Prime Minister Stephen Harper has announced the appointment of Steven Point as British Columbia’s newest Lieutenant-Governor.

Steven Point’s experience includes being a provincial court judge based out of Abbotsford BC, the Chief Commissioner of the British Columbia Treaty Commission, and is an elected Chief of the Skowdale First Nation. . . . [more]

On the first day of the new school year (since this is my first time in a while not actually going back to school, I’m feeling a little nostalgic) people are often optimistic about what the year holds in store. In the spirit of this optimism, I thought I’d point out an online application for any students reading here.

Notemesh, a “social note-taking” application, is based on a philosophy that can seem a little out of place in law school. In their own words, “the goal is that everyone will work together to create a set of lecture notes . . . [more]

Earlier this year, Simon Fodden wrote about Scrybe, an online calendar that was in beta at the time. Although it is still not generally available, Scrybe was written up in this weekend’s NY Times.

The calendaring functions look pretty intriguing, but as Simon pointed out, they may not be enough to cause people to leave their familiar programs. I’m still interested, though, if they can find some sort of solution that allows me to sync up my various calendars – my Google calendar for my personal life, Outlook for my work life, and my phone for important nags when I’m . . . [more]

As of tomorrow, the modern remnant of the “Long Vacation”[1] is over for us Canadian civil litigators. Some of us might be starting trials, tomorrow.

Tell me why
I don’t like Mondays
I want to shoot
The whole day down

from I Don’t Like Mondays (c) The Boomtown Rats, Bob Geldof (1979)

Especially if one isn’t prepared. Preparation means facts and law. One can’t know what facts might be relevant unless one knows the relevant law. And, one owes it to one’s client, and the judge, and the jury where there is one, to go to court with the . . . [more]

done to the tune of Donovan’s Season of the Witch (Kooper – Still’s Super Session version, of course).

When I look out my window,
Many sights to see.
And when I look in my window,
So many different people to be
…
Must be the season of the switch.

OK, so I switched a word. Sue me.

Simon F’s taken heart in hand, foot in mouth, tongue in cheek, etc. and allowed me to shift from occasional to core contributor, on threat of dire consequences if I stray too far from “hailing distance of research/IT/legal-information”. 

“Sue me” is within “hailing . . . [more]

In praise of… free law

Leader – The Guardian
Monday September 3, 2007

History tends to forget that the Sheriff of Nottingham had a greater purpose than hunting down Robin Hood. Like every county sheriff, he was supposed to ensure that the burghers of Notts knew the law of the land, however recently it had been proclaimed in distant Westminster. The injustice of this myth of convenience never troubled Robin Hood, but it did worry Hobbes, Bentham and, more recently, the magisterial Lord Brooke, a former chairman of the Law Commission and appeal court judge. In the internet era, . . . [more]

Nice to know we are being read on the Monterey peninsula . . . [more]

. . . [more]

Just a month after a science fiction writer speculated on storage devices the size of a grain of sand comes news from the magazine Science of developments in magnetic anisotropy that could eventually be used to store information in individual atoms, paving the way to pack as much as 150 trillion bits of data per square inch, 1,000 times more than current data storage densities. In other words, the ability to store data in individual atoms could lead to devices capable of storing the equivalent of 30,000 movies in a device the size of an iPod.

The first paper describes . . . [more]

Today’s Guardian Blog”Guardian Blog contains an impassioned plea to keep the world’s most famous reading room as just that.

The Reading Room was Karl Marx’s office. It was used by a large number of famous figures, including notably Karl Marx, Oscar Wilde, Mahatma Gandhi, Rudyard Kipling, George Orwell, George Bernard Shaw, V. I. Lenin (under the name of Jacob Richter), Bram Stoker, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and H. G. Wells. It was according to Norman Lebrecht, a “Room [which] was neither loved by users, nor conducive to creative thought”. Still…what a space.

. . . [more]

In the blogosphere, according to a piece in law.com entitled Is the Future of Legal Scholarship in the Blogosphere?

Though according to Warren Kinsella quoted in the Hill-Times, such views are so 2006, since blogs are passé and the action’s elsewhere. . . . [more]

Earlier this week on Slaw Evan Van Dyk asked about podcasts and got a number of good suggestions. Must be the Zeitgeist, because at roughly the same time Alex Iskold of Read/WriteWeb reported how podcasting is on the decline, losing steam to video, among other things — and I’d teed up a sound file as today’s fillip.

My offering this Friday is Dylan Thomas’s Under Milkwood read (not acted — audio, remember?) by that other son of the red dragon, Richard Burton. And in case you don’t want to close your eyes and let the sonorous sloe syrinx of the . . . [more]