With our friends south of the border still reeling from a turkey-induced hangover, it was a quiet week. Still, there was plenty to be thankful for.

Proponents of personalized medicine were thankful for several developments that show this trend is picking up speed: CVS followed Medco’s example in expanding pharmacogenomic testing, while biotech and pharma companies, as well as the National Cancer Institute, stepped up their investment in the field.

I am thankful to be following a new trend for 2010: synthetic biology, i.e. attempts to create novel organisms. This week, I weighed in on the search for . . . [more]

I have been thinking a lot lately about video and how it might be of use in law. I blogged about Law Marketing: YouTube Milestones and the launch of law video site LegalTube earlier this month. Now allow me to introduce you to my new favourite video site, Magma.

Magma is the brainchild of Andrew Baron in New York, and developed by his team at Rocketboom, known as Internet video blogging pioneers. Not meant to replace YouTube, Google Video, Vimeo and the like, this site is a place to discover and aggregate videos from those other sites. I . . . [more]

We’re all increasingly dependent on technology. And as much as we love our portable Blackberrys and iPods, for serious work we usually need an actual computer – a laptop at the least.

The new Kohjinsha Dual Screen DZ Series is now available in Japan for ¥95,800, about $1,170 Canadian. Yes, that’s a dual-screen laptop computer with two 10.1″ LED displays, Athlon Neo 1.6 GHz MV-40 CPU, 1 (exp to 4) GB RAM, ATI Radeon HD 3200, and 160 GB of storage. There’s even a 1.3 megapixel web camera.

In some industries like health information management (one of my other pre-law . . . [more]

Just as we were thinking the Texas ban on unions “identical…to marriage” and the Ugandan proposal to severely punish homosexuals were the loony tunes of the moment, here comes a Swiss miss: A right wing proposal to ban minarets in Switzerland, put to the people in a referendum, was a few minutes ago approved by “a majority of the Swiss people and the cantons . . .”

According to an announcement on the Federal Chancellery website:

The Federal Council respects this decision. Consequently the construction of new minarets in Switzerland is no longer permitted. The four existing minarets will remain.

As many Slaw readers will know, much of the trading in finds and pointers on the internet has moved into “real time” applications, principally Twitter. Because not everyone uses Twitter—and because those of us who do will each follow different groups—Slaw will test out a new weekly feature that brings you a selection of interesting tweets relating to things we haven’t otherwise posted about. These are chosen (by me) from a collection of tweets proposed, in this first go-round, by Slaw contributors. (Apologies for the fact that too many are from me: it’s just a pump priming.)

But we’d like . . . [more]

We’re late to the party on this one, which has been bouncing around the internet over the last week, starting with a claim (by Barbara Ann Radnofsky, a lawyer and a candidate for the office of Texas attorney general) in the Fort Worth Star Telegram, picked up by the Huffington Post, that a 2005 amendment to the Texas Constitution effectively wiped out legal marriage there. The thing that has Radnofsky fussed — and scornful — is Paragraph (b) of Section 32 of Article 1 (Bill of Rights), which reads as follows:

(b) This state or a political

I recently had the pleasure of meeting a man with an extraordinary career which has been untimely cut short and I want to use this platform to draw attention to a true renaissance man. Justice David Marshall of the Ontario Superior Court, MD, LLB passed away unexpectedly a week ago today. While I did not know Justice Marshall well, upon meeting him one could not help but marvel at his career and list of accomplishments; regardless of his list of accomplishments, I was immediately struck by the genuine interest he took in the people he had just met. Over . . . [more]

Since today seems to be a quiz Friday, here’s an easy one to kick off this Friday Fillip. Who is this debonaire man?

. . . [more]

Slaw reaches 5000 posts. For a law blog that’s awesome, and for a Canadian legal information blog, unthinkable.

And we have been told just this week that we’ve been recognized by the Law Foundation of Ontario and will be receiving a grant which will permit us to take Slaw to even greater heights. Thank you Law Foundation.

Over the next few months we’ll unveil our plans and respond to unmet needs, through Slaw.

As many of you know Slaw is deliberately unhierarchical in its structure and operations. Steve Matthews, Connie Crosby and I form three parts of our loose four-person . . . [more]

Three unrelated thoughts on law and honour. . . . [more]

Given the current news stories arising out of the Commonwealth leaders meeting and the Ugandan anti-homosexuality bill introduced last month, I thought it might be useful for Slaw readers to have access to the actual language of the bill. (I guess it’s too much to ask the mainstream media outlets to either quote the legislation at length, in cases such as this, or provide a link to a web location for the text of legislation under discussion.)

A PDF photocopy of the bill is available on the Box Turtle Bulletin site, as is an HTML text version. . . . [more]

[QUIZZIN 1] . . . [more]