♬ Why can’t people just get along
What a world it would be
If we could all just have fun
‘Cause it don’t do nobody right
When it comes down to a fight hey
Why can’t people just get along…♬

Music and Lyrics by David Lee Murphy and Minnie Pearl.

Monday Oct 24th to Friday Oct 28th is Cyberweek 2011. Cyberweek is a conference focusing on the world of Online Dispute Resolution. Since ODR is an online method of resolving disputes, it stands to reason that Cyberweek would be a world-wide online conference!

Cyberweek is hosted by:

• Werner Institute

The CBC Radio Show “Ontario Today” recently covered the auto insurance reforms that went into play one year ago,

One year after changes to auto insurance in this province, who’s better off?

Hear from a doctor who says insurance companies are turning almost everything down; a lawyer who says there is a lot less money for treatment if you’re in a car crash; and an insurance industry spokesperson who says you will be taken care of if you’re hurt.

The changes continue to be highly contentious, with insurers saying they were desperately needed, and many clients and assessment centres saying . . . [more]

While Canada has not exactly had its bottleshock moment, over the last few decades various regions of Canada, including British Columbia, Nova Scotia and Ontario have become notable for their wine producing regions. These producers have developed to such an extent that demand for their products has grown to a point where requests for their wines come from all quarters (undeniably is a good thing) except for when the wine producers have to decline certain requests, which happens on a regular basis because of the Importation of Intoxicating Liqours Act, RSC 1985 c I-3. Specifically section 3(1) of . . . [more]

Hey, you greyheads, remember back in the day? You wrote letters. Or, if you were lazy, you read letters that others wrote to you. Now, for those of you who still have a spring in your step after you go walking, let me elaborate: the national service that now brings flyers and the occasional bill to your door would once upon a time bring you news from friends and relations, a kind of Facebook on feet, if you will. Often these epistolary efforts were longer than emails, done in a personal cursive, and, as a bonus they never needed to . . . [more]

The British Columbia Supreme Court has recently given judgment for Century 21 Real Estate company against a company (affiliated with Rogers Communications) that scraped real estate listing information from the Century 21 sites and repackaged it on its own site: Century 21 v Rogers Communications 2011 BC 1196 .

The court thoroughly reviewed US and Canadian law on the topic and recited a number of factors that might support a finding that a ‘browsewrap’ contract (i.e. one that did not depend on any active assent to its terms, but that operated by mere use of the web site) would be . . . [more]

Librarians often use the rule that 20% of a library’s collection accounts for 80% of its use. However a recent OCLC study found that 80% of the circulation in a university library was driven by just 6% of the collection. Given that law libraries, whether academic, courthouse or private law firm, are constantly under space pressures, does this mean that we should be discarding the other 80-94% of the collection and using the space for something else? (Spoiler: my answer is “no”.)

Usage is not necessarily a good measure of the value of an item. There are items in my . . . [more]

This is a post in a series to appear occasionally, setting out some articles, videos, podcasts and the like that contributors at Slaw are enjoying and that you might find interesting. The articles tend to be longer than blog posts and shorter than books, just right for that stolen half hour on the weekend. It’s also likely that most of them won’t be about law — just right for etc.

Please let us have your recommendations for what we and our readers might like.

The library of the Supreme Court of Canada recently updated its online bibliography about the court. New material from the period 2008-2011 has been added.

The bibliography contains articles, textbooks, earlier bibliographies, rules of practice and statistics about the Court.

Speeches by Justices of the Supreme Court of Canada as well as scholarly articles about the court’s rulings are not included.

[Cross-posted to Library Boy] . . . [more]

Site news for those who read Slaw only via RSS or email

1. Comment Watch:

In the last week there were 36 comments. You might be particularly interested in these:

• 8 informative comments on Connie Crosby’s post on the Person’s Day case, going deeper and deeper into the legal history of that case.
• 5 very thoughtful comments on John O’Sullivan’s post on Quantum Physics and Mediation

You can subscribe to the comments on Slaw either as a separate matter (RSS, email) or as part of a subscription combining posts and comments (RSS, email).

2.

It’s an obvious feature of practice that a lawyer’s professional interest will generally gravitate towards the big, the powerful, and the rich — there’s a business side to lawyering, after all, (though I’m not yet prepared to agree with those who say, reductively, that practice is a business), and, as a long-gone uncle used to opine, “It’s gotta be fed and it don’t eat hay.” That said, it’s good, I think, even for those in big towers and Jimmy Choo shoes, to reflect on small wrongs and rightings from time to time, the matters at the bottom of the justice . . . [more]

When you next visit the website, you’ll see a few changes on Slaw. We’ve spruced up the site a little, mostly around the top banner, and we’ve made the recent new features on Slaw a bit more prominent by giving them menu icons at the very top. TalkLaw/ParLoi, MLB-Slaw Case Summaries, and SlawTips have already been introduced here — indeed, SlawTips is already venerable by web standards and has a healthy following of its own. But Noted on Slaw is brand new.

When Delicious got sold, it broke the right-column feature called Slaw Linkblog, where a number of . . . [more]

There are three ways to approach a skillset such as project management:

1. Have a specific rule to apply for every imaginable situation.
2. Analyze every situation anew, based on what you know.
3. Have a set of core principles that you apply as you recognize situations.

Let me offer an analogy. Let’s say I want to program a computer to play tic-tac-toe. I could do so using each of the three approaches above.

1, By rule: Tic-tac-toe is a simple game. There are only nine possible moves to start the game. For each opening move, there are but 8 possible responses, and . . . [more]