This is a post in a series appearing each Friday, setting out some articles, videos, podcasts and the like that contributors at Slaw are enjoying and that you might find interesting. The articles tend to be longer than blog posts and shorter than books, just right for that stolen half hour on the weekend. It’s also likely that most of them won’t be about law — just right for etc.

Please let us have your recommendations for what we and our readers might like.

Yesterday at the Law via the Internet conference, Clay Shirky, author of “Here Comes Everybody” and “Cognitive Surplus” described how people were using RapGenius.com to do more than explain rap lyrics…they were using it to explain law.

Here’s an example: 

Will “the crowd” develop an interest in annotating the law?

There is a pretty exciting project underway in Quebec that has built a platform for just that purpose.

In the meantime, go here to read more about Clay Shirky’s presentation and to watch the video.

Finally, if you want to try your hand at annotating Canadian law, we’ve . . . [more]

Many of us donate some of our time for a cause – whether it is providing pro bono time to a client, or volunteering on a board. We do this for many reasons – including client development and the promotion of our practices. But if we do it just for those reasons, we will do a second rate job, which will be transparent and won’t accomplish anything. Pick something you feel strongly about, that you find interesting, where you think you can make a difference, or where you might learn something new. It will help the community, broaden your horizons, . . . [more]

We haven’t talked about Wordle for a while. I used some public graphics from Wordle.net in a recent presentation and thought it would be neat to do a Slaw.ca Wordle.

Older versions of Slaw related Wordle graphics:
Slaw Tip on Wordle
November 2010 Slaw Wordle

It is interesting to see how these have changed over time. . . . [more]

UK online newspapers and blogs are buzzing with the proposal outlined by George Osborne, a British Conservative politician and Chancellor of the Exchequer, at the Tory conference yesterday: in exchange for shares given by their employer, newly hired employees would have to give up certain employment rights (see here for The Guardian article). Under this program, employees would be able to waive certain rights with regard to unfair dismissal, redundancy, flexible work time and receive rights of ownership. This employment-ownership scheme would see a large deregulation of the labour market and encourage start-up companies that are concerned with all the . . . [more]

The New York Times has a story about hackers who have broken into servers at 53 universities and have published online certain student records and other data.

The universities concerned are principally in the United States but include some in other countries. Two Canadian universities have had their servers hacked: the University of British Columbia and McMaster University.

I’ve followed up the hyperlinks provided and find that data from both these universities is openly available online at the time of writing. . . . [more]

Here’s a neat graphic summarizing the many ways in which social media interrupts us and erodes productivity, based, I think, on this Microsoft study. Conveniently, there’s an app for that. . . . [more]

Who is this dapper fellow, you might ask? He’s a California gold miner, and he’s sporting one of the first pairs of Levi Strauss’s serge de Nîmes pants. What makes them special, apart from the fact they’re made of denim, is the use of rivets at the critical joints, an invention that Strauss’s partner, Jacob Davis, patented in 1873. The image is from that patent application, as is the following:

My invention relates to a fastening for pocket-openings, whereby the sewed seams are prevented from ripping or starting from frequent pressure or strain thereon; and it consists in the

This is a post in a series appearing each Friday, setting out some articles, videos, podcasts and the like that contributors at Slaw are enjoying and that you might find interesting. The articles tend to be longer than blog posts and shorter than books, just right for that stolen half hour on the weekend. It’s also likely that most of them won’t be about law — just right for etc.

Please let us have your recommendations for what we and our readers might like.

The law’s a wordy thing, but from time to time it resorts to images to get its point across, as we’ve pointed out occasionally here on Slaw. The idea is, most often, that an image or a graphic representation can be taken in all at once — as a gestalt — which is assumed to happen more quickly than the decoding that takes place as we move (leaping, it turns out) through a text from left to right. This is one reason graphic laws find themselves on traffic signs.

But what seems obvious to one observer — the “draftsperson,” say . . . [more]

Across Canada tomorrow there are multiple vigils being held on behalf of Sisters in Spirit, a national campaign to honour the lives of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls. The Sisters in Spirit campaign was initially funded by Status of Women in order to address violence against Aboriginal women and girls, but expanded to include murdered and missing Aboriginal women and girls. Federal funding for the Sisters in Spirit campaign ended in 2010.

In 1988, a Manitoba provincial inquiry (“the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry”) examined the death of Helen Betty Osborne and found that her murder was clearly motivated by . . . [more]

It is becoming more common for businesses and not for profits to require criminal record checks for new employees and volunteers, and to have current employees and volunteers update them every few years. This stems from liability and safety concerns. To avoid, for example, someone who has a violent criminal record from being around children, or someone convicted of fraud handling money. 

As this process becomes more common, it has arguably raised the bar for liability standards, thus making it even more common. At least one government provider of grants to the arts sector has stated that it won’t give . . . [more]