The University of Ottawa’s Centre for Law, Technology and Society is hosting a conference on Friday, March 5 entitled Taking Stock of Tech: Reflections on Law, Technology and Society. The keynote address will be given by Harvard law prof, Yochai Benkler, who is also the Faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

The conference program and registration information are available online via the link above. . . . [more]

Slaw contributor Ivan Mokanov, Deputy Director of LexUM, has an interesting and informative post this morning on VoxPopuLII entitled Environmentally-Friendly Citations. He discusses Canada’s neutral citation, its history and structure, and the extent to which it has been embraced by practitioners, the judiciary, and other tribunals. He also discusses CanLII and the mechanics of RefLex, CanLII’s citator. Cheers to Rob Richards, editor in chief of VoxPopuLII, for the heads up. . . . [more]

According to a report by Richard Liebrecht of the QMI Agency:

Alberta Musing Online Election Voting
New election rules have cleared the way for Internet and electronic voting, which could come to Alberta as early as 2013. “Obviously that online voting is something that’s on the forefront of people’s minds … people say, ‘I can do my banking online, but I can’t do my voting online’,” said Brian Fjeldheim, Alberta’s Chief Electoral Officer.

The Chief Electoral Officer went on to say “Once it has been proven to be effective, that the votes can be certified, all that security stuff can . . . [more]

Collaboration is a constant theme for biotech companies, from inception to exit: researchers work together to generate novel ideas, young companies work with development and formulation partners, and collaborations between pharmaceutical companies and biotechs are the classic final phase of drug development. 

That’s just the tip of the iceberg:

Foundations work together: foundations formed by the families of patients can be the most ardent advocates for getting drugs to market, but that is an expensive process. One solution is for multiple foundations to pitch in to fund the same project. That was the story with CureDuchenne and the Foundation . . . [more]

One aspect of the Olympic Movement I had never heard of before is the Olympic Truce. The concept was started in Ancient Greece, when countries would call a truce to allow athletes to travel in peace to the Olympic games and back. The concept was re-instituted by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 1992 as a platform of peace. The IOC launched the International Olympic Truce Foundation and the International Olympic Truce Centre in July 2000. From the olympictruce.org website with regard to supporting this ideal:

The Olympic Truce call

At the dawn of the 21st century, the Olympic Truce

Originally published in the 6th issue of the Black Law Students Association (BLSAC) magazine.

In the West African culture, historical tradition is passed down orally through what are known in the Western world as griots. The griot is a repository of knowledge, and ensures that the lessons of one generation are passed down to the next.

It’s our pleasure as BLSAC members to be your griot, and share what we’ve learned from our experiences.

The Mende people refer to a griot as a jali, which comes from their word for “blood.” Make no mistake; there will be plenty of . . . [more]

Mark Liberman raised an interesting question on the Language Log yesterday: Why is it, he wonders, that “the laws and practices dealing with the recording of human interactions seem to be so different for video compared to audio?” We penalize recordings of conversations without proper consent but think nothing of videoing millions of interactions daily.

Here in Canada, too, Criminal Code provisions concerning privacy seem directed at speech. Section 184. (1) provides that:

Every one who, by means of any electro-magnetic, acoustic, mechanical or other device, wilfully intercepts a private communication is guilty of an indictable offence and liable

♫There’s a Long, Long trail a winding
Into the land of my dreams,
Where the nightingales are singing
And a white moon beams.
There’s a long, long night of waiting
Until my dreams all come true;
Till the day when I’ll be going down
That long, long trail with you…♫

Lyrics by Stoddard King, Music by Zo Elliott, “There’s a Long, Long Trail” (WWI song).

This is a co-operative Canadian weblog on things legal. I thought that, as a Canadian who is observing firsthand an interesting event taking place here in Vancouver, I would take a moment and blog about . . . [more]

The 140 character limit on Twitter may be a constraint for some, but it lets others go retro.

On February 20, an antique Commodore VIC-20 (circa 1981) at the Personal Computer Museum in Brantford, Ontario was used to send a tweet. There was a CBC report on YouTube the day before, and the event itself was recorded for posterity here.

The program had to be loaded into memory from a cassette tape. Talk about constraints! . . . [more]

It’s a big freebie today, a big filmic freebie: HotDocs, the great Canadian documentary film festival, has opened its online library to us all. I count 171 movies for you to choose from, some as short as 6 minutes, others a full hour-and-a-half.

The basic site lets you browse the films sorted by title or by year (1951-2009). And there’s an alternative version of the site done in Flash that lets you filter by subject, time, date and language, or a combination of these facets. As well on the Flash site you can create your own playlists.

What do . . . [more]

London may still be for the moment the “libel tourism” capital of the world for affronted folk, but Paris has its strong points, too, if the case of Professor Joseph H. H. Weiler is anything to go by. A professor of law at NYU and the editor-in-chief of the European Journal of International Law, Professor Weiler was summoned to appear in French criminal court to defend himself against a complaint of criminal libel lodged by Dr. Karin N. Calvo-Goller, a senior lecturer at the Academic Center of Law & Business in Israel. The basis for her complaint? Professor Weiler . . . [more]

These days, it’s a given that within its collection of web properties, a law firm must have its own website. Every year, the legal industry spends a pretty penny hiring consultants, designers and copywriters to produce a website that will serve as the firm’s online headquarters. 

Much attention is given (at least we hope it is…) to the aesthetics: colour and font choices, graphical images, photos, etc. And if the firm is smart, the actual content of the website is given just as much consideration. But what about the site’s most basic, fundamental element: the domain name? How much thought . . . [more]