There was an amusing Federal Court of Canada decision last week covered today by The Star. In Mackay v. Canada (Attorney General), Justice Harrington ruled that a thesaurus is an educational textbook or supply not subject to the $1,500 limit on personal property for inmates.

Here are the best parts:

[1] “Don’t make a federal case out of it!” means “don’t make a mountain out of a molehill” or don’t make a “big deal” of a small matter.

…

[20] According to Lewis Caroll, “[w]hen I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it

. . . [more]

I usually don’t pay attention to when Paris Hilton gets arrested.

Last Friday she was charged with a felony drug possession for 0.8 grams of cocaine when pulled over while her boyfried Cy Waits was driving. The Las Vegas Law Review Journal claims that Waits’ attorney Richard Schonfeld is challenging the legality of the stop.

Of course she claimed the drugs wasn’t hers, nor was the purse in which it was found, even though she acknowledged ownership of her asthma medication, credit cards and $1,300 in cash also found inside the purse. According to Hilton, she was carrying the bag . . . [more]

The Open Net Initiative has new internet censorship maps up identifying which popular social media sites are blocked and partially censored around the world. I did not know, for instance, That Mexico censors Flickr and Youtube.

This complements their more general map, which tracks a number of broad categories of censorship.

About the ONI:

The OpenNet Initiative is a collaborative partnership of three institutions: the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto; the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University; and the SecDev Group (Ottawa).

Our aim is to investigate, expose and

. . . [more]

I spent most of this week in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories. Yellowknife is a beautiful city and I really enjoyed spending time with all the people there.

I learned some things that might be useful to Slaw readers who practice in smaller centres. Most of these things are perfectly logical.

Patience is a virtue.
In a smaller centre there are probably only a few people who can do things like repair network cabling. This is not a problem that can be solved by anything except patience. Just accept reality and try not to get grumpy.

Be prepared.
Assuming that technology will . . . [more]

What goes “ninu ni ni no ni no“?

Give up?

Answer: a siren in Catalan. Yup, that’s the noise that a cop car makes in certain parts of Spain. Same car, though, goes “pin pon,” if it’s in France and “wang wang wang” if it’s hurrying through the Philippines. This is onomatopoeia, folks, which lovely long Greek word means the making of words from sounds.

It’s always fascinated me that using the same aural apparatus folks can come up with such different-seeming words for the same aural stimulus. The Wikipedia article on Cross-linguistic onomatopoeias . . . [more]

In honour of the McGill Guide 7th ed I’ve decided to write this entire post without any periods For the sake of simplification I have; however, retained commas, hyphens, semi-colons and capitalization at the beginning of sentences for the sake of clarity, at least until the 8th ed is published (I will admit, though, that I had to retain the periods in my links or they would not work; I’m unsure if that can be used as metaphor) As many are aware Nova Scotia and the Maritime Provinces have a sudden and acute interest in canceled TV sitcoms this weekend . . . [more]

I love a good sports analogy, so I was thrilled to see Frank Houdek’s article in the July 2010 issue of the AALL Spectrum, “Introducing the AALL Hall of Fame.” Ooh, I thought, what would be the law librarian equivalent of the National Baseball Hall of Fame’s 300 wins, 500 home runs, 3,000 hits, and similar measurable longevity and career athletic achievement stats? And did any of my foreign, comparative, and international law (FCIL) librarian colleagues make the AALL Hall of Fame?

For the AALL Hall of Fame, “a nominee…must be or have been a member . . . [more]

We’re used to thinking about search engine optimization (SEO) as a tool for law firms’ general web presence. But a growing opportunity, still under many firms’ radar, lies with a slightly different approach: practice group SEO, tailoring SEO tactics for specific practice areas within the firm. In many respects, practice focused SEO has the potential to be substantially more effective than the firm’s larger SEO strategy, which is often (necessarily) broad and less aligned with the services provided.

Let’s look at an example of how practice groups typically use search engines to improve business development. A patent law practice group, . . . [more]

As of yesterday, foreign lawyers seeking admission to the English and Welsh bar as solicitors via “a shorter alternative route to qualification” must meet the requirements of the new Qualified Lawyers Transfer Scheme Regulations 2010. One feature of these is the identification of certain jurisdictions as “recognised”; only lawyers from these jurisdictions may take the shorter route to qualification.

Curiously, as of September 1, no Canadian jurisdiction is on the list of recognised jurisdictions, which contains Namibia, Turkey, Israel, and dozens of others. Neither, I should add, is any US state other than California.

According to Legally India . . . [more]

On Tuesday, August 31, 2010, the Canadian Press reported that a Montreal man filed a motion for leave to bring a class action suit against the Community of the Clerics of St. Viateur in Montreal and the Raymond-Dewar Institute (also known as the Institute for the Deaf and Dumb) and its priests. Serge D’arcy claims to have been a victim of abuse by pedophile priests while attending the institute between 1967 and 1972.

The World Treaty Index began life in 1974 and has been in more or less continuous development since that time, as the output of the database moved from print to various electronic formats. Now it’s managed by researchers from the University of Michigan who have given it a new web interface. (See also the explanatory article on Computational Legal Studies.)

The WTI contains only metadata, as it were, about the treaties, and not the texts themselves, which likely can be found in other online databases, such as the United Nations Treaty Collection. Even so, the database is large . . . [more]

Over the past couple of years, I have noticed that organizations engaging in outsourcing activities are increasingly willing to rely on service providers’ standard service descriptions. The main driver of this trend appears to be tight budgets. At a time of economic uncertainty, there is less capacity for rigorous review of a service provider’s standard service descriptions and service levels. Lacking internal resources, customers are increasingly relying on service providers’ expertise to fill in the gaps. A second factor may be a form of complacency. As customers accumulate a history of positive experiences with successful outsourcings, they may become less . . . [more]