Dalhousie law prof, Philip Gerard, has an enjoyable piece on The Court today in which he shades his eyes and does a tour d’horizon in search of a replacement for Justice Bastarache.

Herewith an excerpt to whet your appetite:

That leaves Nova Scotia, but it has to be said in all honesty that the province is not bursting with Supreme Court-calibre talent at the moment. Don’t get me wrong: there are lots of highly competent and professional judges sitting on the Nova Scotia bench. But the bar for the Supreme Court is higher than that. If you are looking

Apparently the University of Chicago Law School has stopped giving students access to the internet in classrooms, at least on an “experimental basis,” according to the Dean. Inside Higher Ed has the story on the situation, first broken by the blog Above The Law. Students are not happy about it, according to reports.

This seems to be the first time a law school has shut off wireless connectivity as a matter of policy.

I’ve just finished teaching a law school course and I’d have to say that, looked at from the other side, there are few if any good . . . [more]

Adam Kolber, who teaches law at the University of San Diego School of Law, and who is currently teaching at Princeton University, studies neuroethics. You might well ask. Well, folks have always been trying to mess with our heads one way or another — just ask any of my students — and now there needs to be some greater discussion of ethical standards to hamper, if not to restrain, some of the more enthusiastic and direct neural intruders. And we need to think about how to understand and use what we’re learning about neural functioning.

His blog, the Neuroethics . . . [more]

What Cornell manages to accomplish in library-based legal education is definitely the most arresting and challenging aspect of what I’ve learned here. They outline their activities on their teaching page. . . . [more]

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School is celebrating its 10th year. Wow! They have been holding a series of events including distinguished speakers, book releases and the like, including the talk by Clay Shirky we previously noted. The whole thing culminates with “The Future of the Internet” conference on May 15 & 16, 2008. There will also be a gala the evening of May 16th. The Agenda looks stellar. . . . [more]

The first video gaming research symposium at the University of Toronto will be taking place as follows:

Tuesday May 13th 2008
8 am – 4 pm

40 St. George Street
Bahen Centre for Information and Technology
University of Toronto
Room 1190

Video gaming incorporates and impacts cutting edge research in the fields of computer science, engineering, sociology, management and law. We are delighted to present a broad array of research projects that are representative of the breadth of work underway at the University of Toronto.

The presentations will focus on the technical aspects of video game design and then consider

Back in the 70s, then Professor ((pre Dean and pre President)) Harry Arthurs touted Osgoode Hall as the best law school in the Commonwealth.

I’ve just read an extraordinary newsletter from Oxford which lists such an extraordinary range of academic, comparative and pro-bono activities that I wonder whether any other law school could match it.

Whether this is due to the new (Canadian) Dean of the Faculty Timothy Endicott (whom we have saluted before) or just that for the first time, the whole seems larger than its collegiate parts, but page after page manifests intellectual energy and engagement.

And . . . [more]

Tscript.com is in the business of putting litigation transcripts online and so making them accessible at any time from anywhere. It seems that sometimes when a public body holds an inquiry the transcripts are made generally available on Tscript, something I discovered when I was exploring the Ipperwash Inquiry. Every word in a transcript is indexed and linked to the pages where it occurs, the index appearing in a frame to the left of the document. (This might make searching awkward, depending on your browser; Safari searches both the text and the index; but if you have difficulty, you’ll . . . [more]

For all you law and IT lovers, I am pleased to announce that Leg@l.IT is back this year! With Canada’s Privacy Commissionner, Jennifer Stoddart, and Prof. Pierre Trudel as co-presidents, three tracks with the most interesting and en vogue subjects (here is the agenda) and an impressive group of speakers, including fellow Slawers (Simon Chester, Jordan Furlong and Vincent Gautrais) and blogger (David Bilinsky), it is THE event you don’t want to miss!

Leg@l.IT is an accessible and spearheading conference, the most important of this kind in Canada, about the potential and . . . [more]

From the land of “Herr Doktor Doktor” via Language Log:

…Ian Thomas Baldwin, who holds a PhD from Cornell, and now serves as researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena… [had] been accused of “title abuse” by the German police under a little-known Nazi-era law that specifies that only people who hold PhDs or medical degrees from German universities are permitted to be called “Dr.” [But] persons with a PhD from an accredited US institution can now use Dr. in Germany without jeopardy. As I understand this, however, PhDs from Japan, Canada, and other

The most recent issue of The Lawyers Weekly features an article entitled Animal law: from the classroom to the real world? that describes the emergence of animal law as a serious field of study and perhaps legal practice:

“If the law schools are any indication, animal law is a growth area. University of Toronto has just become the seventh law school to offer animal law on its curriculum, after McGill, Dalhousie, University of Alberta, University of Ottawa, University of Victoria and Université du Québec à Montréal(…)”

“Just as actually practising environmental law was seen as a pipe dream of law

CALL/ACBD 2008
May 25-28, 2008
Saskatoon

Tomorrow is the early bird deadline for this year’s CALL Conference.

Also, there is a terrific pre-conference workshop, the Law Library Leadership Institute being held Saturday, May 24th that is definitely worth checking out.

If you work in a law library, or are otherwise part of the law library community, I hope you will join me at the CALL conference! . . . [more]