There are times when Google’s minimalism palls and you want something just a little more… racy, perhaps, when you’re hunting down that special website that contains all the answers you need. When ennui de recherche strikes, move your operations over to SpaceTime3D, the cosmically inflated name for a pretty front end to Google, Wikipedia, Amazon, etc. What you’ll get is what we Mac users know as “cover flow,” that old fashioned jukebox effect where the website pages emerge from a stack like records on the old machines.

This isn’t very efficient, unless you’re looking for a certain kind of . . . [more]

It has been a good week for people interested in Canadian government documents related to law and justice issues.

The most recent Weekly Checklist of Government of Canada Publications includes 2 parliamentary committee reports:

• the June 2009 report of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security entitled Statutory Review of the DNA Identification Act which examines how effective the National DNA Data Bank has been as a police investigation tool
• the June 2009 report of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights entitled Ending Alcohol-Impaired Driving: A Common Approach that looks

As I hope everyone knows, TOROG — the Toronto Opinions Group — kindly allows Slaw to publish some of their memos and precedents on third party opinions. A new document has just been added to the collection: “Limitations Act, 2002 (Ontario) – Proposals for Improving Contract Drafting and Appropriate Opinion Qualification Practice – June, 2009,” which, like the others, is available in PDF.

This relatively lengthy document (18pp.) describes the impact of recent changes to the Ontario Limitations Act on one’s freedom to contract with respect to a limitation period. The document also contains a sample provisions of purchase . . . [more]

The giant publisher Reed Elsevier (in whose capacious bosom LexisNexis rests) is experimenting with the form that a published scientific article takes online. The “Article of the Future” project, in beta, is an attempt to re-think the way in which a scientific article is presented, given the possibilities made available by information technology. At the moment there is a prototype that makes use of a couple of articles originally published in Cell, reformatting them in such a way that, among other things, graphics are more readily available and can be scaled, contents of the article are broken . . . [more]

I am the very proud parent of two lovely teenage daughters. The Mireau Giggles do not have their own cell phones, much to their dismay. Some day soon they will both have steady employment and I am sure phones are high up on the purchases priority list. As an aside, I had no idea that I was being mean as I MOS my kids while they email in our shared family office.

Rather than MYOB [mind your own business], a careful parent (or a lawyer trying to decipher instant message transcripts) will be happy to know there is a texting . . . [more]

Recent announcements timed for the annual meeting of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries included the usual update from the major publishers on recently rebranded businesses and products.

This time, Thomson Carswell became “Carswell, a Thomson Reuters Business” and “Westlaw-ecarswell” became “WestlawCanada”. Both name changes are undoubted improvements over what was there before and make sense in the long term, but they are really just the latest in a long series of changes that have taken place since The Carswell Company was acquired by the The Thomson Corporation. On the plus side, the print products continue to be associated . . . [more]

While our India readers are doubtless aghast at the Law Commission’s bold reforms on stamp duty – you can pay any transaction/court fee by demand draft/cash/postal order/banker’s cheque instead of through non-judicial stamp papers or special stamps – and at the breakneck speed of Indian Commissions of Inquiry – less than two months for a J&K fatality inquiry, and at Stalin’s announcement of a financial city – our North American readers will be puzzling over the implications of stories in today’s Evening Standard in London and the American Lawyer in New York. . . . [more]

Things were heating up in the world of biotech this week!

Hot deals — some of the biggest numbers Canadian companies have seen this year:

• Bioniche licensed its Urocidin product to U.S.-based Endo Pharmaceuticals for $20 million up front and the potential for over $110 million more; and
• Allostera raised $17 million in venture capital.

Hot entrepreneurs — new sources of capital and new training bode well for a fresh crop of companies:

• Teralys Capital opened the doors to start spending its $700 million fund; and
• Two new initiatives — one in Waterloo and one in Ottawa

In May 2008, Ontario passed the Access to Adoption Records Act, 2008, S.O. 2008, c. 5. As of June 1, 2009, adoption records in Ontario are now open. From an ad placed by the Ontario government in a local newspaper:

This means that adopted adults and birth parents can apply for post-adoption birth information from birth records and adoption orders.

An adopted adult, 18 years of age or older, can now apply for a copy of his or her original birth registration and adoption order. A birth parent can receive information from the birth registration and adoption order of

A sign of the times: for those who have been let go at work but feel too intimidated by the potential cost of a lawyer to seek legal assistance, comes the new service FiredWithoutCause to fill the gap. Have a read through the description below. I’m curious to hear from lawyers in the audience whether you see this type of service complementing or competing with your work?

From FWC’s social media press release (SMPR) from July 10, 2009:

FiredWithoutCause.com is a confidential online service that helps people understand their legal rights and maximize their severance package. The service provides:

• a 

Today, Sunday, turned out to be a day where I felt newspaper deprivation acutely, so I remedied it by buying the Sunday NY Times, as I sometimes do — though not since its price in Canada got hiked to a startling sum just under $9, evidently. The Magazine contains an interesting interview with US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (“The Place of Women on the Court” by Emily Bazelon), which prompted one of those chains of associations that can entrain you when you’ve the Times to draw upon. Herewith, the highlights in something of a ramble, starting . . . [more]

The United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary’s confirmation hearings on Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to be associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court begin Monday morning. She will be on Capitol Hill undergoing questioning by the senators during the next week.

Of all the news outlets planning coverage, perhaps the most interesting is Associated Press. Their plan is to have live coverage via Twitter feed @AP_Courtside. They will be taking it a step further by taking questions and directions on coverage for their blog from their readers via Twitter, according to their blog post yesterday at Yahoo! . . . [more]