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]

This week in biotech was all about action at a distance. Not the quantum entanglement kind, just the plain old mucking with things indirectly kind.

In a post on recent developments in electronic medical records, two items highlighted a role for remote access: a pilot program by the American Telemedicine Association that is using phone, email and videoconferencing to resolve over 55% of issues without an office visit; and a new pacemaker that transmits data to the doctor and the patient to allow proactive monitoring and planning.

Another phenomenon one step removed — BioMS, having had to abandon . . . [more]

…with all due apologies to Van Halen. What would a Winter Olympics in Canada be without ski jumping controversy? In Calgary in 1988 the world watched as Eddie Edwards flew like an eagle. In response to that the IOC instituted minimum requirements for competitors to take part in Olympics and placed more severe restrictions on competitors qualifying for Olympic competition. In 2010, the ski jumping controversy for Vancouver is the IOC’s refusal to allow women’s ski jumping as an event in the Olympics. In a sense the restrictions that came out of the Calgary Olympiad of 1988 indirectly led . . . [more]

Readers of Slaw may have come across the small volumes that have been published annually for over sixty years – the Hamlyn Lectures. They resulted from an application for directions before Mr. Justice Wynn-Parry of a Trust resulting from the Last Will and Testament of Miss Emma Hamlyn. They’re delightfully accessible general talks on various aspects of English and comparative law.

And the older volumes of the series are now available from the University of Exeter Law School website. CUP is publishing the current volumes.

Miss Hamlyn bequeathed the residue of her estate to her executors as . . . [more]

A story that’s been making the rounds this week (Lawyerist –Legal Blog Watch –ABAJournal –@davidtsfraser) deserves to be passed along one more step: U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Robert Kressel got fed up with the way lawyers wrote the proposed orders submitted to him, so he sent a memo to the whole bankruptcy bar setting out his rules for doing it right. They’re a mix of regs on proper form and injunctions about some stuff that should have been learned in grade school.

For instance, in addition to a request that documents be submitted in PDF electronically, . . . [more]

The people at the Law Reform Commission of Ireland have been very busy little beavers recently.

Last week, they published a consultation paper on electronic evidence. Then they brought out a report on criminal defences (self-defence, provocation, duress).

Yesterday, boom, another consultation paper, this time on search warrants and bench warrants.

In each case, the Commission has adopted a very pronounced comparativist point of view that can be of interest to Canadians, as all of the documents take a close look at what is happening in other jurisdictions, such as the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and the . . . [more]

The Court of Appeal for England and Wales has ruled against Lucasfilm in its breach of copyright suit against Andrew Ainsworth, the British designer who produced the Stormtrooper costume for the Star Wars films. (Lucasfilm Limited et al. v. Andrew Ainsworth [2009] EWCA Civ 1328)

Ainsworth had been selling a few Stormtrooper helmets both in the U.S. and in Britain. Lucasfilm claimed that the models for the helmet were copyright works as “sculptures” within the meaning of s.4 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988. After a long review of the legislative history and the caselaw, . . . [more]

Thanks to a tweet by @richards1000 I was reminded about Cornell University Library’s digitization project, which has resulted in over 2000 law books’ becoming freely available online at the Internet Archive. Slawyer Michael Lines spent some time at Cornell in 2008 and reported on the digitization project then current. As with most texts in the Internet Archive, you are able to read these materials online in an interactive version of the actual books, see or download them in plain text or PDF, or obtain them in, among others, a format suitable for Kindle or EPUB.

I’ve done a fairly . . . [more]

I have made the following enhancements to my Custom Google Search of Canadian Law Firms available at http://tinyurl.com/canadianlawfirms:

– Renamed the site to “Search Canadian Law Firm Websites, Blogs & Journals”

– added 28 more law firms to include boutiques and regional (smaller) firms for a total of 79 Canadian law firms (and I broadened URLs to include subdomains of law firms [e.g., lawfirm.ca instead of http://lawfirm.ca/*]).

– added 205 Canadian law-related blogs

– added 20 Canadian law journal websites, the BC Courthouse Library and the CBA and CBAO

– added refinement tags to refine search results to publications . . . [more]

The American Bar Association’s Technology Resource Center has launched a search engine that enables you to search the “free full-text of over 300 online law reviews and law journals” as well as some additional material. There is a list of sources searched on the page where you’ll find the search box.

Because the search facility was constructed using Google Custom Search, it only searches those resources made available online by the journals and indexed by Google. The historical depth of such material will vary greatly, of course, from journal to journal.

Sensibly, perhaps, the sources look to be all from . . . [more]