The American Bar Association’s Technology Resource Center has launched a search engine that enables you to search the “free full-text of over 300 online law reviews and law journals” as well as some additional material. There is a list of sources searched on the page where you’ll find the search box.

Because the search facility was constructed using Google Custom Search, it only searches those resources made available online by the journals and indexed by Google. The historical depth of such material will vary greatly, of course, from journal to journal.

Sensibly, perhaps, the sources look to be all from . . . [more]

The Canadian Government stunned the telecom sector last Friday when it overturned the CRTC’s October 2009 ruling that Globalive Wireless Management Corp. was not Canadian-owned and controlled as required by section 16 of the Telecommunications Act. The variance is effective immediately which means that it’s now clear sailing for Globalive’s entry into the Canadian wireless telecommunications market. . . . [more]

Herewith a few interesting tweets encountered by me and others during the past week. Please join us in sharing the best of Twitter: simply tag your tweets or retweets with #slawca.

• @ABAesq Best of #ABA #TECHSHOW: Ediscovery for solo & small firm attorneys – by Sharon Nelson & @dominicjaar
• RT @stevematthews Nominations Open for the 2009 Clawbies – Law Firm Web Strategy – by @smireau 
• RT @Ledjit: New post: The Portable Courtroom – The Case for Paperless Courtrooms – by @smireau 
• What Makes a Good Law School Exam Answer? @WSJLawBlog via Tarlton Library News
• Calls for expansion of

Lawyers Rights Watch Canada (LRWC), an organization that assists lawyers around the world who themselves defend human rights, has published a “Protesters’ Guide to the Law of Civil Disobedience in British Columbia – Olympic Edition” [PDF].

The forty-three-page guide is anything but a sketchy pamphlet for marchers on the front line; it’s a serious, accessible, and well-written handbook. Produced by Leo McGrady originally in 1970 in connection with protests against the Vietnam war, according to a story in the Globe and Mail, and updated a number of times since then, it aims to

. . . inform

Following up on Connie’s post (thanks!) earlier this week, I’d like to thank everyone who has participated in the 2009 nomination season!

We’ve got one more fun item to announce… a new look for the site! Please drop by & have a look. And if you haven’t done so already, consider endorsing your own favourite bloggers!

Happy holidays!
Steve . . . [more]

“[T]his regrettable result is a necessary consequence of Canada’s commitment to policies of international comity and reciprocity. Any time sovereign immunity is asserted, the inevitable result is that certain domestic parties will be left without legal recourse. This is a policy choice implicit in the Act itself.”

Re Canada Labour Code, [1992] 2 S.C.R. 50 at 91, per La Forest J.

Last week, in a Montreal courtroom, Justice La Forest’s observation was put to the test. For the past three and a half years, Stephan Hashemi, the son of the late Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi, has been seeking to . . . [more]

I posted earlier this week (see Privacy, Social Media, Targeting and Marketing: Poked and Pwnd) about recent updates on privacy practices online. Noted was Facebook’s announcement that users would be asked to update their settings to allow better and easier controls for users over their posted information. Facebook users were certainly asked yesterday to update their settings: but I had to blink twice. The update screen gave the choice (i) to keep the user’s old, often customized settings (e.g. restricted to friends only and/or with other customizations for restricted access) or (ii) to allow viewers to access more information . . . [more]

Lawrence Lessig has put out a call to make a donation to support Creative Commons. From his request:

About 8 years ago, a bunch of us started thinking about how we might make the current system of copyright work better. We wanted a voluntary system that would give people a simple way to signal the freedom they wanted their creative work to carry, so their work would say legally what most took the Net to say implicitly — share this. The result was Creative Commons, born December 16, 2002.

None of us imagined then just how quickly the idea

Dominic Jaar has an interesting article in the droit-inc blog (en français) suggesting that a printed document may have less legal impact than the electronic original, because the printout does not reproduce all the information in the original, notably not the metadata. And these days, pretty well all documents start in electronic form, in a word processing program of some sort. Who has a typewriter any more?

This is a particular issue in Quebec because of the terms of the Act to provide a legal framework for information technologies — Loi concernant le cadre juridique des technologies de l’information, . . . [more]

Some of you have probably seen this news(?) item, already.

The headline is “Canadian charged with sham witchcraft“.

Excerpts from the article:

A Canadian woman is to appear in court on Christmas Eve for posing as a witch in order to defraud a grieving Toronto lawyer in a case that invokes a century-old law, police said Thursday.

The bogus witching law was enacted in 1892 when witchcraft was no longer a punishable offense in Canada, but fears persisted that it could be used as a cover for fraud.

It makes it illegal for anyone to fraudulently pretend

David Weisbrot is stepping down as president of the Australian Law Reform Commission, a position he has held for 10 years.

He was interviewed earlier this week on a radio show of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation:

“Law Reform Commissions — do we really need them? If governments want to change the law, why can’t they work out what they want by themselves? Do law reform commissions provide governments with camouflage, allowing them to further their political agendas with a veneer of impartiality?”

“After 10 years at the helm of the Australian Law Reform Commission David Weisbrot is stepping down.