Thanks to BeSpacific, I’ve learned that the U.S. 7th Circuit federal court of appeal is making oral arguments available by podcast. The link in BeSpacific to the court page is borked“Irretrievably broken”: Urban Dictionary. It should be: http://www.ca7.uscourts.gov/ca7_rss.htm. The RSS feed comes in two flavours: standard audio podcast and “iTunes optimized.”

I chose the latter and popped it into iTunes. Nine oral arguments were included in the package for the ninth of August. I listened to the first, USA v. Sergio Arcuri, a criminal case. Poor Mr. Holsinger (sp?), counsel for the appellant. He . . . [more]

I’m in the middle of revamping an instruction session on finding tax treaties worldwide. Since most people aren’t very familiar with treaties/international agreements, I include a review/clarification of some key treaty-related terms. To help me out with this, I’ve been relying on the United Nations Treaty Reference Guide. It defines in great detail key treaty-related terminology (parties vs contracting states, treaty vs agreement vs convention, etc). It also defines terms related to treaty actions (adoption, ratification, entry into force, etc). . . . [more]

A group called Legal Community Against Violence, a San Francisco-based public interest law centre dedicated to preventing gun violence, has just released a comprehensive overview of U.S. federal and state laws on gun control.

The report looks at gun laws in a number of broad areas: classes of weapons, restrictions on sales and transfers, gun dealers, gun ownership, consumer and child safety, and crime detection (ballistic identification, retention of sales records, background checks).

Last December, I wrote a post on my blog Library Boy entitled Gun Control Resources that provided links to Canadian and international resources (Australia, New Zealand, . . . [more]

The Law Commission of Canada released its annual report for 2006 this week.

It is short (30 pages) and provides brief summaries of the research and consultation work done in areas such as globalization and the law, international informal banking, indigenous legal traditions, the definition of “crime”, the future of policing, secured financing on reserves, the protection of vulnerable workers, age and intergenerational relationships, and immigrant settlement. . . . [more]

I’m pleased to announce that Agnese Caruso has joined Slaw as a core contributor.

Agnese is a Research Specialist in the Tax Research Centre at PwC Management Services LP (Price Waterhouse, that is). She has had her own blog, TaxHeat, noted here in Slaw a while back, but has decided that she’d rather bring her talents to us. We’re glad.

Please welcome Agnese Caruso. . . . [more]

I can’t think of a less likely subject for a newspaper editorial than the merits of LC Classification systems. Yet today’s New York Times has just that.

It talks about the New York Public LibraryWhose Catnyp catalogue I use every week. moving away from a home grown classification system, which while delightfully ideosyncraticAll such is relative., confounded users accustomed to conventional catalogues and defied updating.

In the Canadian law library context, all major private law firms with national practices, save one, use modified KFThe best article on KF and the development of Canadian law library cataloguing comes . . . [more]

“Porn for book nerds”. VERY effective! The “nonist” writes, “… (14) gorgeous photos, nearly all without visitors and just begging to be entered.”

I’m speechless with library lust! I know some of you will feel the same way. Has anyone had the opportunity to visit any of these libraries or any other such incredible ones?

See 14 photos from Candida Höfer’s book, Libraries, at Red-Hot and Filthy Library Smut Get a copy for yourself at Amazon.ca.

. . . [more]

An announcement this morning from Lexis about the results of an Ipsos Reid poll on the legal rights of cohabiting couples is as remarkable for its sponsor as its content.

Ipsos Reid conducted the survey for lawyers.com, an online legal resource centre from LexisNexis Canada that helps consumers and small businesses find lawyers and legal information. For the survey, a representative, randomly selected sample of 1,184 adult Canadians completed an online survey.

Given the extent to which there seems to be public misapprehension of rights, it will be interesting to see what products this spurs Lexis to produce.

I . . . [more]

There is an article about the latest cricket controversy in today’s International Herald Tribune. It concerns an incident of ‘ball-tampering’ by a Pakistani bowler in an England/Pakistan match that led to a forfeited match, diplomatic row and subsequent banishment of all other less important world affairs (such as the situation in Lebanon) to the back pages of the British newspapers. The article indicates in its title that cheating in cricket does not happen – a fact that any follower of the game knows not to be true. It may “not be cricket” but it does happen and there have . . . [more]

A new to me website, but obviously not to 35 thousand other people… Gliffy is a web-2.o cross between writely and MS Visio. Lots of drag-n-drop tools for work flows, wireframes, floor plans. Plus, it’s a web application that requires no additional software.

The other cool part is the ability to collaborate with others. As an example, here’s a 30 second diagram of my living room. I could add my wife as an editor to that file. Then, she could rearrange everything before getting me to schlep our stuff 6-ways from monday! ;-) There are probably some nifty possibilities . . . [more]

Must be something in the Antipodean water. Following on the controversy concerning McLachlin CJC’s speech on Unwritten Constitutional PrinciplesGiven at the 2005 Lord Cooke Lecture in Wellington, New Zealand., which led to such a dust-up after Maurice Vellacott, MP misread it, comes a lively story in the Sydney Morning Herald.
This one involves Justice Mason’s rejection of much of the judicial role under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms that would be familiar to everyone of Slaw’s readers within Canada. It’s all in the context of how much courts should touch issues of religion.

The swipe at . . . [more]

Well before there was Web 2.0, General Electric — yes, GE — put up a lovely timewaster that let you draw in your browser. Now it’s back reborn as a whiteboard and sporting the essential element of a Web 2.0 whiteboard, shareability.

Imagination Cubed offers you various tools — text, pencil, shapes, backgrounds — and each with a menu of possibilities — to let you draw your way to clarity, when text in row after row just won’t do. Unfortunately you’re not able to upload or paste in a graphic, which would have been handy, allowing for collaborative markup. But . . . [more]