From the land of “Herr Doktor Doktor” via Language Log:

…Ian Thomas Baldwin, who holds a PhD from Cornell, and now serves as researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena… [had] been accused of “title abuse” by the German police under a little-known Nazi-era law that specifies that only people who hold PhDs or medical degrees from German universities are permitted to be called “Dr.” [But] persons with a PhD from an accredited US institution can now use Dr. in Germany without jeopardy. As I understand this, however, PhDs from Japan, Canada, and other

The most recent issue of The Lawyers Weekly features an article entitled Animal law: from the classroom to the real world? that describes the emergence of animal law as a serious field of study and perhaps legal practice:

“If the law schools are any indication, animal law is a growth area. University of Toronto has just become the seventh law school to offer animal law on its curriculum, after McGill, Dalhousie, University of Alberta, University of Ottawa, University of Victoria and Université du Québec à Montréal(…)”

“Just as actually practising environmental law was seen as a pipe dream of law

CALL/ACBD 2008
May 25-28, 2008
Saskatoon

Tomorrow is the early bird deadline for this year’s CALL Conference.

Also, there is a terrific pre-conference workshop, the Law Library Leadership Institute being held Saturday, May 24th that is definitely worth checking out.

If you work in a law library, or are otherwise part of the law library community, I hope you will join me at the CALL conference! . . . [more]

The TechnoLawyer Blog is compiling a growing list of blog posts and reports at ABA TECHSHOW 2008: Read Our Exclusive Firsthand Reports.

. . . [more]

Monica Bay has put together a nice list of bloggers who have been live at this year’s ABA TechShow in Chicago covering the event for the rest of us stuck in the snow or underneath paperwork! . . . [more]

Mike Hoeflich, a professor at the University of Kansas School, has just created a blog called The Legal Antiquarian.

As he mentions in his intro post last week, the blog deals with “the various aspects of legal history having to do with the daily life of lawyers and judges, as well as to the sources, manuscript, printed, and otherwise preserved which can be used to help understand how law and the legal profession functioned in the past. Among the subjects I will cover will be the daily lives of lawyers, their practices, their offices, the books they owned and . . . [more]

From the Torys Speaker Series at the University of Ottawa Law and Technology:

Facing up to Facebook
A panel discussion on social media and social networking

Please join the Law & Technology group as Professors Jane Bailey, Jeremy de Beer, Michael Geist, Ian Kerr, and Valerie Steeves discuss legal issues arising from Facebook and related social media technologies.

Date: Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Time: 11:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.
Place: Fauteux Hall, room 351
Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa

Please RSVP to techlaw@uottawa.ca.
Join the Facing up to Facebook event page.

Note about this event . . . [more]

The Women’s Court of Canada launches this week. (See the story in the Ottawa Citizen.) The WCC is a group of women academics and practitioners who combined to rewrite six Supreme Court of Canada decisions to take a full and proper account of women’s equality. The affected decisions are:

• Symes v. Canada, [1993] 4 S.C.R. 695
  deduction — child care expenses — women — taxpayer — income
• Native Women’s Association of Canada v. Canada, [1994] 3 S.C.R. 627 ((The citation is misprinted in the Majury article referred to below.))
  funding — freedom of expression — women —

Here’s a note about a new bibliography of published sources of English medieval legal documents. The announcement is on several lists.

In a long-term labor of love, Hazel Lord, Senior Law Librarian at the University of Southern California School of Law has been tirelessly working on a bibliography of published sources of English medieval legal documents (covering the years 600-1532). What she had thought originally would only be a few hundred sources, has blossomed into a list of close to 1,000 sources!

Because of the nature of the project, Hazel decided that it might be most useful as a wiki.

The Canadian Journalism Foundation is presenting Michael Geist in both Toronto on March 6th and Vancouver on April 3rd. The session description:

The Internet and new technologies have ushered in a seemingly unlimited array of possibilities for access to knowledge, creativity, and public participation. University of Ottawa Law School professor and internationally renowned expert on law and the internet Michael Geist will highlight the role that the Internet is playing for new creativity and knowledge sharing, while identifying the business and policy challenges that this creates for journalists and journalism. The talk will be followed by a Q&A moderated by

A 2.5 million dollar grant is being given to a group of 8 academic researchers by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Announced today, the grant is to be spent over seven years in the study of how and why average citizens are being watched by public and private organizations. The study is being titled “The New Transparency: Surveillance and Social Sorting.” Part of the study will be to look at the flow of surveillance information that is now possible with computer use.

From the Queen’s University press release:

The new project will examine

Amazing what one stumbles over.

A website devoted to the cultural significance of law school T-shirts, all I regret to say from the United States and mostly from the Eighties and Nineties. Information in cyberspace has never been quite as geeky. . . . [more]