That great Canadian blogger Rob Hyndman has a good piece on the sad news that William Patry is closing down his copyright blog. Patry has two reasons: first, because he can’t get people to treat what he says as personal, as having no connection to his work as Google’s copyright counsel; and second, more unhappy, because the current state of copyright law is truly depressing. Rob notes that Larry Lessig abandoned the field because of a “corruption” of the political process.

Read both entries. . . . [more]

Some time back we posted about Google’s wisdom of the crowds encyclopedia knol, the idea being that it would be useful to have experts write about what they know and authenticate the pieces by attaching their names and info to them. Google now tells us that the experimental phase is over and you, too, can contribute to the store of the world’s knowledge by either writing your own knol or by making suggestions to those of others, suggestions they’re free to accept or not, of course (a process Google has called “moderated collaboration”).

I have to say that thus . . . [more]

How many Canadian law students could identify John Humphrey or explain his significance to the law? I certainly couldn’t when we met at a meeting in 1976, convened by the Ontario Human Rights Commission. He was then seventy, a tweedy academic in bow tie, who had come down from the McGill Law School. Only at a break did a friend lean over and tell me that this academic had held the pen for the drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights . . . [more]

Tonight the Canada Council awards this year’s Killam Prizes – which come with a cheque for $100,000.

The Social Sciences winner is Ottawa’s Constance Backhouse. . . . [more]

“Draft it yourself,” that is, using the wiki set up for that purpose by McGill University’s Centre for Intellectual Property Policy (cipp).

It’s interesting to see the points made by the cipp folks to try to get the wiki to work for such a serious and exacting project:

• Like any wiki, justify your comments, add links, etc.
• Let’s be serious. If we want this to be an alternative piece of legislation, we have to be balanced. (David Lametti, for example, would personally like to see copyright’s term reduced radically and the re-imposition of a registration requirement, but he appreciates that

Occasionally a single appointment can signal everything. Today, Harvard Law School Dean Elena Kagan announced the long-awaited replacement for Harry S. Martin, who has been director of the Harvard law Library ((Which is the most extraordinary law library I’ve ever used, with due apologies to Ruth at the Bodleian and David at the Great Library)) for 27 years. Martin’s contribution deserves a post in its own right for his service as Henry N. Ess III Librarian and Professor of Law at the Law School and his seminars on Art and the Law.

But let’s focus on the new . . . [more]

Dalhousie law prof, Philip Gerard, has an enjoyable piece on The Court today in which he shades his eyes and does a tour d’horizon in search of a replacement for Justice Bastarache.

Herewith an excerpt to whet your appetite:

That leaves Nova Scotia, but it has to be said in all honesty that the province is not bursting with Supreme Court-calibre talent at the moment. Don’t get me wrong: there are lots of highly competent and professional judges sitting on the Nova Scotia bench. But the bar for the Supreme Court is higher than that. If you are looking

Adam Kolber, who teaches law at the University of San Diego School of Law, and who is currently teaching at Princeton University, studies neuroethics. You might well ask. Well, folks have always been trying to mess with our heads one way or another — just ask any of my students — and now there needs to be some greater discussion of ethical standards to hamper, if not to restrain, some of the more enthusiastic and direct neural intruders. And we need to think about how to understand and use what we’re learning about neural functioning.

His blog, the Neuroethics . . . [more]

Back in the 70s, then Professor ((pre Dean and pre President)) Harry Arthurs touted Osgoode Hall as the best law school in the Commonwealth.

I’ve just read an extraordinary newsletter from Oxford which lists such an extraordinary range of academic, comparative and pro-bono activities that I wonder whether any other law school could match it.

Whether this is due to the new (Canadian) Dean of the Faculty Timothy Endicott (whom we have saluted before) or just that for the first time, the whole seems larger than its collegiate parts, but page after page manifests intellectual energy and engagement.

And . . . [more]

Mike Hoeflich, a professor at the University of Kansas School, has just created a blog called The Legal Antiquarian.

As he mentions in his intro post last week, the blog deals with “the various aspects of legal history having to do with the daily life of lawyers and judges, as well as to the sources, manuscript, printed, and otherwise preserved which can be used to help understand how law and the legal profession functioned in the past. Among the subjects I will cover will be the daily lives of lawyers, their practices, their offices, the books they owned and . . . [more]

From the Torys Speaker Series at the University of Ottawa Law and Technology:

Facing up to Facebook
A panel discussion on social media and social networking

Please join the Law & Technology group as Professors Jane Bailey, Jeremy de Beer, Michael Geist, Ian Kerr, and Valerie Steeves discuss legal issues arising from Facebook and related social media technologies.

Date: Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Time: 11:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.
Place: Fauteux Hall, room 351
Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa

Please RSVP to techlaw@uottawa.ca.
Join the Facing up to Facebook event page.

Note about this event . . . [more]

The Women’s Court of Canada launches this week. (See the story in the Ottawa Citizen.) The WCC is a group of women academics and practitioners who combined to rewrite six Supreme Court of Canada decisions to take a full and proper account of women’s equality. The affected decisions are:

• Symes v. Canada, [1993] 4 S.C.R. 695
  deduction — child care expenses — women — taxpayer — income
• Native Women’s Association of Canada v. Canada, [1994] 3 S.C.R. 627 ((The citation is misprinted in the Majury article referred to below.))
  funding — freedom of expression — women —