♫ What makes you think that you are invincible
I can see it in your eyes that you’re so sure
please don’t tell me that I am the only one that’s vulnerable
impossible…♫

Lyrics, music and recorded by John Vesely, under the pseudonym Secondhand Serenade.

The State Bar of Arizona has issued one of the first Ethics Opinions on preserving client confidentiality when placing client documents for access over the Internet. Arizona stated:

“Lawyers providing an online file storage and retrieval system for client access of documents must take reasonable precautions to protect the security and confidentiality of . . . [more]

Concluding twelve years of efforts from a lot of JTAC members, Justice Fran Kiteley, from the Ontario Superior Court and a former JTAC member, rendered the first judgment using neutral citation in R. v. ANDREW DEL RICCIO, 2010 ONSC 01. Congratulations!

As everyone will know, California’s Proposition 8, passed in November of 2008, added this section to the state constitution: “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.” On January 11, the constitutionality of that law will be challenged in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California (USDCCAND) in a case styled Perry v. Schwarzenegger. The case has elicited such public interest — see, e.g., the nifty media guide [PDF] issued by the court — that the judge in the matter has ruled that it be broadcast on YouTube.

At . . . [more]

A group of Canadian authors has launched an online petition to protest the proposed settlement intended to put an end to a class action copyright lawsuit by U.S.-based author and publisher groups over Google’s plans to make and sell digital copies of millions of books.

In November 2009, the settlement was amended so that it would now apply only to books registered with the U.S. Copyright office or published in the U.K., Australia, or Canada.

The Book Rights Registry board, the entity that will be responsible for paying authors and publishers from revenues earned by the digitization project, would also . . . [more]

The Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics (Juristat), part of the Statistics Canada organization, has released “Multiple Victimization in Canada, 2004” by Samuel Perreault, Julie Sauvé, and Mike Burns. There’s a version in HTML and in PDF.

As the title suggests, the study looked at data on repeat victimization within the population, both as concerns violent crimes against the person and crimes against property (“household crimes”). In 2004, of all Canadians who reported being victims of violent crime, rather more than a third (38%) reported being victimized multiple times, accounting for almost two thirds (60%) of all violent crimes. Of . . . [more]

In a post last Fall called Finding and Updating Canadian Federal Private Acts, I provided a link to the House of Commons Procedure and Practice (Marleau and Montpetit).

With the prorogation of Parliament and the controversy over that, it may be that researchers will be investigating Parliamentary procedure. Since my post last Fall, I see there is a new 2009 second edition of House of Commons Procedure and Practice (edited by Audrey O’Brien and Marc Bosc) available here (at a different URL), tabled in the House on November 18, 2009. I assume we can no longer refer to the . . . [more]

The interesting blog, Computational Legal Studies, has a recent post on Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s posts to the Islamic forum, Gawaher. (Abdulmutallab is the person who tried to blow up a plane on Christmas day.) All of his 310 posts have been downloaded by NEFA, which has made them available online in a zip file. (I have no idea what NEFA stands for and I’ve been unable to find out. There’s a… creepy element to this “anti-terrorism” site, though, I have to say.)

Some very basic analysis of the content of the posts has been done at . . . [more]

It’s been a little while since I wrote about The Law Librarian podcast created by Richard Leiter and available over at BlogTalkRadio and iTunes. I am one of several regular panelists; panelists now take turns participating in the shows depending on the topics. Richard has also expanded the schedule from once a month to once a month plus frequent updates, which will hopefully mean a new show every couple of weeks.

In case you missed them, the last two shows are:

Google Scholar Legal Opinions and Journals: A Conversation with Anurag Acharya (Dec. 4/09)
– Anurag Acharya is a . . . [more]

On the day after tomorrow, at least 100 amendments to statutes and regulations will come into force in Canada, according to a simple search in CanLII. It’s a hodge-podge of rules, of course — a cross-section, if you will, of life under modern rule-making.

Thus, for instance, B.C. mushroom growers are likely to be happier on January 1, because the regulation obliging them to pay a levy to the Mushroom Industry Development Council is to be repealed on that day. Happier, too, will be Costa Ricans who export to Canada, as tariff rates for certain goods will be reduced by . . . [more]

For those who don’t know of it, Arts & Letters Daily is an aggregator par excelllence for links to information and links of all kinds. Another is the Voice of the Shuttle. VoS describes itself as a “website for humanities research”.

At present, the first reference in the AL&D “Articles of Note” column is to a new article about the Peter Principle and studies that have been done since the book The Peter Principle: Why things always go wrong came out in 1969.

The A&LD summary, taken from the paragraph in the article under the heading “Pervasively inept” is:  . . . [more]

Readers will likely know that I enjoy the blog Language Log. Law is, after all, a language game (in the serious sense of game), and it helps to see what the folks who study language per se have to say about it. Recently they’ve been musing about which of the sexes gets preference in a two-word phrase, such as “mum and dad”, which got me thinking about what we do in the same circumstance within the more formal settings of Canadian legislation and caselaw.

Trouble is, I’m no scientist. So all I can do is use what a statistician . . . [more]

Louise Hamel, manager of the Judges’ Library for Ontario Courts, just announced to Canadian legal publishers that beginning January 2, 2010, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice will assign a neutral citation to their decisions, except for the Small Claims Court.

The Neutral Citation Standard for Case Law was developed in 1998 by the Canadian Citation Committee, an informal group that brought together various specialists in legal information from the judiciary, academia and the publishing industry, including slawers Martin Felsky and Daniel Poulin. The standard was approved in 1999 by the Canadian Judicial Council and has since then been . . . [more]