Earlier in the week e-discovery diva and twitterer Peg Duncan sent out a request for “an ‘official’ French translation for ‘redaction’…” (She’d come up with épuration, caviardage and expurgation thus far.) Then, as synchronicity will have it, shortly afterwards I came across the University of Ottawa’s CLTD (Centre for Legal Translation and Documentation) lexicons, which I believe we’ve not pointed to on Slaw before.

The Federal Lexicon / lexique fédéral presents you with a word list in either English or French, each word linked to a collection of uses (word plus context) drawn from federal legislation in the other language, . . . [more]

A rant / proposal on Canadian legal journal indexes:

As many SLAW readers will know, there are two main products that index Canadian legal journal literature:

– the Index to Canadian Legal Literature (ICLL), available in print from Carswell and online on each of Westlaw Canada and LexisNexis Canada (early 1980’s to current but I believe the print purports to include some pre-1980 content).

– the Index to Canadian Legal Periodical Literature (ICLPL) (print only, from 1960 to current but with a large publishing lag/delay (i.e., I believe the 2005 annual volume was published circa 2008).

[I am intentionally not . . . [more]

A small Canadian legal venture announced itself recently, going public in its very early stages. LexPublica, using the .ca domain so that the URL is lexpubli.ca, aims to be both a business and an online source for free legal instruments and information. At the moment LexPublica is only a blog, where the two founders, Martin Ertl (a McGill grad who has worked at Davis LLP) and Zak Greant, a techie, explain what they hope to do, which seems to be akin to what JD Supra is doing in having lawyers post their material for display and use by . . . [more]

…against shaving your head with both hands as you drive?

Ontario Ombudsman André Marin caught this guy on his iPhone in a video (guess who’s got a new 3GS) shaving his head with both hands as he was driving. It’s hard to make out the details in the vid, but I’ll take Andre’s word for it — which came via his Twitter strream, by the way. But only after he’d got out of his car. . . . [more]

Last Friday, July 3rd, the Law Commission of Ontario released our first consultation paper in our project to develop a coherent approach to the law as it affects persons with disabilities. You can also see a video that turns the tables on able-bodied people (or, in recognition of the reality that many people develop serious physical or mental challenges as they age or for other reasons, “not yet disabled people”). . . . [more]

The British Library, together with partners, has put on line the Codex Sinaticus, the earliest known surviving version of the Christian Bible, including the Old Testament, dating to somewhere in the middle of the fourth century. The website enables you to peruse certain pages of the document with varying magnification and, in some cases, with different kinds of lighting. The image you see here is a portion of Leviticus — Chapter 21, Verse 5 — chosen more or less randomly from among the many regulations and statutes found in the Septuagint.

  . . . [more]

Further to the Slaw post yesterday, daily coverage is being posted both on the CBC News website, and on Michael Geist’s blog. From Monday:

Net neutrality doesn’t exist, CRTC told (CBCnews.ca, July 6, 2009)

CRTC Net Neutrality Hearings Open Amid ISPs’ Conflicting Claims (Michael Geist blog, July 6, 2009)

CRTC Network Management Hearings, Day One: Sandvine, Juniper, Consumer Groups (Michael Geist blog, July 6, 2009) . . . [more]

These news items likely aren’t worthwhile putting as separate posts, so this is a silly season round-up of odd notes from the legal media.

We’re Staying in Dayton

Despite what we speculated last year about the outsourcing of jobs from Dayton, Lexis told the local paper last week that it has no plans to move and that 3,000 jobs in town are safe.

Amazing ROI in Legal Publishing

Want to quadruple your money in 55 months? Sounds like a Madoff line.

Well, in 2004, a London fund put £750,000 of fund money into a Lexis spin-off, a MBO . . . [more]

Saturday’s Globe brought the sad news of the death of Heather McArthur, who Slaw readers may have encountered through her career in the Ontario Bar Association and in continuing legal education.

Heather had a strong interest in the use of technology to deliver CLE and was an early and enthusiastic backer of annual legal technology onferences in Toronto.

At the Ontario Bar Association, she had been, at various times, Director of Continuing Legal Education, Director of Technology, and Acting Executive Director.

She was warm, enthusiastic and committed. Our sympathy to her husband Paul Truster, who also has long been involved . . . [more]

The British Library has made two million pages from forty-nine mostly regional 19th century newspapers available online. There’s a search function that does an adequate job of locating your terms within the scanned-in pages, though because of the quality of much of the type and the imaging, it’s less than perfect. (I did the, for me, obvious search on my last name, which is sufficiently uncommon to make the inquiry worthwhile: wound up with a great number of hits on the word “sudden” because the “s” was often a long ‘s’ — the one that looks like an ‘f’ — . . . [more]

I spent most of this week playing catch-up, having taken vacation the week before, and there was some great stuff to catch up on:

• Canadian developments included a new structure for Ontario’s commercialization network, new advice from BDC and new management at MSBiV (a Montreal-based commercialization entity).
• Deal news included the Neuromed-CombinatoRx merger, as well as product acquisitions and expansions for Paladin Labs and Biovail. Plus, Sumagen’s HIV vaccine candidate got picked up by the CBC; but PhRMA got dropped by Roche (which says it’s better aligned with BIO).
• Finally, the week saw some suggestions for what

Starting today, the CRTC is holding meetings in Gatineau, Quebec, to examine how Internet service providers, notably Bell and Rogers, manage and manipulate traffic on the Internet and whether this is in accordance with the Telecommunications Act. Their current “traffic shaping” practices include throttling, deep packet inspection, and putting download limits or extra charges on high bandwidth users.

There are a number of arguments against their current practice:

• smaller ISPs who buy bandwidth from Bell and resell it should be allowed to decide how to manage their own traffic, that the current practice is anti-competitive
• ISPs should not