The first Friday of February is a tradition at Dalhousie University which I’ve mentioned previously here at Slaw. The first Friday in February is Munro Day, a Dalhousie holiday in honour of the benefactor who rescued the university from a precarious financial position in 1879. This time there is a short video to go along with the Munro Day link celebrating Dalhousie’s rich history. In the spirit of George Munro, last fall Seymour Schulich made a transformative donation to the Law School at Dalhousie University which has since been renamed the Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie University. . . . [more]

I believe that the oldest use of media other than print to teach legal research was a videotape with voice-over by Stephen Borins back in the academic year, 1970-1971 in which he ran through a legal research problem which touched on Priestman v. Colangelo and the liability of police officers. It stressed the reliability of the Canadian Encyclopedic Digest and touched briefly on Butterworths Ontario Digest and the Canadian Abridgement.

The tape required a technician from York’s AV division to run it, and was very much talking head with some close-ups of book pages. It might be in a dusty . . . [more]

Richard Susskind of the Times Online has a piece this week on how the College of Law‘s Legal Practice Course is delivered with video, slides, and audio – which can all be paused and started at a student’s leisure in their own home.

He also mentions the online initiatives at the BPP Law School and the University of Strathclyde. The latter actually has students role-playing as solicitors dealing with a real problem in a virtual law firm.

Susskind closes saying,

Sceptics protest. They say that a law lecture should be a communal event at which students are professionally

From Volume III, Issue II of Amicus Curiae, Western Law’s Student Paper

Canada was a different place before Trudeaumania swept the nation, and the man we know as Ivan Rand, founding Dean of this law school and former Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, was a product of his times. It would be easy to dismiss Dean Rand as an intolerant bigot, but as William Kaplan explained to an audience at Western Law on Nov. 11, [2009,] Rand was complicated character.

“Canadian judicial biography has been, with a few exceptions, mostly uncritical and largely celebratory, written by . . . [more]

For many years now my firm, Adler Bytensky Prutschi, has enjoyed the opportunity to host a student placement for Osgoode Hall Law School’s Criminal Intensive Program (CIP). This week, for the first time in the history of our involvement with the program, we were informed that “due to low enrolment in the course this year” a student would not be assigned to us.

While I am only hypothesizing, I fear that this storied program’s current enrolment woes are tied directly to the continuing erosion of our legal aid system. Barely a decade ago when I was a student in . . . [more]

This may seem like a Friday Fillip, but it’s such an interesting idea that I thought Slaw readers might be interested.

Today, Radio 4 officially launched a major new series ‘A History of the World in 100 Objects’, written and presented by the Director of the British Museum, Neil Macgregor. In brief segments over the next year, the history of mankind will be discussed by reference to a variety of objects. . . . [more]

Curmudgeon time.

An article with the headline captions:

Driven to Distraction
Forget Gum. Walking and Using Phone Is Risky.

appears in today’s online and print New York Times.

The note at the bottom of the online article is: ” A version of this article appeared in print on January 17, 2010, on page A1 of the New York edition.”

The point of the piece is that walking while distracted by reading or using the keyboard or touchscreen may be distracting.

As Homer (Simpson, that is: the other is currently unavailable for comment, at least to me) might say: “D’oh”!

Would . . . [more]

I’ve noticed that lawyers tend to be second wave adopters of technology. Not quite on the cutting edge, but once that edge blurs into the maintstream most (young? progressive? keen? geeky?) lawyers are there. There are dozens of examples, from e-mail to social media. Lawyers, law firms and legal education are all there. But one thing I’ve noticed is that the massive movement to video seems to have left lawyers behind (or, more likely, lawyers have left it behind).

My eldest kids have videos on YouTube. I’ve picked up an HD camcorder for less than $150. The barriers to entry . . . [more]

Yesterday I happened upon the Legal History Blog, and wanted to share my find. Started in November 2006, this blog has been consistently covering the academic scene in legal history, including the publication of new treatises, for some time. It is a group blog with main contributors Mary L. Dudziak, Judge Edward J. and Ruey L. Guirado Professor of Law, History and Political Science at the University of Southern California Law School, Dan Ernst, Professor of Law, Georgetown University, and Clara Altman, a graduate student at Brandeis University who co-ordinates the Legal History Blog’s accompanying Facebook . . . [more]

In a Nov. blog post, Hein addressed deficiencies in Google’s indexing of their content.

We provided the metadata for and allowed Google Scholar to crawl more than 1 million documents from HeinOnline’s Law Journal Library. … Of these … they opted to only include about 50% of the content in the Google Scholar index.

[…]

While it is hard to pinpoint exactly what Google Scholar’s methodology is for adding documents to their index, we do know that they have left out some key documents from HeinOnline’s Law Journal Library.

Then in Dec., Hein addressed improvements to the indexing . . . [more]

I’m slowly working through all my friends from outside of our community with something to contribute. On this criterion, Jason Lewis – change management consultant, facilitator and improvisational comedy artist – is a great introduction.

Jason and I both ran distance back at Queen’s, and first became close when we roomed for a summer – me teaching windsurfing and Jason doing telesales, and both of us with plenty of time for just shooting the breeze. We spent every night on “storybook porch” with friends, talking goofy stuff but also lots about the skills we both employ in our professional lives . . . [more]

A recent poll in the UK shows that following Switzerland’s minaret ban people in that country would be open to a similar minaret ban as well. In a related stream, France is reconsidering its proposal to ban the burqa completely, instead looking to prevent its use in public areas.

As with most political issues, there is a legal discourse that has occurred on this subject which preceded the controversy. Hafid Ouardidi, a resident of Geneva, has already filed a case at the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in Strasburgh.

The backdrop of xenophobia and misinformation within the European . . . [more]