I was recently introduced to one of Canada’s Military Judges, learning that there are only four such judicial officers, which made me realize how little I know not simply about military law but also about the very structure of the military justice system. I suspect that many, if not most, of our readers are equally unaware of this structure, so I thought I’d provide a few links for the curious to follow.

For an overview, look at the Military Law and Military Justice pages of the Judge Advocate General’s website. As well, there is a clear and well written overview . . . [more]

Colleague Katharine Thompson has shown me how to add “refinements” to my Custom Google Search of Canadian Law Firms.

A search on “wallace” (admittedly not a very sophisticated search if looking for law firm bulletin case comments on Wallace v. United Grain Growers Ltd., [1997] 3 S.C.R. 701) results in a number of hits on the bio’s of lawyers named Wallace.

However, with the prior search results on “wallace”, if you click on the new “Bulletins” refinement button we have added, you generate much better search results of mainly law firm bulletins on the S.C.C. decision in question . . . [more]

Although the Canadian government has already taken initiatives to develop social networking tools, they may be getting help soon from Google.

The official Google Public Sector blog has plenty of resources for government technology directors, including the recently concluded Gov 2.0 summit in D.C. last week, chaired by web guru Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media, Inc., the guy who coined “Web 2.0.” Videos of most of the presentations are available online.

Last night Google announced the launch of Google for the Public Sector, offering a number of tools that largely already existed, such as website . . . [more]

Recently, I attended a session that brought together Legal Aid officials and representatives of legal clinics, among others, to discuss how to improve access to clinic services by members of racialized communities. I want to mention only one point that a participant raised at the meeting and that is the use of technology to provide information to people using the legal system (or wanting access to the legal system), ostensibly to increase their capacity for “self-help”. . . . [more]

I see one of the most-quoted posts today on Twitter is All publicly funded content should be in the public domain from popular blog Boing Boing, written by Jesse Brown, host of TV Ontario’s Search Engine podcast. Since he pulls CBC, Telefilm, the Canadian Television Fund and The Canada Council for the Arts into his argument, I thought we (as good Canadians) should have a look at the position he posits. It is:

I think that any publicly funded content should (within, say, 5 years of its creation) be released to the public domain.

Thoughts? (Un-Canadians welcome. Let’s open an

As recently posted here, the CanLII website will soon have all Canadian jurisdictions included in its new point-in-time legislation publication system. I thought that slaw readers would be interested in having some more insight about the project. Let’s begin with preliminary figures and some trivia about legislation available online from governments’ websites, which are the source of CanLII’s databases.

Over 6,000 updated public Acts are available online in all Canadian jurisdictions, averaging about 450 per jurisdiction. These figures double for corresponding enabled regulations. Not surprisingly, the Province of Ontario posts the largest number of effective public acts – . . . [more]

When I got back from vacation just over a week ago I discovered there was an elephant in the room: a possible looming federal election that no one really wanted to discuss. Except, perhaps, the media. We’ve even avoided discussing it here on Slaw for whatever reason (are we just too polite to talk politics in public? How very Canadian). In the meantime we have a lovely trio of election-related controversies from which to sample: . . . [more]

This is old now, but I just found a recording of an interesting 2007 talk by Carl Malamud about his efforts to cajole US Government agencies and Canadian corporations into recognizing and acting on the public domain status of all US government info, including, of course, case law. (Re-)Defining the Public Domain is available at Berkeley’s School of Information as audio, and also with his slideshow. To find the law content, skip ahead to 38:12 of the video version. Some really choice quotes here, and the whole thing is a great introduction to his strategic, and very . . . [more]

I was near the bottom of the bell curve for introductory French in my first year of University. Worried for my GPA, I dropped the course just before the transcript appearance cut off date. I have come to deeply regret that decision.

Lucky for me, I have excellent colleagues among the members of the CBA Alberta, Research Lawyers North section. This hybrid section welcomes non-lawyer members. Our September meeting was a round table of research tips.

Jane Fagnan, Legal Counsel with Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench offered some tips and sites to help anglophones with law in French. A . . . [more]

The semantic web is coming. The fact that it’s been heralded more often than “the wolf,” shouldn’t deafen us to the the essential truth: slowly but surely Web 3.0, the semantic web is arriving. After all, the wolf did actually show up, as I recall.

What is it? And why should lawyers care? There are two typical answers to the second question, as is usually the case when technology is the subject: lawyers should care first because the change will (eventually) alter the way in which they research, prepare and present documents, and second because as the technology goes mainstream . . . [more]

Forty years ago, on September 7, 1969, the Official Languages Act officially came into force.

The legislation recognized the equal status of English and French in federal institutions and in Canadian society.

All week long, the Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages is marking the occasion through meetings, discussions, and exhibitions.

As Graham Fraser, the Commissioner of Official Languages, wrote in the August 31, 2009 edition of The Hill Times:

“Bilingualism ‘is at the core of what this country means’ but Canadians don’t have a sense of ownership of both official languages, says Graham Fraser, the Commissioner

The Guardian carried a story this weekend on Interpol’s online database of stolen art objects. The idea is that by making information — photos, dimensions, etc. — available to art dealers and interested members of the public, it might become harder for thieves to sell on stolen art, at least to unwitting buyers.

What intrigued me was that despite talking about the database website and the fact that 400 people had applied for passwords to view the art the Guardian piece failed to give its readers a URL for the site. I’ve banged on about this before, I know; but . . . [more]