A new site launched less than a month ago was brought to my attention recently. Persuasive Authorities is a blog by faculty at various American law schools. But it was the Canadian contributors that I’ve encountered previously that really caught my attention.

I know Richard Albert of Boston College through political activities in Canada. With an impressive resume that includes law degrees from Yale, Harvard, and Oxford, he also clerked in the Supreme Court of Canada. His latest post on the site is about his first class at Harvard, where Duncan Kennedy described how law travelled around the world.

Comparative . . . [more]

The government of the United Kingdom is thinking about instituting a ‘single publication’ rule for online defamation. Here’s a story about that issue, with a link to the government’s consultation paper.

The single publication rule is an American rule that makes a limitation period for defamation run from the first publication of the defamatory statement. If the defamation remains available, say through the continuing availability of a book or through a newspaper archive, that does not restart the limitation period. US courts have applied that rule to Internet publications.

Canadian and British courts do not have a single publication rule . . . [more]

This is a stub posting on this morning’s Bell decision from the Supreme Court (with the headnote) until we can figure out what its implications are: Bell Canada v. Bell Aliant Regional Communications, 2009 SCC 40, . . . [more]

I once dreamt of a career in etymology. I find the concept of where words originate and thus their linguistic application is very interesting. This character trait may have been the cause for the in-drawn breath when I read the Hello Words and Phrases Online, Goodbye Words and Phrases in All Formats post on the Law Librarian Blog today.

It’s been decades since I’ve had any real need for the title. I doubt Word and Phrases is needed in either print or digital except as an instructional device to teach online searching…

With full-text searching online Words and Phrases is

Google today announced its partnership with On Demand Books, developers of the Espresso Book Machine, which can “perfect bind” a copy of a book printed on an attached copier in about three minutes, at a cost of one cent per page. (The press release [PDF] from On Demand Books is somewhat more detailed.)

This video shows the machine in action:

. . . [more]

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]