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]

Available as of today on SSRN, “Dissents from the Bench: A Compilation of Oral Dissents Issued by U.S. Supreme Court Justices“, by Jill Duffy and Elizabeth Lambert, identifies 117 instances where justices of the the United States Supreme Court issued oral dissenting judgments. Duffy is a research librarian at the Court and Lambert is a staff attorney at the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York. The authors examined all decisions from 1969 to the present day. Curiously perhaps, oral dissents are not officially recorded as a matter of course, and some were only . . . [more]

Last week I came across the news story on the YorkRegion.com News website: Libraries fight proposed Internet Blocking (June 10, 2009). It talks about a private member’s bill in Ontario that proposes the use of Internet filters to block pornographic websites from children, and how Ontario libraries are standing up against it. Considering the Bill has been sitting at First Reading since November 19, 2008, I tried to find out why it was making the local news once again. My research did not turn up satisfactory results. . . . [more]

Here are the ins and outs of biotech this past week:

As far as Merck was concerned, Xenon Pharmaceuticals was in, with a new deal that has Merck providing R&D funding for new small-molecule cardiovascular drugs and getting an option on any output. Neuromed was out, with Merck pulling out of a collaboration looking for NCE’s targeting N-type calcium channels.

Online medical resources are in, with new offerings from the Canadian Medical Association for patients with diabetes and an information upgrade from the Ontario Hospital Association at myhospitalcare.ca. But the Ontario Health Quality Council’s 2009 Annual . . . [more]

We’ve talked half a dozen times on Slaw about the United States Border Services’ practice of instituting suspicionless searches of travellers’ laptops, recommending basically that lawyers take nothing but a clean machine across the border.

Now the American Civil Liberties Union has made a formal request under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act for records setting out or touching upon policies establishing and governing this practice, as well as data as to the number of searches, the characteristics of persons whose devices were searched, and so forth. The official request adumbrates the ACLU argument that these searches may infringe the . . . [more]

Issue 12 of the News & Views on Civil Justice Reform, from the Canadian Forum on Civil Justice, released a few days ago, has a piece by Jordan Furlong, “This is Not the End of Lawyers …but this is the End of the Traditional Legal Business Model” [PDF], responding to an excerpt from Richard Susskind’s book, The End of Laywers?, in the same issue.

Furlong wisely would have lawyers construe their coming (already here?) loss of control of the marketplace for their services as an opportunity to transform the practice of law. As always, he writes . . . [more]

Robert Cribb has a story this morning about the high-profile charges against some Canadian plastic surgeons.

But it also reveals that at least one of the initial complaints against Dr. Behnaz Yazdanfar of the Toronto Cosmetic Clinic were allegedly initiated by the fiancee of a competing surgeon,

Using the name Abby Nash, Hodgson allegedly posed as a patient “for the purpose of filing a spurious claim with the College of Physicians and Surgeons.”

…After her visit to Yazdanfar’s clinic, Hodgson filed a “slanderous” complaint with the college alleging that Yazdanfar “misrepresented her medical accreditation and medical training on the Cosmetic