My week for finding things that have been around for ages, in this case LawNow, a magazine and, as LawNow.org, a website with associated services. The tagline for LawNow is “relating law to life in Canada,” which, you might guess, means that it’s aimed at real people rather than legal folk. I can see that it might be useful in a highschool law course. The mag is by subscription only ($26/year); a subscription to LawNow Plus ($89/yr) gets you the magazine and alerts about changes to legislation or information on selected cases as well as access to the . . . [more]

Anyone involved in teaching lawyers and law students should take a look at a Berkman Center paper, “New Skills, New Learning: Legal Education and the Promise of New Technology” by Gene Koo. The study does a good job of analysing the problems and promises that face lawyers in respect of technology and raises some of the right questions for those responsible for educating students. A paragraph from the conclusion:

Law firms, continuing legal education providers, technology providers, and law schools all have a role to play in ensuring that attorneys are prepared for a technologically-mediated world. To meet

Caught this piece in The Globe and Mail: Flickr is now internationalizing its services by offering them in seven other languages besides English. Sites in French, German, Korean, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and traditional Chinese will soon be introduced.

Did you know this about Flickr?….

Over to Mysore, where the Economic Times reports that Smith Dornan Dehn (SDD) Global Solutions, a subsidiary business formed by SDD, a Manhattan-based international media and intellectual property firm, is working on providing legal research and script-vetting for major Hollywood productions. The resumes of the legal researchers are impressive.

Its clients include Elsevier, HBO, Sony Pictures Television, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal Pictures, MTV Networks, Channel Four TV (UK), and ABC apparently.

The litigation over Borat, the highest grossing comedy film in history ($300 million) is being handled out of Mysore. We are also doing legal planning for Universal

The House of Lords today rejected claims by families of people killed in Iraq that European human rights law applied to the conduct of British troops in Iraq. The case is Al-Skeini and others v. Secretary of State for Defence.

They said that such laws only applied to people held in custody by British troops, refusing to extend that protection to those injured or killed by such soldiers on the streets of Iraq.

This was a test case of six Iraqis killed by British troops in southern Iraq in separate incidents in 2003. The case was brought by the . . . [more]

In last week’s Weekly Checklist of federal government publications, the 2006 annual report by Justice Canada on applications for ministerial review in cases of possible miscarriages of justice is listed:

“Under Canadian law, the Minister of Justice has the legal authority to review a criminal conviction on the basis that there may have been a miscarriage of justice (…)”

“If the Minister is satisfied that those matters provide a reasonable basis to conclude that a miscarriage of justice likely occurred, the Minister may grant the convicted person a remedy – a referral of the case to the court of appeal

The B.C. People’s Law School has been around for over 30 years. I should have known. Thanks to Stan Rule’s Rule of Law I’m finally clued in. He points us to a recent brochure “A Death in Your Family: Practical Considerations on the Death of a Loved One.” There are a dozen and a half other publications available on the website, and a list of planned talks on various legal topics. Brochures are available in an impressive variety of languages. . . . [more]

There’s an enjoyable, short article on Edward Tufte in this week’s New York Magazine: “The Minister of Information” by Christopher Bonanos. Tufte’s latest book, Beautiful Evidence, was (self)published in 2006. His work is interesting for us, I think, because, in the words of the article, “Pretty much anyone who writes or presents can learn from Tufte,” and my guess is that we’ve been know to do both.

This is the book that talks about “sparklines,”There’s a fairly extensive discussion and a draft of the sparklines chapter on Tufte’s website. I used this site to create the . . . [more]

Two months ago (to the day, as it happens) I noticed that in CanLII‘s new system when a search brought up a case there was no easy way to capture a tidy URL for it. Daniel Poulin took the time out of his undoubtedly busy schedule of road-testing the renovated facility to tell us that the matter would be fixed and a “human readable” URL, as he put it, made available. I’m happy, but not surprised, to report that it has indeed been fixed.

As before, my test search term was Hamilton v. Open Window Bakery, entered into . . . [more]

I have increasingly had the feeling of frustration with Microsoft Word as software for research and scholarship and I recall that in the 90’s, Bob Franson from UBC hosted at least one conference where he introduced a software programme called Nota Bene. I have played around with this somewhat. It can be quite complicated, but looks like a very powerful tool if you can master it. Does anyone else have experience using Nota Bene or more knowledge of its use in law and legal research that they can share? . . . [more]

Seeing all of the attention, I have just downloaded a new browser, Safari which is supposed to be lightning fast and a quantum improvement over IE and MF. Simon F will likely tell us that he’s been using it for years, but this is the first time that those of us in the Microsoft Windows and Vista worlds have had a chance to see what it looks like.

It downloaded quickly, and I’ve played with it for an hour or so. It has some useful features, though I prefer the look, feel and speed of Mozilla Firefox.

I don’t know . . . [more]

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates have a great podcast over at the D5 Conference which is available at the Itunes store.

The rivalry is friendly – and the war seems to have been a media hype. Don’t miss the initial video-clips from the early 1980s, with Gates looking about 28.

And it’s also revealing about the shape of the future. . . . [more]