I was near the bottom of the bell curve for introductory French in my first year of University. Worried for my GPA, I dropped the course just before the transcript appearance cut off date. I have come to deeply regret that decision.

Lucky for me, I have excellent colleagues among the members of the CBA Alberta, Research Lawyers North section. This hybrid section welcomes non-lawyer members. Our September meeting was a round table of research tips.

Jane Fagnan, Legal Counsel with Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench offered some tips and sites to help anglophones with law in French. A . . . [more]

If you’re a hockey fan, you probably know about the current dispute between the NHL and RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie. You may also know about the court auction that is taking place right now – as of the writing of this post anyway – to determine the ownership of the Phoenix Coyotes.

TSN is covering the event, and using a live blogging tool called coveritlive.com to capture the play-by-play. It’s a one way communication tool in that the reporter is publishing, and receiving comments, but isn’t interacting or responding to those comments.

It also translates to different languages, and . . . [more]

The semantic web is coming. The fact that it’s been heralded more often than “the wolf,” shouldn’t deafen us to the the essential truth: slowly but surely Web 3.0, the semantic web is arriving. After all, the wolf did actually show up, as I recall.

What is it? And why should lawyers care? There are two typical answers to the second question, as is usually the case when technology is the subject: lawyers should care first because the change will (eventually) alter the way in which they research, prepare and present documents, and second because as the technology goes mainstream . . . [more]

Picking up on my last post here at Slaw (Social Media and Background Checks), I recently came across some excellent commentary from some heavyweight legal bloggers about managing one’s online reputation.

It begins with Jim Calloway’s post Online Reputation Management: First Rule is to Avoid Self-Inflicted Wounds. That really is the first rule and the one that is sometimes forgotten “in the moment”. Jim writes:

As we have seen with many well-documented Facebook and Twitter stories, the biggest potential danger area for damage to your online reputation is you. We saw it happen with flame e-mailing when

Forty years ago, on September 7, 1969, the Official Languages Act officially came into force.

The legislation recognized the equal status of English and French in federal institutions and in Canadian society.

All week long, the Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages is marking the occasion through meetings, discussions, and exhibitions.

As Graham Fraser, the Commissioner of Official Languages, wrote in the August 31, 2009 edition of The Hill Times:

“Bilingualism ‘is at the core of what this country means’ but Canadians don’t have a sense of ownership of both official languages, says Graham Fraser, the Commissioner

The Guardian carried a story this weekend on Interpol’s online database of stolen art objects. The idea is that by making information — photos, dimensions, etc. — available to art dealers and interested members of the public, it might become harder for thieves to sell on stolen art, at least to unwitting buyers.

What intrigued me was that despite talking about the database website and the fact that 400 people had applied for passwords to view the art the Guardian piece failed to give its readers a URL for the site. I’ve banged on about this before, I know; but . . . [more]

The controversial cash grab…er, law…known as s. 172(1) of the Highway Traffic Act along with Regulation 455/07 have been deemed unconstiutional by a Judge in Napanee in the case of R v. Rahman (unfortunately, the case is not currently reported and therefore I cannot provide a full text of the decision but thank you to James Morton for summarizing the case on his blog).

The law essentially creates serious penal consequences for excessive speeding (anything over 50kph above the posted limit) and had been challenged constitutionally before in several failed attempts. This time around, Justice Griffin was convinced that . . . [more]

As someone with Scottish heritage (no, not the Tjaden side), it was fun to read the news stories about the trade-mark battle in Malaysia in which McDonald’s failed in its attempt to block a curry restaurant whose nomenclature was Malaysian Chicken Curry from using McCurry as its name.

What about McSlaw for Multi Content Slaw?

I doubt Simon McFodden would go for it . . . . . . . [more]

According to the Times Online legal blog Law Central, Fasken Martineau has added six lawyers to its London contingent of 50 “fee-earners” (!) and gets praise for bucking the “doom and gloom” mentality in which Britlaw seems mired.

I note that the Times calls Fasken’s an “international” firm, with nary a whisper of Canada or Canadian in the brief piece. Something we said?

In addition to its offices in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and Quebec City, Fasken Martineau has an office of six lawyers in Johannesburg.

The firm has also added three senior lawyers to its . . . [more]

Data about individuals can be a valuable resource. Organizations holding personal information often aggregate or anonymize that data in order to gain valuable information on various trends. From a privacy perspective, that’s perfectly acceptable, as individuals can no longer be identified. Or can they?

The caveat is that is has been known for some time that it is not as easy to anonymize individual data as one might think. Reidentification of individuals by comparing anonymized data to other sources of data has been surprisingly easy in some cases.

Slashdot points to an ars technica article that talks about a paper . . . [more]

It was just over 2 years ago I was boasting here on SLAW about attending the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF).

Alas, I will not be attending TIFF 2009 this month but note there are a few law-related movies this year that sound interesting:

– Presumed Guilty (about injustices in the Mexican prison system)

– Google Baby (about issues surrounding surrogate pregnancies)

– Cleanflix (about movie copyright and censorship involving attempts by Mormons to edit racy Hollywood movies)

– Copyright Criminals: This is a Sampling Sport (about copyright issues involving music sampling [good Wikipedia article here on the legal . . . [more]

This is a great time to be a Canadian labour and employment lawyer, but Canadian law schools now employ fewer full-time labour and employment professors than they have in decades. This post highlights the issue and invites comment about the relationship between our law schools and the maintenance of a vibrant and well-qualified labour and employment bar.

The declining faculty issue first caught my attention when, in February, York University professor David Doorey published a blog post entitled “Employment Law Practice is Booming, But Someone Should Tell the Law Schools.” Professor Doorey noted the significance of labour and employment issues . . . [more]