I’m current reading (and loving) the book “What if?” by Randall Monroe of xkcd fame. The subtitle tells you what the book is about: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions. As with xkcd itself, the beauty of the book is the depth of thought and extrapolation beyond the facile that goes in to answering such questions as “what would happen if everybody on earth jumped at the same time” or “what would happen if a baseball pitcher threw the ball at 9/10 the speed of light”? I’m inspired in this column to pose my own “what . . . [more]

Here are excerpts from the most recent tips on SlawTips, the site that each week offers up useful advice, short and to the point, on technology, research and practice.

Technology

Hootsuite Power User Tip: Create Templates for Regular Message
Dan Pinnington

Most of you will say that typing 140 characters isn’t a big deal. But typing the same thing over and over again can be taxing, even if it is only 140 characters. And why type things unnecessarily if you can avoid doing so? Hootsuite has a really neat feature that lets you save templates of tweets that you . . . [more]

Paul Lippe and Daniel Martin Katz offer “10 predictions about how IBM’s Watson will impact the legal profession.”

They note in part:

“Many imagine Watson might displace lawyers for legal reasoning. We believe that systems like Watson are very unlikely to displace the reasoning processes of lawyers. But it’s equally true Watson may illuminate how rare it is that lawyers have to solve “bespoke” reasoning problems, and how common it is to apply “proven” approaches in slightly different contexts. But Watson doesn’t have to displace legal reasoning to have an impact.”

Which made me think of . . . [more]

Each Monday we present brief excerpts of recent posts from five of Canada’s award­-winning legal blogs chosen at random* from sixty recent Clawbie winners. In this way we hope to promote their work, with their permission, to as wide an audience as possible.

This week the randomly selected blogs are 1. Susan on the Soapbox  2. Employment & Human Rights Law in Canada 3. First Reference Talks  4. Canadian Securities Law  5. Clicklaw Blog

Susan on the Soapbox
194 ABCs and Why They Matter

The other day on the campaign trail I met a Bearded Dragon. He was curled up . . . [more]

Following the European Court of Justice decision earlier this year in Google Spain v AEPD and Mario Costeja González, Google has had a flood of requests to have webpages deleted from their index. More than a third of these requests, or over 60,000 links, come from the U.K.

Google released data today demonstrating where the requests originate from:

To date, Google has evaluated nearly 500,000 links for removal. More than half of all urls reviewed by Google are removed, meaning that there are still many others that they do not.

This data also reveals that the vast majority of . . . [more]

Summaries of selected recent cases are provided each week to Slaw by Maritime Law Book. Every Sunday we present a precis of the latest summaries, a fuller version of which can be found on MLB-Slaw Selected Case Summaries at cases.slaw.ca.

This week’s summaries concern:
Citizenship / Limitations of actions / Civil Rights / Banks and Banking / Consumer Law / Creditors and Debtors

Jia v. Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration) 2014 FC 596
Administrative Law – Aliens – Civil Rights – Constitutional Law – Courts
Summary: In 2014, individuals who sought to immigrate to Canada in the . . . [more]

Every week we present the summary of a decision handed down by a Québec court provided to us by SOQUIJ and considered to be of interest to our readers throughout Canada. SOQUIJ is attached to the Québec Department of Justice and collects, analyzes, enriches, and disseminates legal information in Québec.

ENVIRONNEMENT : Oléoduc Énergie Est ltée et TransCanada Pipelines ltée devront suspendre les travaux géotechniques préliminaires nécessaires à la construction d’un terminal maritime et d’un parc de réservoirs de stockage jusqu’au 15 octobre 2014.

Intitulé : Centre québécois du droit de l’environnement c. Oléoduc Énergie Est ltée, 2014 QCCS 4398 . . . [more]

On one Sunday each month we bring you a summary from Supreme Advocacy LLP of recent decisions at the Supreme Court of Canada. Supreme Advocacy LLP offers a weekly electronic newsletter, SupremeAdvocacyLett@r, to which you may subscribe.

Summary of all appeals and leaves to appeal granted (so you know what the S.C.C. will soon be dealing with)(Sept. 12 – Oct. 8, 2014 inclusive).

Appeals

Class Actions in Québec: Credit Card Conversion Charges
Bank of Montreal v. Marcotte, 2014 SCC 55 (35009)
Québec’s Consumer Protection Act applies to credit card issuers re conversion charges on purchases made in foreign . . . [more]

Today, justice was denied to Zahra Kazemi and her family. After an eight year struggle, the Supreme Court of Canada released the decision many of us feared: Iran and its functionaries are immune from the civil jurisdiction of the Canadian courts for having arrested, tortured and murdered Ms. Kazemi, a Canadian journalist.

There will be time to pick apart the decision over the coming months, and years. Right now, though, I can’t do much more than shake with frustration and grief. In my 2009 comment on this case, when it was still pending before the Quebec Superior Court, I . . . [more]

Are you ready to bring change to the legal profession? LAWPRO (the Ontario malpractice insurer) is looking for a lawyer who is passionate about helping Ontario lawyers and paralegals avoid malpractice claims and succeed in the practice of law. This is a high profile opportunity for a dynamic individual who will become the public face and engine behind the practicePRO program, our internationally recognized risk management and claims prevention initiative. See a more detailed list of responsibilities and requirements here. . . . [more]

Remember school physics and the whole business of learning the difference between mass and weight? Weight is what you gain as you get older and what the Beatles were singing about; mass is, well, a much heavier concept by far, given that it remains constant no matter where you are — here, on the moon, or in deep space.

And constancy is the thing. At least it is if you’re to swap measurements with others or carry measurements over time. Think only of the Chancellor’s foot, as John Selden did four hundred years ago:

. . . what

This July, the Centre d’accès à l’information juridique (CAIJ), funded the addition of 546 Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) decisions to CanLII’s databases. With this addition every SCC decisions originating from Quebec are now available on CanLII (CAIJ’s press release). This effort constitutes one more step in assembling a collection of SCC decisions freely accessible to the public. These decisions are accessible through CanLII, but also through the Judgments of the Supreme Court of Canada website published by Lexum.

The long story of assembling the public collection of SCC decisions

Even though not yet finished, the project to build . . . [more]