respect for justice and to

A couple of new features are now available at Quickscribe’s BC Legislation Portal:

1. BC Bills Tracker – As BC Bills recieve their 1st or 3rd Reading and added into the Quickscribe databases, the new bill tracker page will automatically publish those alerts.
2. BC Consequential Amendments – When proposed legislation, if passed, will amend another Act, this page category will aggregate those related alerts.

Both tools may be personalized further – limiting by area of law, for example – using Quickscribe’s (free) RSS alert service for Bill Tracking. But if users are simply after a roundup of new BC . . . [more]

In C.H. Giles & Co. Ltd. v. Morris, [1972] 1 W.L.R. 307, [1972] 1 All E.R. 960 at 971 (Ch.D., Megarry J.) said:

… In this judgment I have referred to a number of authorities not cited in argument. On the procedural point I have reached no final conclusion, and so the citation of additional authorities in that respect does not raise any particular difficulty. But it is otherwise in relation to the question of specific enforceability. On this, the only authority cited to me by either side was Fry, cited by counsel for the defendants. Wilson v West

The Supreme Court of Canada is hearing Prime Minister of Canada, et al. v. Omar Ahmed Khadr tomorrow, November 13 — a Friday the 13th, as it happens. There is a webcast of the hearing scheduled to begin at 9 a.m. EDT.

You can read the SCC Case Information Summary to get a quick overview of the matter. The appellant’s (i.e. government’s) factum is online [PDF], as is that for Khadr [PDF].

The appeal is from a judgment of the Federal Court of Appeal: Canada (Prime Minister) v. Khadr, 2009 FCA 246 (CanLII), which in turn was an . . . [more]

The Times Online has a curious nostalgia piece entitled, “Whatever happened to the radical lawyers,” that keys off Michael Mansfield’s autobiography, Memoirs of a Radical Lawyer (co-written with Yvette Vanson). Mansfield, president of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers, has been practising in Britain since 1967, and has a string of unpopular causes as his clients over the years. The article examines his, and others’, views on what happened to the radicalism of the sixties that seemed to motivate so many young law graduates.

I say the piece is curious because it supplies something of an answer . . . [more]

A U.S. federal court in the state of Georgia has ruled that Rule 53 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure prohibits “tweeting” from the courtroom:

“The immediate result of the court’s decision is to reject a request from a reporter for the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer that he be allowed to use his BlackBerry during the Shellnutt criminal case in order to send updates to his newspaper’s Twitter feed.”

This is exactly what Ottawa Citizen reporter Glen McGregor did during this year’s bribery trial of Ottawa mayor Larry O’Brien.

This whole area of discussion (the impact of social networking media . . . [more]

Chatting with Angela this morning about judgments, and then the Ontario Reports undermines my certainty about my prior views.

One expects that such issues as what is a judgment, and what is an endorsement, would have been determined years ago, when the basic rules of precedent were laid down by common law courts.

However, this morning’s copy of the Ontario Reports has me wondering. There are 80 pages of reported judicial decisions in part 10 of volume 96 of the Ontario Reports, Third Edition.

However, four of those decisions from the Superior Court totalling 61 pages are nominally endorsements. I . . . [more]

Here is this morning’s Interim Management Statement from Reed Elsevier. Note the interested bolded statement on R&D in the legal research sector.

LexisNexis has seen a modest decline in underlying revenues with softer legal and corporate markets in the US and internationally. Overall revenues benefit from a full year contribution from the ChoicePoint business acquired in September last year.

The US Legal Markets business has seen a continuation of the first half trends. Revenues in the core law firm market have held up, although these are under some late cycle pressure reflecting the downturn in the legal services industry. Directory

Google is always releasing new features or apps. Here’s a rundown of some released recently that may have relevance for lawyers…

Google adds World Bank data

googleblog.blogspot.com… – Permalink – Similar

Now it’s possible to export your documents from Google Docs, removing one anxiety about working in this cloud. You can export up to 500 MB of data in a single zip file. You can export to a variety of document types.

Google uses feeds to find new sites

googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com… – Permalink – Similar

Google has built a Custom Search Wikipedia skin. If you have a Wikipedia account, log in . . . [more]