A cohort of law commissions or a covey? We’re not militarily inclined, but we are associates, so cohort kind of works. We are, alas, a small group, but would run of the risk of being thought of as “grouse” if we used “covey” – and this might be a misleading or incomplete connotation, since we are “constructive grousers”. I’ve decided on “cohort”.

From March 8th to 10th, the British Columbia Law Institute hosted a meeting of the Federation of Law Reform Agencies of Canada in Victoria (yes, it snowed there). FOLRAC is a loose cohort of law reform agencies . . . [more]

By now most newspaper readers will know of a momentous event at 1:59:26 one numerical representation of the date and time, 3.1415926, aligned with pi out to seven decimal places. This afternoon the digital clock in North America turned to show 3.1415926. PI Day was March 14.

At 1.59pm at the San Francisco Exploratorium a parade of people processed approximately 3.14 times around a shrine to Pi — and then ate pie.

Curiously it was also Talk Like a Physicist day, and Albert Einstein’s 130th anniversary.

So a significant day for physicists, mathematicians and obsessives of various . . . [more]

Th WCC-TFC is on a western Canadian Tour. Details are hard to track down, but here are their destinations, and some dates.

• UBC, March 9
• UVic, March 11
• UAlberta
• U Calg, March 13
• U Sask.
• U Man. March 19

As a rock group they are pretty unplugged, but as an educational experience, they… rock! Slaw has already covered their launch week in 2008, and explained the project, which is to re-write important SCC equality decisions from a more ‘context-aware’, if I may paraphrase, perspective.

It was interesting to hear about how the process of writing these decisions . . . [more]

I used to read John LeCarré and Len Deighton. There was something about the closed-in, mirror-in-mirror world of spies that appealed to me, and, of course, there was the pleasure of fiction (i.e. lying) about lying. Nowadays, spy books are fewer — and lying is so very much easier, having leaped free of the genre, thanks to the internet. So I thought I’d take a brief look at the sorts of web tools that are available to, well, create false impressions and in so doing perhaps make your life easier.

First there’s the fake mobile phone call, typically designed to . . . [more]

As a group, justice personnel are becoming older, according to a Statistics Canada report, “Aging of justice personnel” by Mathieu Charron, Racha Nemr and Roxan Vaillancourt, available on Juristat in HTML and PDF. (There’s a summary available on The Daily.)

The main findings of the study, based on the 2006 Census, are that the number and average age of justice workers has grown in parallel with the labour force as a whole; the median age is now 41. The report goes on to scrutinize four groups in greater detail: police officers, court personnel, correctional services workers, and private . . . [more]

I’m sure I’m not the only one watching the anti-Twittering struggles of Alberta Speaker Ken Kowalski with mixed feelings (see the Globe and Mail story here). I think the Speaker is correct in demanding that Members pay attention to the proceedings while they are in the Chamber – after all, it is their job to do so. However, the Speaker has villified the hand-held device, where the real culprit is its operator. I once attended a session of the Ontario Legislature during my undergrad days, and observed MPPs writing Christmas cards. Is Twittering any more offensive to the dignity . . . [more]

Three items here.

When I was in Newcastle-upon-Tyne last month I met an old friend Councillor Ron Beadle, who told me of the ways in which English politicians are using Facebook as ways of keeping in touch with constituents and supporters. I’m more likely to get responses from English politicians that way. Matthew Fraser and Soumitra Dutta’s new book Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom has much on how the Obama campaign deployed Web 2.0 technologies.

But let’s come closer to Canada.

In last week’s NDP leadership convention in Toronto, Peter Tabuns had more money. But there is a fascinating . . . [more]

That’s the title of my newspaper column this week. It talks about a House of Lords report that expresses concern over the U.K.’s extensive closed-circuit television (CCTV) surveillance network and its growing national DNA database, which contains information even about innocent people.

While the report does not go so far as to say that the U.K. has become an Orwellian state, it does say that “the expansion in the use of surveillance represents one of the most significant changes in the life of the nation since the end of the Second World War.”

I can’t reporoduce the article here for . . . [more]

♫ Rise up this mornin,
Smiled with the risin sun,
Three little birds
Pitch by my doorstep
Singin sweet songs
Of melodies pure and true,
Sayin, (this is my message to you-ou-ou:)

Singin: dont worry bout a thing,
cause every little thing gonna be all right…♫

Music and lyrics by Bob Marley, recorded by Bob Marley & The Wailers

This year there are three great conferences on legal technology that one can attend. In order of time, the first is:

ABA TECHSHOW, held in Chicago April 2-4, 2009.

Close on the heels of Techshow is LegalIT in Montreal on April . . . [more]

A year ago, we mentioned that the Law Foundation of Ontario had launched a project on access to legal information and legal services by linguistic minorities and persons living in rural or remote areas. It focussed on access to two components (legal information and legal services) by two groups who can face isolation in our communities (linguistic minorities and persons in rural or remote areas). We should have updated that report to note George Thomson’s report issued in January, and the creation of a website on the topic.

It discusses the digital divide in terms of rural access . . . [more]

This morning’s Globe and Mail carried a death notice for Alison Youngman, who spearheaded Stikeman’s Technology and Outsourcing group, dead of cancer at too early an age.

She promoted the adoption of new technologies before it was fashionable to do so. She became a self-taught expert on technology law, creating a nationally recognized Technology and Outsourcing group for Stikemans. She published widely and served her profession by co-chairing the American Bar Association Negotiated Acquisitions Committee Task Force on Joint Ventures.

She was part of the OBA’s Business Law Section on the Modernization of Business Law in Ontario . . . [more]

There are times when you want to know who the head of state / government / power is in a particular jurisdiction, and for those times Rulers is the site you need. Something like CanLII’s new point-in-time legislation database, Rulers offers a point-in-time database of information about who was in charge here, there and everywhere between 1700 and now.

The site offers you four ways, more or less, to get into the data: an alpha index to the jurisdictions, an index of dates (this only back to 1996) of “relevant events,” an alpha index of everything, and a map keyed . . . [more]