To mark this past Canada Day, the National Archives of the UK put online hundreds of old photos of Canada, many of which pre-date Confederation. There’s some amazing shots in there.

Ontario lawyers may recognize this building…

. . . [more]

Here’s a small matter, tiny in fact:

I’m collating some material from various Canadian law firm websites, and as part of the project I need to record the firm name along with the material I’m referencing. I imagine I’m not alone in doing this sort of thing: whether it’s a phone number, a lawyer’s name, or something the firm’s proud of and has published, it’s pretty common to grab it with select-copy-paste, and sensible too to select-copy-paste the firm name into the note as well. Yes, I could type McCarthy Tétrault, but I’m as stingy with my keystrokes as the . . . [more]

The best cup of coffee I ever had was made by my cousin in London when we were both impoverished students. I was visiting, and to celebrate he sprang for a slim packet of freshly roasted and ground coffee, which he then brewed by putting it in a chipped juge and pouring boiled water over it. After a bit he ran the back of a cold spoon over the surface of the water, as I recall, causing some floating grounds to sink to the bottom. And then he poured. Lovely.

Of course, it was London. We were young. I was . . . [more]

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 Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, / Searches.
(With apologies to Omar Khayyám)

Google’s just made a new feature available for searching on mobile or tablet platforms. “Handwrite” allows you to write your search terms with your finger on any portion of the screen. You have to enable the function by going to “settings” at the bottom of your Google search page, where you’ll find the option. You can then turn it on or off from the basic search page, as you wish.

I’ve tried it on my iPhone and find that the writing recognition function is quite . . . [more]

A Facebook comment by a juror made before a trial has resulted in a mistrial. CBC news reports that on the first day of a Moncton murder trial of Fred Prosser, the victim’s family brought to the judge’s attention the fact that one of the jurors was a member of a Facebook group against the accused, and had posted comments on it. The judge declared a mistrial to avoid the possibility that this juror had already tainted the rest of the jury.

You can hear David Fraser’s comments in this CBC interview. David comments that many people don’t appreciate . . . [more]

It irks me a little each time I hear someone announce that this or that phrase is an oxymoron — “efficient government,” for example, or “civil service”. It’s the prescriptivist in me, of course, wanting to say that what they almost always mean is a “contradiction in terms,” because an “oxymoron” is a deliberately conceived figure of speech and not an accidental collision. But let’s face it, nowadays that stuff is all Greek to most of us, and “oxymoron” in the strict sense is the day before yesterday, along with the nearly 160 other technical terms used to describe the . . . [more]

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.

You’ll likely have read about the effort by Stephen Harper and assorted other defendants to have Helena Guergis’s statement of claim for defamation and all manner of other unkindness thrown out as failing to disclose a reasonable cause of action and for raising non-justiciable issues. That motion continues to be argued today.

What you might not have read, however, is the statement of claim itself, court records not being digitized and accessible over the internet. But the CBC now does what all good news agencies should be doing: they make the original documents that lie behind stories available online. So . . . [more]

Elections Ontario has just disclosed that they lost USB drives containing personal information on as many as 2.4 million voters. The USB drives were supposed to be password-protected, encoded and kept in a locked area accessible only to specific staffers – but were not. The Ontario Privacy Commissioner, Ann Cavoukian, is investigating. Her initial comment:

I am deeply disturbed that a breach of this extent, the largest in Ontario history, involving millions of individuals, could happen at Elections Ontario — the agency charged with protecting the integrity of our electoral process. . .

It is my expectation that personally identifiable . . . [more]

It was at first a surprise to me to see this headline: “New Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is pregnant”. Was this really newsworthy? But it became clear very quickly that the story was significant, if only for the fact that it reveals some of the challenges still faced by women in the workplace.

As reported by Fortune, Ms. Mayer has known of her pregnancy since January when she was still with Google, got the initial call from Yahoo in mid-June and disclosed her pregnancy in late June:

Mayer first disclosed to the Yahoo board that she is pregnant in

On this very date less than half a dozen summers ago I was lucky enough to be part of a group of volunteer roadies setting up a rock and roll concert in a big field in a small town. Steppenwolf with John Kay was to be the headliner, followed by a string of other bands. The air was hot, the buzz building, the Patrón Tequila folks had arrived, things that needed doing were getting done, and even lowly gofers like me were touching the electric hem of showtime excitement.

This would have been enough of a kick for me, at . . . [more]