The papers recently carried the news of the death of Paul-André Crépeau, C.C., O.Q., c.r., LL.D., D.h.c., m.s.r.c., who I would argue was the most influential law reformer in Canadian legal history.

From the initial invitation in 1965 from Jean Lesage’s Justice Minister Claude Wagner to take over the Office de Révision du code civil, originally set up during the Duplessis years with Thibaudeau Rinfret and André Nadeau, Crépeau’s vision and his life work was la révision du Code civil, and under his leadership the Office focused on the daunting task of updating the general provisions of a century-old . . . [more]

When you teach at law school, as I have, you become familiar with a variety of reasons as to why students choose to study law—perhaps there’s a history of lawyers in the family; or their parents want them to do something, anything professional; or they want to right wrongs, get that BMW, enter politics, point damning fingers at witnesses… Even with those students who wound up in law school with apparently only a shrug for a reason, some explanation eventually surfaced.

Now there is a novel explanation—at least for a small portion of the student body. Two recent studies have . . . [more]

For the last few months a colleague from our marketing department and I have been attending SMBYEG. This is the 140 character form of Edmonton’s (Edmonton International Airport code being YEG) combined with the abbreviation for Social Media Breakfast. Not everyone who attends has a Twitter handle, but #SM users are certainly in the majority.

Social Media Breakfasts serves two main purposes:

• Face-to-face networking: Bring together marketers, PR pros, students, entrepreneurs, and social media practitioners and enthusiasts of all stripes over breakfast.
  
• Education: Through panel discussions, presentations, case studies, debates, and breakout sessions … teach, share, and learn social

. . . [more]

I just received this information from the CALL webinar committee, and thought the SLAW community would be interested. I work with Rick – he has incredible knowledge of legislation and a wicked sense of humour. Caroline is not unknown to the CALL community – she has spoken at annual conferences before, and has always impressed me with her skill as a speaker and her encyclopedic knowledge.

This is a session not to be missed!

Thursday September 15, 2011
1:00 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. EDT 

Join two legislation experts in the first of a series of webinars that will share tips

. . . [more]

A short while ago the first issue of the UC Irvine Law Review became available via the UC Irvine website. Given the school’s initial growing pains it is welcome to see this first issue. Many SLAW readers may remember the political controversy involving the initial offer, withdrawal of offer, and rehiring of leading US constitutional law scholar (and frequent critic of the Bush administration) Erwin Chemerinsky as the school’s Founding Dean. Dean Chemerinsky addresses the controversy in the journal’s opening article on the school’s founding and his vision for a new law school. Of interest to SLAWers is that . . . [more]

In a bit of tragic irony last week, I finished my post on some of Canada’s constitutional documents and hit the publish button and left Slaw to discover that Dalhousie, and indeed, Canada had suffered a terrible loss with the passing of Professor Peter Aucoin. I’m sure that many Slaw readers are familiar with the name as he was one of, if not the, preeminent scholar on Canadian government and public service; he was a key figure in many Royal Commissions and published books and journal articles of high quality, too numerous to mention here. His scholarship and contributions . . . [more]

One of the saddest chapters of Bill Kaplan’s excellent biography Canadian Maverick – the Life and Times of Ivan C. Rand, is his account of Justice Rand’s post SCC appointment as the founding Dean of the University of Western Ontario’s Law School. Rand didn’t fit, was remote from students, and was ill at ease and isolated. {For further references see Omar’s post and Jamie Cameron’s review.]

A different challenge awaits the former chairman and chief executive officer of McCarthy Tétrault LLP., Iain Scott who will be moving to take over the deanship of Western in September. This . . . [more]

Simon Fraser University's Masters of Arts in Applied Legal Studies has received a 2011 Award of Excellence from the Canadian Association for University Continuing Education. The prestigious award was presented at the CAUCE national conference recently held in Toronto to John Whatley, the CODE program director. Dr. Whately received the award on behalf of SFU’s School of Criminology, Centre for Online and Distance Education (CODE) and, in particular, all the people responsible for the design, implementation and continuing delivery of the program.

My sense is the the inaugural New Law Librarians’ Institute last week in London, Ontario, sponsored by the Canadian Association of Law Libraries/L’Association canadienne des bibliothèques de droit (CALL/ACBD), was very successful.

It was a 5-day event, with sessions on substantive law led by various University of Western Ontario law professors, combined with sessions by various law librarians, including me.

Sessions included, for example, a Thursday morning session by Professor Sam Trosow on property law for law librarians (including a session on copyright law), followed by a session by UWO Law Librarian John Sadler on researching secondary legal literature. There . . . [more]

Nineteen people graduated today in Philadelphia at the annual conference of the Special Library Association (SLA) with a Certificate in Copyright Management (CCM). The graduates included one Canadian, some rights managers in publishing positions, and many librarians in a variety of positions from pharmaceutical and engineering companies to law firms and financial institutions and academic institutions. One thing all had in common was a desire to understand domestic and international copyright issues, Web 2.0 and other digital copyright issues, special library provisions and fair use/dealing, as well as educating others about copyright and licensing. Canadians in the program are required . . . [more]

A few of us here at Slaw have been giving testimonials to our tablet experiences and I am going to follow the trend today, I am very early in my iPad relationship, you could even call me a Pad-awan, if you will. I am currently using the iPad 2 as a test project to try and determine the applicability of the iPad as tool in legal education. In this post I’m going to try to focus on specific apps and why I use them and attempt not to reiterate the specifics of previous posts on this topic. I expect . . . [more]

An unconference is a participatory style gathering where attendees contribute as much to the content of the event, or more, as the organizers. They’re frequently used in the technology and computer industries (i.e. “geeks”) to foster innovation, creativity and collaboration.

Unconferences though are relatively scarce in the legal community, probably due to an aversion of many to unstructured environments subject to constant change and revision. But this is also exactly what makes Law Tech Camp so fascinating.

A number of Toronto-area legal bloggers have decided to spontaneously launch a Bar-Camp style unconference on June 18, 2011 at the University of . . . [more]