News today of an ambitious transnational legal research project, International Law in Domestic Courts, run as a global collaborative venture, out of an OUP backbone. It’s an online law reporting service focusing on the salience of international law issues before domestic courts.

It has local reporters covering over 50 countries, and yet more are being recruited all the time. The service aims to bring to light the full range of domestic jurisprudence not just from the Commonwealth, Western Europe, and the USA, but also from Africa, Eastern Europe, Asia, and Central and South America. ILDC makes it possible to . . . [more]

Having a PEI cottage in a rural setting is highly recommended. One of the few challenges we have faced so far is staying connected. For the first few years, our dial up connection worked well, but last summer (mysteriously) it suddenly seemed impossibly slow. I recalled reading that our federal government was committed to “broadband access” for all, so I started investigating other options. I quickly discovered that Aliant (PEI phone company) does not offer high speed access to my part of the island. There are some local companies using (I think) microwave towers and satellite dish receivers but I . . . [more]

Our local paper in Chennai, The Hindu is reporting from an interview in Karnataka with Aztecsoft’s Vice President for the Bangalore Delivery Centre, Ravi Bala, that Microsfoft is offering a tool to help users convert their files to the `free-and-open’ standard known as Open Document Format (ODF). On Friday, Microsoft placed in the public domain, a converter between its proprietary Office Open XML (for eXtended Markup Language) format and ODF standard adopted by all Open Source software makers including the rival OpenOffice.org suite created by Sun Microsystems.

Well there had to be a catch, and the first one is . . . [more]

This one’s a strange one. It’s an imaginary city — the city of Galvez — revealed in a slideshow. The texture of the place, the skewing of the known into a 1930’s future-city, is what makes it strange. On top of that there’s a melancholy music track behind the pictures that evokes, for me at least, a kind of nostalgia for things that never were.

Once you’ve clicked on the main picture to get things going, choose the link to the slideshow that you’ll find on the upper right of the screen. You can, of course, go through the pictures . . . [more]

This in the nature of a Phriday Phillipic since the regular Friday Fillip is in the hands of the other Simon …
But thanks to Laurel Murdoch for Smiley SmileNot that Smiley Smile litigation., a delicious bit of IP litigation, that made the NYT today.

Harvey Ball claims to have been the creator of the smiley face. The story goes that the merger of the State Mutual Life Assurance Company of Worcester, MA (now known as Allmerica Financial) with Guarantee Mutual Company of Ohio crushed employee morale.

So nobly, Harvey Ball, freelance artist, was asked to create a . . . [more]

Has anyone heard of the Canadian Justice Review Board or Canadian Justice Review Council? I happened upon their website last night. It appears to be a grass roots organization with some directors in high places. One must take out a $20 membership to see the full content of the website so it has more the feel of a private club than an organization working for citizens. . . . [more]

As a result of his Slaw postings on the issue Simon Chester's views on the phenomenon of outsourcing legal work were featured in the June issue of National [pdf].

Congratulations are also in order to Justice Marshall Rothstein who has written the majority judgment in Ministry of Correctional Services v. Goodis, a case on public access to information, and claims of solicitor-client privilege. Justice Rothstein’s first decision as a judge of the Supreme Court of Canada was for a unanimous panel of nine.

The Court’s own headnote reads as follows:

A judge of the Divisional Court, who was reviewing a decision of the Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner, granted the requester’s counsel access to records notwithstanding a claim of solicitor‑client privilege by the Ministry of Correctional Services. The

. . . [more]

It’s our birthday! Well, tomorrow is, but that’s a Saturday and you know how that goes.

One year ago today I posted this:

And just look what happened! We’re under a hundred posts shy of one thousand and there have been over twelve-hundred comments. We post from sea (Mark Lewis in Halifax) to sea (Neil Campbell in Victoria and Steve Matthews in Vancouver) to sea (comments from “senatorhung” [sic] in Nunavut), with more than a dozen points in between. We post in both official languages (enfin!). And we’re good.

So happy birthday Slaw and fellow Slawyers! Enjoy the . . . [more]

Susan McDonald, a Tennessee lawyer, publishes the Legal Research and Writing Blog. She says of herself:

The internet and outsourcing have enabled me to build a successful practice of providing legal research and writing services to other lawyers around the country. This unique practice is a win-win situation for me and for my clients. I can combine my broad experience in litigation and judicial clerkships with a genuine passion for legal research and writing. With that combination, I provide writing projects that help my lawyer-clients better represent their own clients, without the overhead of an additional full-time attorney.

My

. . . [more]

Readers of Slaw will know about Dominic Jaar, thanks to a recent post by Slawyer Patrick Cormier full of praise for Jaar’s talk at a recent conference. Well now we can all benefit, because Jaar has a blog, Wine and Information Management, which seems to me to be a stellar combination.

A special welcome to yet another legal blogger from Québec. (See his recent Les juristes québécois ne blawgue pas.)

The RSS feed for WIM is http://dominicjaar.blogspot.com/atom.xml . . . [more]

Web 2.0 tools continue on their march to world domination. Latest to come to my attention (thanks, ResearchBuzz) is Gliffy, a diagramming program that operates within your browser. It can do what most commercial programs do (Giffy is free now but will likely charge in the near future), and it allows you to export your diagrams or share them on the web in various ways. Particularly useful is the ability to export in svg (scalable vector graphics) format, which permits the resizing of the image without loss of quality. . . . [more]