My temporary return to teaching has got me using PowerPoint again, now de rigeur in today’s law school classroom, and it’s reminded me of my like-hate relationship with that tool. I’m certain that if anyone with serious presentation chops looked at our academic slides they’d be horrified, because we probably make every mistake in the book. But doing it right two or three times a week for hours at a stretch isn’t easy; it’s the rare bird who can combine personal passion with restrained verbiage on the big screen and get the timing right as well.

I’m sure our readers . . . [more]

A letter has gone out to Canada’s law deans from the Director General of Legal Affairs Bureau of the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT) stating that the Bureau wishes to “enhance Canada’s current engagement with the work of the [International Law] Commission, including its studies and recommendations.” The Bureau would like

to hear of Canadian legal academics who are following the Commission’s work, whether in total or with respect to a specific topic. …We would welcome receiving an email providing us with the name, contact details, and areas of specific interest with respect to the Commission’s work

Larry Lessig’s book “The Future of Ideas” is now free to download under Creative Commons attribution-non-commercial license.

Published in 2001 by Random House, the book addresses IP and the impact on it of the internet. You can read an excerpt here.

Lessig’s other books are also available free under a Creative Commons license:

Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Creativity (Penguin Press, 2004).

Code And Other Laws of Cyberspace, Version 2.0 (Basic Books, 2006).

[via Digital Koans] . . . [more]

Sad news from the Supreme Court today of the death of Gerald Eric Le Dain, law teacher and judge. He was educated at McGill University and the University of Lyon, where he became a Docteur de l’Université in 1950. He practised law with Walker, Martineau, Chauvin, Walker & Allison in Montreal, and taught at McGill University, before becoming dean of Osgoode Hall Law School in 1967.

On a personal note Gerry gave both of the Slaw Simons their first academic jobs.

For Canadians of a certain age, his name will be associated with the Commission of Inquiry into the . . . [more]

Patrick Monahan has been reappointed Dean of Osgoode Hall Law School for another 5 year term, beginning July 2008. York President, Mamdouh Shoukri, announced that the executive committee of the Board of Governors approved the appointment today.

My congratulations to Patrick, who will now have the opportunity to oversee the new building that Osgoode is planning. . . . [more]

Though not as world-famous as the Nobel Prizes, the Ludvig Holberg Prize is now in its fourth year. ((The Ludvig Holberg Memorial fund was established in 2003 by the Norwegian Parliament. The Board of the Fund annually awards the Holberg International Memorial Prize for outstanding scholarly work in the fields of the arts and humanitites, social sciences, law and theology. The prize for 2007 is NOK 4.5 million (approx. € 555,000/$750,000).)) The earliest prizes went to 2004: Julia Kristeva 2005: Jürgen Habermas and 2006: Shmuel Eisenstadt.

This year’s winner is the first legal scholar to be so honoured. No surprise . . . [more]

Today the Victoria Times Colonist is reporting, courtesy of the CanWest wire, that some professors are banning laptops in their classrooms. This is nice for Slaw, because Colin Galinski is quoted extensively, and his Slaw column that touches on the topic is mentioned.

The story is running on page A2, which is pretty impressive. Of course, it seems to be a bit of a slow news day: the headline on page 1 reads “Game over: Lawn bowlers told to leave ‘valuable’ spot” . . . [more]

Few lawyers in Canada – I except the wonderful Milt Zwicker – will remember the name of Kline D. Strong who died at the weekend. But he transformed the practice of law in North America.

Kline Duncan Strong 1927 ~ 2007 Kline was born January 23, 1927, in Driggs, Idaho He tried to impress upon his family that you’ve never really experienced work until you’ve hoed sugar beets. His professional education included a CPA/MBA from Northwestern University, a law degree from the University of Colorado and he was the first person to obtain a Ph.D in law office management. He . . . [more]

The James Lewtas Lecture will be delivered today by David Vaver, a former colleague of mine and now Professor of Intellectual Property & IT Law, University of Oxford on the topic “Chocolate, Copyright, Confusion: Intellectual Property and the Supreme Court of Canada”

You can watch David live at 1pm EST — the link will be present on Osgoode’s home page. Or you can catch the archive, the link to which will be available in due course on Osgoode’s Conferences and Seminars page.

David Vaver is an excellent speaker — clear, insightful and witty — and I’d heartily recommend . . . [more]

That is the question asked in an article published last week in the Legal Times.

It provides an overview of the increasing use of the legal blogosphere by tenured law professors to pursue legal scholarship:

“If you are looking for the future of legal scholarship, chances are that you may find it not in a treatise or the traditional law review but in a different form, profoundly influenced by the blogosphere (…) Who are the bloggers? The uninitiated might think they would be young professors, those who have grown up with the Internet and are comfortable with self-publication in