This weekend I stopped by the Vegetarian Food Festival in Toronto to try out some new food products. The last thing I expected to see was a lawyer group. But there, prominently situated between food sample tables and advocacy groups was the Lawyers for Animal Welfare  booth.

University of Toronto law student Camille Labchuk and lawyer Nick Wright were staffing the booth, making members of the public aware of the group and a number of law-related animal welfare issues. I learned that Lawyers for Animal Welfare (LAW) is a registered charity dedicated to advancing public knowledge of animal practices and . . . [more]

I usually have an opinion on almost everything. Ten years ago I was working in an American military veteran hospital in Detroit, MI, and instantly saw a lot of things change.

But I’m keeping it to myself today to remember all of the lives, civilian and military, from September 11, 2011 and the military and social actions that followed it, such as:

• the 2,996 lives on September 11, 2011, including 24 Canadians
• an estimated 48, 644 lives in Afghanistan
• an estimated 1, 690, 903 lives in Iraq
• an estimated 3,000 people extraordinarily renditioned, including the Canadian Maher Arar
• an unknown

. . . [more]

Oral cultures create knowledge, and some literate cultures produce many more publications than others. In our post-literate world, we have see the resurgence of oral communications on YouTube and elsewhere. Nonetheless, citations to the printed word remains a gold standard. Other forms of verification are needed, to address this imbalance. Enter Wikimedia’s Oral Citation Project. The project is outlined, and links are provided to a movie that looks at the problem.

For more interesting projects from the Wikimedia Foundation (which operates Wikipedia), see here. . . . [more]

Orientation week is drawing to a close. 2L and 3L classes have begun with 1L to begin on Monday. To all 1Ls here are my pieces of advice. I know that not all who have experienced law school will agree with these and that’s fine, I hope that Slawyers will contribute their pieces of advice in the comments. Here are mine:

• Go to Class

I know this seems self-explanatory and I also know that one of the guilty pleasures of being a student is the occasional skipped class, so if you are going to skip classes be very judicious in . . . [more]

I remember when I was a kid there were a couple of things (at least) that could take me to the dizzying edge of imagination, where I’d stall in frustration and wonder.

One was lying in bed at night doing the expanding address thing: Simon Fodden, Walton Drive, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, the world, the universe… and? What was on the other side of the universe, beyond it? Try as I might, I couldn’t imagine.

The other was found in the barbershop — you remember those, don’t you? the smell of bay rum, the combs in the jar of blue . . . [more]

This is a post in a series to appear occasionally, setting out some articles, videos, podcasts and the like that contributors at Slaw are enjoying and that you might find interesting. The articles tend to be longer than blog posts and shorter than books, just right for that stolen half hour on the weekend. It’s also likely that most of them won’t be about law — just right for etc.

Please let us have your recommendations for what we and our readers might like.

. . . [more]

We talk about connecting to the Internet, a pipe through which travels all of the information flowing into or out of the law practice. It is not that simple, though, and that oversimplification can mean that you overlook possible holes that might make your client or law practice information vulnerable to access by others.

Any Port in a Storm

The reason the pipe analogy works is that, while in transit, your information really is flowing amid lots of other information. But the place that it ends up – or starts from – is determined in part by what the request . . . [more]

For those who read Slaw only via RSS or email: Interesting comments / SlawTips / Selected case summaries

Of the eight Canadian provinces and territories that have passed laws calling for fixed-date elections, five call for general elections to be held in October every four years. Those five jurisdictions will all hold general elections this October, as follows:

Michael S. Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg and inventor of the idea for the eBook way way way back in 1971 in the pre-WWW, pre-smart phone, pre-Kindle, pre-commercialization of everything on the Internet era, died earlier this week. He was 64. Librarians (and computer geeks) thought the world of him.

The Project Gutenberg website has published an obituary:

Hart was best known for his 1971 invention of electronic books, or eBooks. He founded Project Gutenberg, which is recognized as one of the earliest and longest-lasting online literary projects. He often told this story of how he had the idea

. . . [more]

Paul Venezia of InfoWorld asks why the fax machine refuses to die. In what is a bit of a rant rather than a reasoned analysis, Venezia advises:

Consider what a fax machine actually is: a little device with a sheet feeder, a terrible scanning element, and an ancient modem. Most faxes run at 14,400bps. That’s just over 1KB per second — and people are still using faxes to send 52 poorly scanned pages of some contract to one another. Over analog phone lines. Sometimes while paying long-distance charges! The mind boggles.

A few reasons come to mind as to . . . [more]

Canada – either the Government or the Parliament of the day – has issued public apologies for its treatment of various groups, primarily ethnic communities for the mistreatment they endured in the hands of previous Governments: Japanese Canadians during WWII; Italian and Ukrainian Canadians during WWI.

Certainly the most dramatic apology was the one offered to the Aboriginal peoples of Canada for the mistreatment of their children over many decades through the residential schools run by various churches under contract with the federal government. Some other time I would like to argue that Parliament needs also to apologize for the . . . [more]