One of the stories we missed in the lead-up to the holiday season was the announcement that the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University has created the North American Law Degree program. According to the law school website:

ASU’s North American Law Degree will include:

• A comprehensive curriculum in Canadian law
• A three-year program that seeks to fulfill all substantive J.D. bar requirements in common-law Canada and the U.S.
• The ability for third-year students to take the Arizona bar exam in their final semester and focus on the licensure process in Canada immediately after graduation

. . . [more]

As announced moments ago, CanLII is launching a collaboration with BG Communications, a Montreal -based translation agency, in order to ensure that certain important case reports delivered in one of the official languages only are made available in the other language. As CanLII President, Colin Lachance notes:

With over 2000 new decisions posted each week, it is not possible to translate everything. . . . However, the legal community has highlighted a number of decisions that warrant wider availability in the other official language.

The press release goes on to say:

Judgments selected for translation will be identified in

. . . [more]

We wish everyone a happy and peaceful holiday. Slaw takes a bit of a break at this time of year, so posting will be slow and not at all on December 25 and 26 and January 1. Otherwise, the regular Today features and our columns will be published as usual. This is a good occasion to thank all of you on behalf of our bloggers and columnists for reading Slaw. Our entries are our gifts, and to find you like them pleases us greatly.

This is just a brief note to say that I’ve updated the Canadian Case Commentary site, which now contains Supreme Court judgments released by the end of June, 2012, i.e. up to Clements v. Clements. (This comes as close to the present as seems sensible, given that the latest commentary recorded was published merely a week ago.)

I invite those of you who haven’t had a chance to learn of this project to visit the site. You’ll find navigation easy: there’s a killer search function and a hyperlinked table of cases.

Fifteen judgments were added to the database, for . . . [more]

The Sixteenth Annual Canadian Information Technology Law Association (“IT.CAN”) Conference will be held in Montreal on October 29-30.

IT.CAN has 350 members from across the country who are concerned with IT law. The annual conference is the organization’s major event to help attendees stay current in this rapidly developing area of law.

The full conference brochure including registration details is available on the IT.CAN website. If you have any questions about the program, get in touch with Lisa Ptack, IT.CAN Executive Director at lisa.ptack@rogers.com. . . . [more]

Supreme Court of Canada Nominee

The Prime Minister and the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, announced today the name of the government’s nominee for the Supreme Court of Canada, the Honourable Richard Wagner of the Cour d’appel du Québec.

He’s a 55 year old construction law litigator from Montréal who has been on the Cour supérieure du Québec since 2004, and on the cour d’appel since Febuary 2011.

The nominee has agreed to answer questions from an ad hoc parliamentary committee on Thursday.

For Slaw readers two items on his résumé stand out: he was one of . . . [more]

Slawers, take note! The Canadian Forum on Court Technology, a two-day conference held every second year in Canada, is coming to Montreal at the Hyatt Regency on October 24th and 25th with an excellent program, great speakers and a variety of court technology stakeholders in attendance.

If you haven’t done so yet, please mark your calendars; you can also register online! I look forward to meeting you there in person,

Patrick Cormier
CEO CCCT-CCTJ . . . [more]

CanLII has added 1,600 Supreme Court of Canada cases, bringing the total of SCC opinions to 9,000 and taking the scope of the SCC database back to 1907. As the press release (soon to be available on the CanLII blog) says:

As with all Canadian court and tribunal decisions available on CanLII (over 1M and growing at a rate of over 2,000 per week), these decisions are fully integrated and cross-linked to any subsequent case on CanLII in which they are referenced.

This is not yet true with respect to earlier Supreme Court decisions on CanLII, which are . . . [more]

As readers of Slaw will know, we approached Maritime Law Book a little over a year ago with the idea of a collaboration in which MLB would select certain of its case summaries for Slaw to make freely available online. Slaw converts the summary to HTML and places a precis of it online, along with a link to the full summary in PDF on Slaw’s site and a link to the free version on the MLB site of the unedited case report. (The more than 300 such summaries are available here; the criteria by which MLB selects them can . . . [more]

The Canadian Centre for Court Technology and the Association of Canadian Court Administrators are pleased to announce an extension of the Early Bird Registration deadline for the Canadian Forum on Court Technology (“Forum 2012”), which is being held October 24 – 25, 2012 in Montréal, Québec.

The theme for Forum 2012, “Revitalizing Courts with Enhanced Technology and Thought-Provoking Reforms: The Modernization Challenge”, is designed to challenge attendees with leading edge sessions, including Enhancing Access to Justice Using Technology and Going Beyond Technology: Revisiting Fundamental Assumptions About Traditional Litigation. Another highlight of Forum 2012 will be the Canada Showcase – . . . [more]

The Fastcase 50 for 2012 was announced on Thursday, earlier than last year presumably to coincide with AALL 2012, the American Association of Law Libraries conference currently taking place in Boston.

According to the press release, the Fastcase 50 “recognizes the smartest, most courageous innovators, techies, visionaries, and leaders in the law” and were nominated by legal and legal technology industry leaders, law firm managers and other individuals.

From Ed Walters, CEO of Fastcase: “We get to recognize our heroes, the great thinkers, creators, and risk-takers who make this such an interesting time to work in legal tech. . . . [more]

This morning my Toronto colleague Martha Foote was awarded the Thomson Reuters Westlaw Award for Career Achievement, the big award at the Special Libraries Association Legal Division breakfast. The award is designed to recognize a member who has provided significant service to the Division.

Martha is a past chair of the SLA Legal Division and has also served on the executive board of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries. When not serving the profession on a volunteer basis, she currently serves as Board General Manager of LibraryCo, the central management for the Ontario county courthouse library system.

Congratulations, . . . [more]