We learned this morning of the death of Professor Hugh Lawford, a legend in Canadian legal information. He will be mourned by many students who studied with him at Queen’s University Law School, and his passing should be noted by every Canadian lawyer, because Hugh and his colleagues revolutionized how law is practiced. . . . [more]

Another year of interview insanity has come to an end and my firm, Adler Bytensky Prutschi, has happily matched with an outstanding candidate who we have very high hopes for in the 2010-2011 articling year. While this fact on its own is likely of little interest to Slaw readers, the technophile lawyers who follow this blog on a regular basis may be intrigued to hear how twitter – for the first time in our firm’s history – became unwittingly a very central part of our interview process.

Having started a legal twitter feed some months ago (www.twitter.com/prutschi), I . . . [more]

The Legal Resource Centre (LRC) recently launched a new blog: Blogosaurus Lex.

The LRC is the publisher of the magazine LawNow and of the legal information website Access to Justice Network.

It was registered as a charity in the late 1970s and its mandate is “to contribute to, advance and promote the legal knowledge and education of the people of Canada.” It is based in Edmonton, Alberta.

According to the initial post on June 22, 2009, the blog will feature:

• new happenings at the Legal Resource Centre (LRC)
• community engagement with other public legal educators and sharing

Charon QC, the UK’s one-man blogging, podcasting and ‘zine publishing machine, has put a contract text online and made it available for free. Properly Mike Semple Piggot, he has taught contract law over the past 25 years at BPP Law School, an institution that he helped found. His text is, as he says, more of an outline, along with a collection of other resources related to contract law. On the site you’ll find up-to-date contract news; links to appropriate recent case reports are available within the text notes.

Semple plans a similar site dealing with the sale . . . [more]

I have talked in the past about The Law Librarian podcast on Blogtalk Radio, created by Richard Leiter and Brian Striman. They are starting the show back up again with the aim to make it a little more consistent, at least once a month to start.

The next episode will be recorded live this Friday, August 7th at 2:00 pm CT. The discussion will be a recap of the American Association of Law Libraries conference held in Washington, D.C. last week. I’m pleased to be invited in as a guest participant for this month’s show. Rumour has it if things . . . [more]

We’ve blogged in the past about Hugh Lawford and the vision and tenacity that built the Queen’s Law School treaty data processing project into the foundation for one of Canada’s two commercial legal databases.

It’s an accident, of course, that QL was based in Kingston – in the same way that Dayton and Eagan were in the American systems. But that’s where the ideas were.

Kingston was of course where Hugh taught contracts, in between being Lester Pearson’s right hand man in Ottawa.

Today, the Kingston Whig-Standard reported that the remaining QL office in Kingston is to close. Rationalization . . . [more]

As I hope everyone knows, TOROG — the Toronto Opinions Group — kindly allows Slaw to publish some of their memos and precedents on third party opinions. A new document has just been added to the collection: “Limitations Act, 2002 (Ontario) – Proposals for Improving Contract Drafting and Appropriate Opinion Qualification Practice – June, 2009,” which, like the others, is available in PDF.

This relatively lengthy document (18pp.) describes the impact of recent changes to the Ontario Limitations Act on one’s freedom to contract with respect to a limitation period. The document also contains a sample provisions of purchase . . . [more]

Just as Allison Wolf shoots some holes in the myth of work-life balance in her recent Slaw column “The Tyranny of Performance,” the Canadian Bar Association has launched a new Work-Life Balance Resource Centre in the CBA PracticeLink section of their website.

Allison asks us:

What is the quality of our work life? What is the quality of our personal life? When both activities are fulfilling we have an abundance of energy. When one or both are draining we run into health issues and performance challenges.

Instead of work-life balance can we just talk about work-life enjoyment?

The . . . [more]

Law.com provides a description of an interesting development in a case of wrongful dismissal at a Catholic university in the US. Tom Monoghan, the founder and guiding light of the ABA-certified Ave Maria School of Law contends that its professors are “ministerial”, and therefore subject only to canon law. Further, this qualifies the school for an “ecclesiastical abstention” from scrutiny by the courts. There are some good quotes from Deborah Gorden, the lawyer representing the three professors who were fired:

Gordon is aghast at the theory that Catholic law school professors are ministers. “Are you people kidding or what,” Gordon

For a limited time, ABA Publishing is offering a special 20% discount on all ABA titles. Do your shopping before July 24, 2009 as this offer expires on that date. To get this special pricing order online and enter source code PEP9MJPM

The 20% discount applies to all ABA books and you can find a complete listing of them at www.ababooks.org. Non-ABA members get 20% off of list price. ABA Section members get 20% off the special reduced member price of any section they belong to, and 20% off the list price for books from sections they aren’t members . . . [more]

Saturday’s Globe brought the sad news of the death of Heather McArthur, who Slaw readers may have encountered through her career in the Ontario Bar Association and in continuing legal education.

Heather had a strong interest in the use of technology to deliver CLE and was an early and enthusiastic backer of annual legal technology onferences in Toronto.

At the Ontario Bar Association, she had been, at various times, Director of Continuing Legal Education, Director of Technology, and Acting Executive Director.

She was warm, enthusiastic and committed. Our sympathy to her husband Paul Truster, who also has long been involved . . . [more]

If you happen to be in Ottawa on Monday, June 29, you’ll have the opportunity to attend a lecture by Madan B. Lokur, a judge of the Delhi High Court, entitled “The Role of the Indian Supreme Court in Human Development.” The lecture is being presented as part of the India Lectures series of the International Development Research Centre.

If you’re going to be elsewhere on that day, despair not: the IDRC has been putting up the India Lectures as podcasts. So make a note to check in a few weeks later to hear Justice Lokur. . . . [more]