Charon QC, the UK’s one-man blogging, podcasting and ‘zine publishing machine, has put a contract text online and made it available for free. Properly Mike Semple Piggot, he has taught contract law over the past 25 years at BPP Law School, an institution that he helped found. His text is, as he says, more of an outline, along with a collection of other resources related to contract law. On the site you’ll find up-to-date contract news; links to appropriate recent case reports are available within the text notes.

Semple plans a similar site dealing with the sale . . . [more]

Karl-Heinz Schreiber, who I believe must have set some sort of record for the most appearances of any individual in reported Canadian caselaw. My count is 44 decisions.

Leaving aside the current story, the legal merits and the political background, which are in the hands of the Oliphant Inquiry and in the presciently accurate work of my friendStevie Cameron. The sheer quantity of court appearances and decisions is impressive. Two appearances in the Supreme Court of Canada, and on the extradition issues, as the judge noted, five applications for judicial review, four of which were dismissed, the . . . [more]

Anne Foster Worlock’s comment reminded me of how far we have come in the technology of legal research.

And we had furious debates in the Eighties comparing this to the Walt. There would be a dedicated terminal for legal research in each library. And we had to remember commands like . . . [more]

Canadian law report citations are riddled with “full stops”, more commonly referred to as “periods”, all of which are completely unnecessary. Needless to say, there are crusaders amongst us who would do away with them altogether, sooner rather than later.

I will admit to having been the unwitting source of a number of the offending citations. In the development of Carswell’s series of topical law reports, an official citation was required for each of them. By tradition, it is the publisher who determines what the citation shall be and how it is to be styled. That task fell to me. . . . [more]

I have talked in the past about The Law Librarian podcast on Blogtalk Radio, created by Richard Leiter and Brian Striman. They are starting the show back up again with the aim to make it a little more consistent, at least once a month to start.

The next episode will be recorded live this Friday, August 7th at 2:00 pm CT. The discussion will be a recap of the American Association of Law Libraries conference held in Washington, D.C. last week. I’m pleased to be invited in as a guest participant for this month’s show. Rumour has it if things . . . [more]

One of the reasons I might like to practice in the United States is that I’d get to use the squiggly in my documents. Otherwise known as the section symbol or mark, § is one of my favourite typographical elements, having an elegance and symmetry that please me in a way that the mere “s.” we Canadians use to denote a section of a statute simply cannot. It is, literally, twice (as good as) our section character, being two esses, one above the other. Feel free to sprinkle your comments in Slaw with this lovely mark: easy to do: simply . . . [more]

We’ve blogged in the past about Hugh Lawford and the vision and tenacity that built the Queen’s Law School treaty data processing project into the foundation for one of Canada’s two commercial legal databases.

It’s an accident, of course, that QL was based in Kingston – in the same way that Dayton and Eagan were in the American systems. But that’s where the ideas were.

Kingston was of course where Hugh taught contracts, in between being Lester Pearson’s right hand man in Ottawa.

Today, the Kingston Whig-Standard reported that the remaining QL office in Kingston is to close. Rationalization . . . [more]

Wrapping up a week of Guest Blogging from Heenan Blaikie lawyers across the country, we’re going to end by focusing on big changes at Heenan Blaikie’s Toronto offices.

After nineteen years at Royal Bank Plaza, the firm is moving 400 metres up Bay Street to the new Bay Adelaide Centre.

The move presents all sorts of practical and logistical challenges. Soon to join us at Bay Adelaide will be Goodmans and Faskens. They’ll be watching carefully to see how we move the Library. Physically packing and transporting an entire law library is not a trivial undertaking. Here is a . . . [more]

Sometimes new law is very old. According to the OED, the term plagiarism was first applied to music in the Monthly Magazine of 1797, when a composition was described as “the most flagrant plagiarism from Handel” (The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works by Lydia Goehr, OUP). Since then a pantheon of musicians have been accused of lifting melodies – from Jerome Kern (Fred Fisher Inc. v. Dillingham, 298 F. 145, 1924.), George Harrison (My Sweet Lord costs over half a million 1981 dollars to settle: Bright Tunes Music Corp. v. Harrisongs, 420 F. Supp. 177 (S.D.N.Y. 1976)), Mick Jagger (co-author . . . [more]

This week, the entertainment group at Heenan Blaikie has been commenting on various developments in the sector. But I thought it might be fun to ask how media and entertainment lawyers use the new media.

So I asked the group:

What sites are on your bookmarks, that you check daily or that you get email updates from or RSS feeds?

What are the must reads for clients? Does everyone read Variety or Hollywood Reporter? Is there an electronic equivalent?

Do you or your clients use social media? Facebook? MySpace? Linkedin? Legalonramp? Twitter? Follow any blogs? Contribute to any blogs? Or

Courtesy of my friend and partner, Subrata Bhattacharjee, today is the last sitting of the Judicial Committee of the House of Lords (you can watch the feed here. So farewell to a court that has provided a vast range of legal judgments from Attwood v. Small in 1838, through Rylands and Fletcher, through M’ALISTER or DONOGHUE (Pauper) v. STEVENSON. In October, a Supreme Court will start sitting to hear appellate matters.

In this Guest Week on Media and Entertainment law at Slaw, it only seems fitting that they’ll spend part of the last day on pop . . . [more]

Celebrities thrive on the oxygen of publicity. As Wilde put it, “there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about”. Between the tabloids and the celebrities, goes on a complex galliard of hunt and court. . . . [more]