Osgoode Hall Law School will officially announce today the launch of a new program in intellectual property law and technology, IP Osgoode, aimed at promoting interdisciplinary research and commentary in the field. The website features a student-run blog, IPilogue, and what will clearly be a growing body of resources for those interested in IP.

Professor Pina D’Agostino is the Director of the new program; she is joined by Osgoode Professors Carys Craig, Ikechi Mgbeoji, and IP Osgoode, Assistant Director, Rex Shoyama. An impressive Advisory Board has been assembled, which includes the Honourable Mr. Justice Marshall Rothstein, the Honourable . . . [more]

Today’s important for a couple of reasons. First, because it’s election day here in Canada. Second, because it’s the first global Open Access Day, a day to spread the word about the benefits of open access to online information and knowledge. Law is one of the areas where free and open access to data is of the highest importance to the health of a society, and fortunately for us here in Canada we have CanLII, which steadily improves in coverage and utility. Now we need law faculties to decide to make their scholarship freely available to all, in . . . [more]

Opportunities for learning and professional development are quickly expanding as it becomes easier for everyone to develop and add their own content to the Internet.

Earlier this week Mitch Joel, President of marketing firm Twist Image, put together Pixelated, a free full-day online conference with some of the world’s leading speakers on the topic of how business is changing including Sir Ken Robinson, Seth Godin, Chris Anderson, Avinash Kaushik, Chris Brogan and many more. What is incredible is it is all freely available video from around the web, and he has posted it to his blog.

His . . . [more]

Robert Ambrogi has a post over on Legal Blog Watch about a conference at Seattle University School of Law on the digital future of legal casebooks. It seems that the situation in the U.S. is no different from that here: publishers and academics are unclear about what they want in a casebook, though both (some academics, certainly) perceive that electronic casebooks are the way to go.

One upshot appears to be that CALI and Gene Koo will organize a group to build and use an e-casebook on cyberlaw. There is, of course, a certain “rightness” about a course in . . . [more]

The chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, John Roberts, warned law students in a speech last Thursday about relying too unthinkingly on internet sources for legal research. Delivering Drake University‘s Dwight D. Opperman Lecture, he pointed to what he described as the growing practice of using simple word searches to uncover precedents, when the cases recovered in this manner may have little doctrinal connection to the issues at hand. Thinking “outside the box” is fine, he said, but “…You cannot think effectively outside the box if you don’t know where the box is.” And that requires the . . . [more]

Some Slaw-ers already know that I am currently on sabbatical from my position at the university and have returned to school for a year. It has been an adjustment to go from doing to learning but has been enjoyable so far. One thing that I anticipated, which is not quite like I thought it was, is the use of laptops by students. Being around a law school for the last several years I have observed that the first thing to happen in most law school classes is that anywhere from 75-90% ((The numbers I cite in this post are completely . . . [more]

The Canarie/Orion summit will be held in Toronto in early November. It’s bringing together a truly impressive variety of speakers and appeals to infogeeks of all kinds. The Cloud Computing session grabbed my attention, as does the session on how Web 2.0 is changing teaching and learning. I see that Nora Young, from CBC’s Spark, is also on the agenda.

If anyone does attend this, I’d be really interested in a report back to the group…please? . . . [more]

The Canadian Bar Assocation’s Practice Link has a substantial and practical article by Luigi Benetton, “How to Secure Your Laptop Before Crossing the Border.” Benetton sets out ten steps you can and should take if you’re planning to travel to the U.S. with a laptop used in your practice:

1. Be Anonymous [… which is not a sure thing, hence… ]
2. Travel with a “Bare” Computer
3. Turn Off Your Computer, Early
4. Back Up Your Data
5. Use a Different User Account to Hold Sensitive Information
6. Partition and Encrypt Your Entire Hard Drive
7. Protect FireWire Ports
8. Store Data on Small Devices

If you’re a lawyer and you’re reading this, you’re unusual. If, by chance, you’re reading this on an RSS feed reader, you’re extraordinary. The 2008 ABA Legal Technology Survey Report is out, with results that confirm most folks’ general impressions:

[W]ebsites and e-mail newsletters are still the digital way that most at­torneys stay current with the news. A small minority reports reading blogs; but actually creating a blog is something the geeky lawyer down the hall—or, more likely, across town—is into.

RSS feeds—a technology that displays headlines from many sites on a single webpage, which greatly speeds the consumption of

Alan M. Dershowitz, that prolific (some would say prolix) law prof, publicity hound and sometime proponent of torture, has published his third book this year: Is There A Right To Remain Silent? Coercive Interrogation and the Fifth Amendment After 9/11. It gets a good review in the New York Times from Johnathon Mahler, who finds the book for the mostpart accessible by lay readers and, where it becomes dense with constitutional law, worth pushing ahead even so.

The description on the Oxford University Press page says this of the book:

…Dershowitz puts forward a bold reinterpretation of the

The Sedona Conference Institute is offering the 1st Annual Sedona Canada Program on Getting Ahead of the e-Discovery Curve, to be held at the Boulevard Club in Toronto on October 23 – 24.

This information-packed Conference will include panels focused on (1) The Sedona Canada Principles; (2) Management of Electronic Information; (3) Cost-Shifting and Sanctions – Judicial Advice; (4) Legal Holds: The Trigger and the Process; (5) Multi-Party, Multi-Jurisdictional, Class Actions & Other Complications; and (6) Cooperation with Opposing Counsel on eDiscovery
Issues.

For a complete agenda, a run-down on the faculty, and a registration form, visit the Program . . . [more]

An article about Avner Levin’s new study about young people and technology ran in itWorldCanada yesterday.

The article, and presumably Levin’s research, considers ways that today’s employers can keep employees happy by resisting the urge to ban instant messaging within the office. I understand the need to ensure that employees don’t feel that walking through the office doors equates to a step back in time; however, I remain unsure about the final object here. Are we simply trying to keep the employees happy as they IM with friends and utilize social networking tools at work, or is there a greater, . . . [more]