I now continue sharing some of the lessons I learned from walking the historic pilgrimage route in France and Spain, the Camino Frances, over six weeks in May and June. Sometimes we are our own worst enemies. Fear or a negative attitude can prevent us from getting to where we want to be or getting what we want. We saw this time and again on our walk. Allow me to share two such stories that stand out in my mind:

One day toward the beginning of our trip we had a very long, tiring journey. We arrived into a . . . [more]

I’ve had the luxury of doing some good reading this holiday weekend. I thought I would share a few of the articles and books I’ve been looking at:

Resistance to courtroom tweeting based on myth, not reality, by Dean Jobb (Globe and Mail, July 31, 2013)
This is a summary of attitudes and policies towards Twitter use in Canadian courtrooms including a model policy for social media use in the courtroom developed by a team put together by the the Canadian Centre for Court Technology. Hat tip Luigi Benetton.

The Changing Role of Women in the Law . . . [more]

January 1, 2014, is a new deadline in the application of the Pay Equity Act for Quebec organizations. This is the deadline by which many more employers with 10 or more employees will have to achieve pay equity in their business and have posted the results.

In a recent paper , Professor Cass Sunstein of Harvard University suggests American Supreme Court justices can be identified as adhering to four distinct personae in their adjudicatory style. Sunstein argues that constitutional law is dominated by those whom he calls: Heroes, Soldiers, Burkeans and Mutes. Ultimately, Sunstein’s point is that judges do not consistently identify as one specific persona, but that the standard theories of constitutional interpretation (originalism, moralism, etc) can lead to the adoption of one or another of the personae depending on the occasion.

While Sunstein’s account is meant to be limited to American constitutional law, his . . . [more]

Edward Snowden’s recent disclosures have revealed a need to rethink the way that the current legal structure governing the clandestine activities of intelligence agencies provides for proper oversight by Congress and the public at large.

I now continue sharing some of the lessons I learned from walking the historic pilgrimage route in France and Spain, the Camino Frances, over six weeks in May and June. Before we started our journey, the question in our minds was how we were going to sustain walking 20 or 25 (or even 30) kilometres a day, carrying all our belongings? We practiced hiking regularly with our backpacks loaded, but could only really manage time for walking two or maybe three days in a row. How would we walk for 35 days?

After the first two weeks–especially walking through . . . [more]

The Canadian Judicial Council (CJC) has just released its 2012-2013 Annual Report, aussi disponible en français, naturellement.

The Report noted the publication during the year of three informational documents related to the role of technology:

• Guidelines on Benchmarking of Costs
• Court Information Management Policy Framework to Accommodate the Digital Environment
• A Comparative Analysis of Key Characteristics of Court Administration Systems

Judicial conduct, one of the key concerns of the CJC, will be the subject of review:

In the coming months, Council will consider how best to engage stakeholders and other Canadians to explore all and any appropriate avenues

. . . [more]

As David Whelan says in today’s post on his blog, Finding Legal Information, law is “powered by words.” David directs us to WolframAlpha’s word information function, which is pretty impressive. You tend to think of WolframAlpha as the home of mathematical and scientific data — at least I do. So it’s a welcome surprise to find that they do “dictionary” better than anyone else online at the moment. Look up a word and you get the definition, the proper places for hyphenation, pronunciation, word frequency (from 1539 to 2007 using Google’s one million books sample), synonyms, antonyms, narrower and . . . [more]

To add to to your summer reading list:

The 2013 Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction goes to Stanford law professor Paul Goldstein for his novel Havana Requiem:

“The novel chronicles efforts by a lawyer, recovering alcoholic Michael Seeley, to help a group of aging Cuban jazz musicians and their families reclaim copyrights to their works. When his main client, Héctor Reynoso, goes missing, Seeley begins to realize that there is more to the story than music, and that a far deeper conspiracy is involved that might include both the Cuban secret police and his former law firm.”

The . . . [more]

Just in time for the summer silly season come a flurry of reports about successful new messaging systems in Asia and their “stickers.” (See, e.g., the WSJ story.) Prime among the systems is Line, which has developed a very large body of users in Japan and other Asian countries in a relatively short time, in part — if not principally — because of its use of “stickers.”

Stickers are rather more elaborate emoticons, small cartoons, in effect; Line has developed a cast of characters with “personalties,” further encoding, if you will, a kind of meaning within each graphic. . . . [more]

The Quebec government has followed up on its plans to legalize doctor-assisted suicide. On June 12, 2013, the government tabled in the National Assembly Bill 52, An Act respecting end-of-life care, which besides its main goal of ensuring that end-of-life patients are provided with care “that is respectful of their dignity and their autonomy,” establishes specific requirements for certain types of medical assistance to die.

I got new lenses in my glasses this week. They’re called progressive, and I’m therefore trying my best to look at this sign of aging as a positive step forward.

As a first-time wearer of progressive lenses, I received a few helpful tips at the fitting:

• Point with your nose – in other words, look with your whole face, not just your eyes or your view will be distorted
• Keep your head vertically aligned or you’ll lose focus.
• Avoid the sidelong glance – you’ll be looking outside the field of focus
• When you look down, lower your chin so you

. . . [more]