Decades ago when I was looking for legal information on gays in the military worldwide, resources were scarce. Those gopher, pre-web days are gone and now researchers can find a wide variety of resources on the global legal status of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex (LGBTQI) people. So, let’s check to see how these resources cover military law related to LGBTQI persons around the globe.

The newest resource is the International Commission of Jurists’ Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity, and Justice: A Comparative Law Casebook (September 2011). It includes a foreword by the Hon. Michael Kirby, former President of . . . [more]

The Supreme Court’s decision in Alberta (Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development) v. Cunningham has left me scratching my head a bit. It overturned an Alberta Court of Appeal decision that seemed quite sensible to me. (One of the things that got me thinking about “double dipping” — since it was one of the respondents’ arguments.)

The case arose because the Cunninghams, long-time residents of an Alberta Métis settlement, were removed from the settlement membership list after they registered as Indians. The Cunninghams had sought to be registered under the amended Indian Act in order to get access to . . . [more]

The push towards the importance of work-life balance began during orientation week of my first year at law-school. Work-life balance (or study-life balance as it was back then) was emphasized as integral to surviving law school, and pursuing a healthy successful career. I recall one professor recommending that students should treat law school like a “9 to 5 job”. He suggested that students should spend the mornings and afternoons tackling classes and readings, so that they could use their evenings to unwind, socialize and pursue their favourite hobbies. I took my professors advice, recognizing that there were days that I . . . [more]

Cloud computing is often portrayed as an online-only world that enables a high degree of collaboration for lawyers. Here’s a reality check. That is not how many, perhaps most, lawyers practice and that perspective can fog some of the possibilities of blending your office technology with cloud-based systems. While software-as-a-service (SaaS) is a significant offering in the cloud world, with some strong companies dedicated to providing legal practice management applications, there are a number of other opportunities that require less dramatic changes to your practice.

One of the significant benefits to cloud computing is that it enables an as well . . . [more]

It’s funny how you can work in a field for a good number of years and completely miss an extremely pertinent term for that field. Then, suddenly it strikes you as particularly apt, and leaves you wondering how you had missed it. I have been working on questions of open access to research and scholarship for a little more than a decade, and last week I ran into intellectual philanthropy in a 2011 book by Taylor Walsh entitled Unlocking the Gates: How and Why Leading Universities Are Opening Up Access to Their Courses. Intellectual philanthropy struck me as . . . [more]

For many lawyers, their workdays could best be described as chaotic, out of control or constant crisis management. They arrive at the office with no clear plan about how they are going to spend the day but just let the day unfold responding to each email or phone call as it appears. While their day may be productive and billable as this is all work needing attention, the feeling that all they are doing is putting out fires can be very frustrating.

Over the long term this type of crisis management means that matters requiring blocks of time do not . . . [more]

Recently Apple released their iPhone 4S and regardless of how excited you might be about the new camera or the new processor the reality is that the feature everybody is talking about (and to) is “Siri” the voice-enabled “personal assistant”.

You can ask Siri to find the nearest coffee shop, to wake you up at a particular time, to tell you what the weather is expected to be, to call or send a message to a contact in your address book…even to look up random facts for you.

One of the most intriguing things about Siri is that you can . . . [more]

If you have “friended” a reporter on Facebook you could potentially see one of your “private” photos published in a mass media publication. It happened to my client.

A recent media relations campaign for one of my law firm clients revealed a new risk with “friending” reporters. One of the media releases was accompanied with a photo of a partner standing with a high profile public person. It seems the reporter didn’t want to only run the sanitized, pre-vetted photo provided by a publicist and decided to hunt for more interesting photos.

By good fortune, or bad, this reporter happened . . . [more]

[ français / English ]

Le locuteur de plusieurs langues peut généralement comprendre la complexité du travail de traduction. Il sait qu’un bon traducteur ne va jamais traduire mot à mot une phrase d’une langue à l’autre. Il faut plutôt refaire la phrase selon la structure grammaticale de la langue de traduction, les sens différents d’un mot dans cette langue ou les expressions idiomatiques propres. Sans oublier que parfois, la phrase originale contient des référents culturels qui n’auraient pas de sens dans l’autre langue.

Lorsqu’on fait de la vulgarisation et de l’information juridique, c’est encore plus complexe. Souvent, afin de . . . [more]

From my earliest days as a professional I have taught about how best to carry out legal research. Over the years I have instructed high school students, undergraduates, prisoners, graduate students, paralegals, librarians and many, many law students. Something not quite rational drove my interest. Many times I have paraphrased the lines spoken by John Belushi in the classic movie The Blues Brothers, telling people that I was on a mission from God to teach legal research. I have written books, made cassette tapes, video tapes and DVDs about legal research. If this almost obsessive interest had not been . . . [more]

Canada’s electronic commerce legislation in Canada tells us how to create an electronic document that will satisfy a legal requirement that the information must be in writing. Most such legislation also tells us that a legal requirement that a document be signed is satisfied by an electronic signature. In the common law provinces and the territories, however, it stops short of telling us how to create a sealed document.

This article addresses that shortcoming, if it is one. It will restrict itself to seals on transactional documents. Seals by public authorities will be the subject of a future column. . . . [more]

When I first began working with First Nations political organizations, a childhood friend who had become a rising star in the Ottawa public service told me, “Indian Affairs (DIAND) is the funny farm of the civil service.” Sadly, in the several decades since that conversation very little has changed. On the contrary the very qualities that won DIAND that award have, more recently, made Aboriginal land claims process, and particularly “specific claims” the Alice in Wonderland (AIW) of the Canadian Judicial System. It is this dubious quality, and particularly its significance for the judicial system that I want to share . . . [more]