Following an “emergency hearing held by telephone on [a] Friday night”, the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia recently refused to grant an injunction restraining the Halifax Herald from publishing a story using a five hour digital recording of a conversation between Minister Raitt and her former press secretary, Jasmine MacDonnell. This ruling is the latest to comment on the state of the potential common law tort for invasion of privacy in Canada.

Ms. MacDonnell, not Minister Raitt, commenced an action against the Herald and its reporter, Mr. Mahar. The common law tort of invasion of privacy was included in the . . . [more]

There’s a great post on the Law Librarian Blog this morning, entitled Who are we anyway? In it, the author muses on the role of librarians in bridging the gap between users and technology, and challenges us to think about whether we’ve reached the point where librarians MUST be tech-competent and strategic users of technology in order to properly function in the profession.

I would have thought we passed this point some years ago. From helping students figure out the photocopier to participating in the design of portals and document repositories, librarians have had a key role in making . . . [more]

Here’s some information on the upcoming Westpac 2009 Conference, to be held this October 8-10 in Victoria. The Program is shaping up pretty well, with confirmed presentations from Professors John Davis and Ted McDorman, a tour of the Legislative Library, and a very interesting excursion to visit and learn about the Cowichan Tribes. We also plan a tour of the newly renovated Diana M. Priestly Law Library. I have to say, the conference hotel, designed by Aurthur Erickson, should be a pleasure. especially if you can afford to a studio (at conference rates, they will be considerably more . . . [more]

It would appear that the RSS feed for Slaw has been hacked and an advertising link inserted at the top of both the post and comment feeds. Slaw does not run advertising. Moreover, the intrusion has interfered with the readability of the feed for some.

We’re working on solving the problem and apologize to our readers for the annoyance.

UPDATE: The problem would appear to be with Feedburner, which handles our feeds. However you can subscribe to our feed directly from Slaw, and this seems to be working without problems. The direct feed URL is www.slaw.ca/feed/. The direct RSS . . . [more]

I think the new name of Westlaw Canada will be easier for a lot of users (particularly American users) compared to the old name of WestlaweCARSWELL.

The new logo is here:

The change in name is also accompanied by some improved content. I like the fact that they have “chunked together” individual paragraphs from the Canadian Encyclopedic Digest (CED) into a series of paragraphs in a single view (this avoids having to click on “next” or “previous” as much). Their commitment to update all of the CED titles in the next year or so is also very welcome (and overdue). . . . [more]

This afternoon LAWPRO sent an e-blast warning Ontario lawyers to be on the lookout for the latest fraud scheme targeting them. For the first time LAWPRO is seeing a counterfeit bank draft fraud scheme that targets real estate lawyers on mortgage deals. Furthermore, the new scenario may include the supposed fraudster using the identity of a major national financial institution as the actual lender in the transaction.

This new type of fraud works as follows: A new and previously unknown client or lender contact allegedly from a major bank will ask a lawyer to act on mortgage matter. The source . . . [more]

Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario, switched from an internal email system to Google Mail. The Faculty Association objected on the grounds that this breached terms in the collective agreement giving faculty the right to privacy in their personal and professional communications. ((Article 16.01.03 of the Collective Agreement provides: The Board agrees that members have the right to privacy in their personal and professional communications and files, whether on paper or in electronic form. )) The argument was that because Google and the relevant servers are based in the United States, authorities from that country would have legitimate and other . . . [more]

Hat tip to the Law Librarian Blog for the note that all the sessions at the CALI Conference for Law School Computing, June 18 to 20, will be webcast live. The webcasts will use the open source web meeting software Dimdim and each session will have a live video feed and chat room.

The conference program looks great, and the webcasts are free. . . . [more]

That’s the title of my Free Press article for this week. It talks about the new IOC rules for athlete blogging for the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. In essence, the IOC has amended its rules to allow limited blogging, and have taken the position that bloggers are not journalists. In essence, they don’t want them to be journalists, as that might run counter to the rights they sell to traditional media outlets.

In checking Slaw this morning to see if anyone else has mentioned this subject, I noticed Connie Crosby’s post from last summer about athlete blogging. She pointed out that . . . [more]

An evaluation of the Law Commission of Ontario will begin this fall. (Since it has been full operating – working on projects – only since February 2008, this may seem premature or early. Early it is, premature it is not because it is tied to the funding renewal/renewal of mandate process that will begin in spring or thereabouts next year.) There are many questions about evaluation (who should do it? who should be part of the process? and so on), but I am bringing one to this group: whether anyone has had experience with evaluating an organization’s use of technology. . . . [more]

Happy Bloomsday, from all of us at Slaw!

Oddly, there’s no plan to tweet the whole of Ulysses in 140 character chunks. And neither is there a #bloomsday hashtag. Twitter fail? To get things started, here are the first 140 characters of that fabulous novel:

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead,
bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.
A yellow dressingg

You can find the rest of the book online (Joyce’s books are in the public domain now in Canada) at Finnegan’s Web. . . . [more]