As we’ve recently seen here on Slaw, getting governments to cough up information can be a difficult proposition. But there’s some help for folks in Nova Scotia. The Right to Know Coalition is:

… a non-profit organization. Through advocacy and education, RTKNS encourages the use and development of freedom-of-information legislation to foster a better informed and more politically active electorate in Nova Scotia and to improve the quality of public and private decision making in the province.

RTKNS has been around for years but has somehow slipped under my radar and eluded Slaw’s attention. Our apologies for that.

The . . . [more]

The International Competition Network (ICN) is a group concerned to encourage competition-friendly policy changes in member nations. Canada’s Competition Bureau is a member.

Founded in 2001, the ICN

…provides competition authorities with a specialized yet informal venue for maintaining regular contacts and addressing practical competition concerns. This allows for a dynamic dialogue that serves to build consensus and convergence towards sound competition policy principles across the global antitrust community.

Unlike the G8 and some other more shadowy international groups, the ICN has a secretariat, and thus presumable also collects and maintains files of its own creation. The website . . . [more]

First Member of Atlantic Canada's Mi’kmaq Community to be Appointed Judge

The fall 2010 session of the Supreme Court of Canada began earlier this week.

Not everyone knows that electronic facta filed by the parties in cases before the Supreme Court of Canada are available on the Court’s website. This has been so for cases filed since February 2009.

For example, if you want to find out about the arguments of the parties in upcoming hearings of the fall season, you only need to click on the style of cause (party name) link for a particular case.

For example, today, the Court heard an appeal in the case of Information . . . [more]

The Ontario Bar Association (OBA) is creating an online video library to help educate the public about the justice system in the province. The videos cover the basics of the civil litigation process.

The library is created by the charitable arm of the OBA, The Advancement of Legal Education and Research Trust (ALERT). The civil litigation videos feature James Morton, a Toronto lawyer with Steinberg Hope Morton & Israel LLP and adjunct faculty at Osgoode, who blogs at Mortons Musings.

The press release from the OBA can be seen here. The entire libary can be viewed on . . . [more]

Further kudos to Melissa Kluger and her staff at Precedent: The New Rules of Law and Style. I remain impressed with the ongoing quality and content of her magazine (note of disclosure: I know Melissa from when she was a law-school student and I believe my firm also advertises in the magazine).

It seems they have also now launched The Precedent A-List, a site for lawyer announcements and career postings.

As stated in their news release:

The site will be devoted to career announcements — such as who has made a move, made partner or gone in-house —

. . . [more]

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) based in Strasbourg has published a series of Factsheets that deal with various themes such as the situation of the Roma, the rights of homosexuals, prison conditions and environmental rights. They include both decided cases and pending applications before the Court.

The full list of Factsheets:

• Case-law concerning the European Union
• Child protection
• Data protection (English version in progress)
• Detention and Mental Health
• Detention conditions and treatment of prisoners
• Dublin cases (which European state is responsible for asylum applications)
• The environment
• Expulsions and extraditions
• Forced labour and trafficking
• Homosexual rights
• Homosexuality: criminal aspects

. . . [more]

The esteemed Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund, LEAF, has launched a website “to monitor developments in equality law.” Equality Rights Central is to be:

… a place to find cases, commentary, trends, news and facta about equality and discrimination issues, in law and policy.

This site is for advocates, academics and practitioners involved in equality rights, to monitor and advance the development of equality law in Canada.

Funded by LEAF and several provincial law foundations, ERC ( — Their acronym; not mine. Not particularly felicitous. — ) will offer updates on key issues as they move through the court . . . [more]

Our congratulations to Public.Resource.Org a non-profit organization focused on enabling online access to public government documents in the United States. Today it won a $2 million award from Google’s Project 10¹⁰⁰ competition – 10¹⁰⁰ is 1 googol – which called for “ideas to change the world”.

Google’s competition garnered 150,000 ideas from more than 170 countries. Google whittled that list down to a final 16 ideas for public vote. Public Resource came in second equal, after FIRST a non-profit organization that promotes science and math education around the world through team competition.

The Law.Gov initiative aims to make . . . [more]

Based in Halifax, NS, the Centre for Law and Democracy is a non-profit organization that

promotes respect for those human rights which serve as the foundation of democracy. This includes the right to information, the right to participate and to vote, freedom of expression, and the rights to assembly and association. CLD specialises in providing legal and policy expertise on these rights globally.

If your work touches on human rights, you’ll find some useful material here. There are published papers and reports (e.g. “Hate Speech Rules Under International Law, February 2010“) and a section on Legal Work, containing . . . [more]

Zotero has announced that it will be releasing a standalone desktop version of the program that will integrate with Internet Explorer, Safari, and Chrome. At the present, Zotero is only an extension to the Firefox browser.

Zotero is a free note-taking application much favoured by researchers and others who need to clip, annotate, and organize material from the web along with bibliographic metadata. Zotero comes with a variety of bibliographic and citation styles built in (though not, I think, the Canadian legal citation format).

This move will make Zotero Everywhere a sensible alternative to other popular note-taking tools, such as . . . [more]

Intellectual property researchers should have a look at WIPO Lex, a new reference resource from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) that provides up-to-date information on national IP laws and treaties of the members of WIPO, the World Trade Organization and the United Nations. It currently features the complete IP legal texts for over 60 countries with substantial coverage for a further 100 legal systems.

IP history buffs can also explore Primary Sources on Copyright (1450-1900) sponsored by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (Great Britain). It is a “collection of key primary documents from five countries—the United States, . . . [more]