In a report released this week, a Royal Society of Canada Expert Panel proposes that assisted suicide and voluntary euthanasia should be decriminalized for competent individuals who make a free and informed decision that their life is no longer worth living.

The panel concludes:

1. That there is a moral right, grounded in autonomy, for competent and informed individuals who have decided after careful consideration of the relevant facts, that their continuing life is not worth living, to non-interference with requests for assistance with suicide or voluntary euthanasia.
2. That none of the grounds for denying individuals the enjoyment of their moral

. . . [more]

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

1. Comment Watch:

In the last week there were 56 comments. You might be particularly interested in these:

• the 15 comments on Yosie Saint-Cyr’s post “Should the Government Make Remembrance Day a Public (Statutory) Holiday?”, which surface concerns about militarization and whether the point is to have a holiday.
• the extended exchange between David Cheifetz and guest blogger Erik Magraken on his post, “Tort Reform For The Better: Adding Liquidity to Dry Judgements.”
• the debate following Gabriel Granatstein’s post, “Mandatory Union Awareness Training at Apple”

You can subscribe . . . [more]

On November 8, 2011, the High Court of England and Wales ruled that a Catholic priest qualified as an employee of his diocese, thus exposing the diocese to vicarious liability for clergy sex abuse.

On ReadWriteWeb there’s an interesting map of the metadata that accompanies every one of your 140 character messages on Twitter, which I’ve reproduced below. (The map is the work of Raffi Krikorian. Click on the image to enlarge it.) There’s nothing terribly shocking here, perhaps: much of this metadata can be learned from visiting the Twitter page of the person sending the message. Even so, it’s sensible for those of us who are privacy conscious to be reminded from time to time that what seems to us to be a very minimal exposure to the unblinking glare of the . . . [more]

It could be argued that from the time that students first enter law school they are being trained as de facto risk managers. Students are typically asked in their exams to “spot the issue” and spend hours learning the various legal pitfalls (ie: risks) that may face future clients. In practice lawyers continue to play the role of risk managers as they are called upon to manage and minimize the risks that clients face in their daily business operations. Despite this considerable grounding in working with risk and counseling clients on methods to minimize and avoid risk, seemingly very few . . . [more]

The Trial Lawyers Association of British Columbia is coordinating a withdrawal of legal aid duty counsel services in support of the campaign to restore Legal Aid funding in the Province of British Columbia.

We’ve talked a bit before on Slaw about Matthew Butterick’s great book, Typography for Lawyers, copies of which should be found wherever lawyers’ thoughts are committed to print (digital or otherwise). Now Butterick’s created Equity, a typeface specifically for lawyers. He says, in an article in Co. Design, that he designed Equity:

to be every bit as space-efficient as TNR [Times New Roman], but eminently more readable—and a tad sexy. “I wanted Equity to be like a navy-blue Armani suit: a classic updated with contemporary virtues.”

The typeface includes 24 fonts—a face is a design and a . . . [more]

I am attending the Dig2011 conference today. Several hundred people will be at the London Convention Centre today and tomorrow to hear about topics in 2 different streams – the digital game industry, and the web industry. (Harrison Pensa is a sponsor.)

The second day includes a mini-MBA for budding game development companies, and a high school stream with panels on the path and options leading to a successful game development career.

There are good employment opportunities in this sector. Companies in the game and software development business are having difficulty finding qualified employees. But just because one likes to . . . [more]

Most law firms have a history of using Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF) to distribute their brochures, papers and longer written pieces. That practice matches what web usability experts have long advised: “PDF is great for distributing documents that need to be printed,” but not much more than that. The well-traveled rule is that if a document contains more than five pages of text (hint: that excludes lawyer profiles), then PDF format is worth considering.

Now, let’s throw a wrench into this. As we approach the end of 2011, many firms and their their clients are moving toward paperless . . . [more]

A question at a LESA seminar I was involved with brought the thought of republishing to mind. An attendee at the seminar asked if articles posted to SSRN as prepublications to a peer reviewed journal release were altered or whether they could be the same text as what the journal published. My answer off the cuff was that I had a sense that the articles could be edited after posting to SSRN and before publication, but I confess that I have no proof of this.

The republishing that I am thinking of is not the actions the SCC contempated in . . . [more]

This morning I came across a U.K.-based online quiz setting out various scenarios. Titled “Are you an accidental outlaw”, there are 9 questions relating to: twitter, facebook, uploading, music, blogging, online discussions and selling content. After you complete each answer, you click through to your score, with an explanation/advice on the current law and top tips. You may want to ask your fellow employees to take the quiz too. Take the quiz. . . . [more]

Yesterday police cleared out the protests in New York for Occupy Wall Street. The same day, the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) received a court injunction allowing the protesters to return. A copy of the injunction can be found here.

Coincidentally I was on The Agenda with Steve Paikin last night talking about whether we should be evicting protesters from our parks. You can see the episode here.

A press release from the NLG New York City Chapter is available here. . . . [more]