Last week Family Law Education for Women (FLEW) unveiled a public education campaign called “All Women. One Family Law” to ensure that women in Ontario know their legal rights under provincial family law. FLEW is a public legal education project funded by Ontario to develop materials to inform women’s decisions about family law issues.

Here is the English language website, the French website and news announcements in both English and French. The information itself is in English, Chinese (traditional), Punjabi, Tamil, French, Chinese (simplified), somali, Urdu, Arabic, Farsi and Spanish.

I particularly liked the embedded video in the . . . [more]

The folks over at Orange Legal Technologies have put together a news feed they are calling “Unfiltered Orange” focussing on electronic discovery. You can access Unfiltered Orange a few ways:

• directly from the Orange Legal Technologies website. Scroll down for the latest headlines, click through for the full news item from its original source.
• if you are on Twitter, follow the tweets from @complexd.
• if you are using a feed reader, or want to repurpose the feed, the RSS feed is available here.

They are apparently using Twitter to create the original feed. They have created this . . . [more]

An article in the recent Communications of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), “Got data?: a guide to data preservation in the information age,” makes the case for urgent investment in data cyberinfrastructure — whatever is required to store, manage, catalog and access data.

(Note: that link won’t give you much joy unless you happen to subscribe to the ACM portal. Fortunately, the author, Francine Berman, who is Director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center, has put up on her website a version of the piece in PDF, “Surviving the Data Deluge.” Such is the . . . [more]

for Counter-feiting, fa la la la la, la la la la. Interestingly enough there are not many catchy carols about the counterfeiting season. But as I was about the other day, I saw a sign at a particular business to mark the season, the sign was to the effect that the business would no longer be accepting 100 dollar bills. Which got me to thinking, can they do that? So I headed straight for the Currency Act, R.S.C. 1985, c.C-52 in order to figure it out. And what to my wondering eyes did appear? …. well, not the answer to . . . [more]

Last week Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a collaborative service of Britain’s Internet Service Providers, banned a page of Wikipedia that contained a picture of a record album cover (in the UK called the ‘sleeve’) from 1976. The picture showed a young girl, about 10 perhaps, naked, in a sexually suggestive pose.

The ban was done by putting the page on a blacklist that IWF updates twice a day to help British ISPs avoid making potentially illegal images available.

An unintended consequence of the ban was to prevent any British internet users from editing any page on Wikipedia. This consequence comes . . . [more]

Yesterday, UVic Libraries announced the launch of The British Colonist, an online archive of The British Colonist newspaper, one of the earliest newspapers published in British Columbia. From the UVic Digital Collection page:

When complete, the archive will consist of approximately 100,000 page images spanning 52 years from the newspapers beginning in 1858 until 1910, when the paper changed its name to The Daily Colonist. The above link will connect you with the database allowing you to search by keyword or browse by date.

The project is sponsored by Victoria Times-Colonist, University of Victoria Libraries, University of British

This morning the Bank of Canada announced the reduction of its overnight rate by .75, lower than even predicted by economists. The overnight rate now stands at 1.5 %, a level not seen since 1958. And with it, acknowledgement that Canada is “now entering a recession.” . . . [more]

Issue 2 of the Osgoode Hall Review of Law and Policy is now available online. The lead article in this student-run journal is “The SAC Proposal for the Monetization of the File Sharing of Music in Canada: Does It Comply With Canada‘s International Treaty Obligations Related To Copyright?,” [PDF] by Barry Sookman, of McCarthy Tétrault LLP and Co-Chair of its Technology Law Group. This issue of the OHRLP can be downloaded entire in PDF. . . . [more]

Recent developments regarding the official status of legislation available online are certain to have an effect on the legislative products offered by Canada’s commercial legal publishers.

As noted in a recent SLAW posting, Ontario now recognizes its legislation website as an official source of the law. As of November 30th, 2008, an “on-screen display of a statute or regulation viewed on, or downloaded from the e Laws website” is now official.

Quebec is expected to follow suit. Just prior to the recent dissolution of the National Assembly, a bill was pending that would recognize the official character of its legislation . . . [more]

Last night I wrote about RSS and whether we need to do something simpler over on my Crosby Group business blog, Connection. It seems to have struck a nerve with a number of people since there is now a good discussion going on in the comments. An excerpt: . . . [more]

A sad but significant report from the U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics publishes the data concerning capital punishment in 2007 in that country. Some 17 tables of statistics explore such matters as the demographics of persons under sentence of death, the number of persons executed in the last decade, method of execution by state, and so forth.

As of the end of December 2007, the median elapsed time since sentencing for inmates under sentence of death is 133 months. That is a month longer than 11 years.

[via beSpacific] . . . [more]

The Canadian Bar Association recently published Guidelines for Practicing Ethically with New Information Technologies (the “Guidelines”) as a supplement to its Code of Professional Conduct.

While the Guidelines provide a considerable amount of information concerning the use of technology in a legal practice (even referring to certain software in its annexes), some lawyers may find themselves at a loss as to how to actually implement the guidelines in their practice. This essay identifies certain aspects of the Guidelines that are worthy of additional commentary and refers readers to (mostly free) tools which will prove useful in following the Guidelines. . . . [more]