In an unprecedented move that reflects a climate of judicial concern over the BC Justice Reform initiative, the three Chief Justices of BC’s courts issued a five page statement on judicial independence today. The statement was issued by Chief Justice of BC Lance Finch, Chief Justice Robert Bauman of the Supreme Court of BC and Chief Judge Thomas Crabtree of the Provincial Court of BC. The statement is entitled “Judicial Independence (And What Everyone Should Know About It).” In a previous post, I reviewed the BC Government’s launch of the Justice Reform Initiative which includes a Green Paper on . . . [more]

Here are the three most-consulted English-language cases on CanLII for the week of March 7 – 14.

♨ 1. Bedford v. Canada 2010 ONSC 4264

[1] There has been a long-standing debate in this country and elsewhere about the subject of prostitution. The only consensus that exists is that there is no consensus on the issue. Governments in Canada, as well as internationally, have studied the topic and produced recommendations ranging from creating laws aimed at protecting individuals, families and communities by promulgating tough criminal laws to decriminalizing or legalizing prostitution. Other legal solutions look at the reasons for the

If you have an iPhone 4S and have interacted with the voice control personality “Siri”, then you likely already know about its limited functionality outside the US market. So when the news came out a few days ago about Siri’s improved responses for queries about weather and time, it still left me feeling a bit underwhelmed.

Voice recognition technologies have been around for many many years now. In the legal space, because of lawyer dictation technologies, we know better than most about the slow rates of adoption. For 20+ years, there’s been a small community of lawyers dedicated to . . . [more]

Sarah Glassmeyer, Faculty Services and Outreach Librarian & Assistant Professor of Law, Valparaiso University School of Law, has made available her Legal Research Flowchart, which you see below. Though it’s a process for discovering U.S. law, it’s got a lot to recommend it universally.

You can follow Professor Glassmeyer (“Information liberator. Coffee achiever.”) on Twitter @sglassmeyer.

Click on the image to enlarge it. . . . [more]

I was relating to a BigLaw colleague how I had recently spent a weekend at a CLE event in rural Australia where it was a 53 year tradition. Again I learnt a lot from my audience some of whom had probably attended each year.

A striking fact was that 85% of the 134 attendees were male. This was to be contrasted with a colleagues recent experience where her legal team and their client met with the other side. It was an all female event. She suggested that the reason there are so few female practising lawyers outside large cities was . . . [more]

Statistics Canada released a report today, Legal Aid in Canada: Resource and Caseload Statistics, detailing information from 2010-2011.

The highlights of the report state that the federal government provided $112 million for criminal legal aid during this period, a decrease of 2% when adjusted for inflation, whereas provinces and territories increased their criminal and civil legal aid by 1% to $563 million.

A pdf version of the entire report is available here. . . . [more]

Much has been written on SLAW about the fairly recent 7th edition of the Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation (known as the McGill Guide, red in colour, and published by Carswell), including a lengthy 21 September 2010 post by John Davis that includes links to prior posts.

Although I was initially against the “radical” change to remove periods from most citations, I have since come to prefer the simplicity of removing periods on citations to legal documents over which I have editorial control.

However, the focus of the guide (understandably) is on citation style for your footnotes . . . [more]

QR codes can be useful tools for marketing (including for lawyers) and other uses – but they are a tool that must be used correctly, not a strategy on their own. At a TechAlliance session this morning on QR codes Donnie Claudino of TechAlliance and Jonathan Kochis of Resolution Interactive Media talked about how to use them. 

To put them in context, consider that some extimate that half of all web traffic will be mobile by 2015.

A lot of the bad press QR codes have received are based on poor uses. Examples of QR code fails can be seen . . . [more]

I have long believed, certainly before we spoke so much about “communities”, that if a professional publisher is to achieve its best, by all the relevant measures, it has to engage closely, intimately, regularly and consistently with the key member institutes, associations, societies and representative bodies in the market. In its efforts to reach and understand the members, as well as to build trust with them, to circumvent the membership route is unwise and can be a recipe, to some extent at least, for failure. That said, it is not necessarily an easy route for the publisher . . . [more]

Check out Virginia Decoded. It’s a new presentation of that state’s code aimed at making it easier for ordinary human beings to get access to the laws that govern them. Virginia Decoded is the first state to get to beta in The State Decoded program, a private, not-for-profit venture. The legal material is provided by the state via LexisNexis, which marks it up with SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), enabling the Decoded folks to manipulate it appropriately.

Canadians used to CanLII may be a trifle blasé, or even smug, about this development. It is the case that Americans . . . [more]

In anticipation of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries 2012 Conference, May 6-9 in Toronto, I have been thinking about the word innovation. Rebecca Strange, Librarian Specialist, Office of the Medical Officer of Health, Peel Public Health and I are preparing a session called Innovate. I hope to see Slaw readers at the conference.

A news release from Google offers some innovation inspiration. Google has teamed up with Historypin to launch an interactive online gallery to celebrate The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. Check out the Google Blog post here. Historypin is a not-for-profit archives sharing project. Think Pinterest with . . . [more]

The Canadian government is set to pass back to work legislation for certain categories of Air Canada employees to prevent any major disruption of air travel by a potential labour dispute following difficult and unsuccessful collective bargaining (see here). The Honourable Lisa Raitt, Minister of Labour, introduced a bill to this effect yesterday and it is expected that it will be adopted by tomorrow. The legislation would require that the disputes over working terms and conditions be referred to binding arbitration.

Back to work legislation for Air Canada was also considered back in 2011 (see a Slaw blog posting . . . [more]