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.

. . . [more]

Statistics Canada has published an article in its Juristat publication on Police-reported clearance rates in Canada, 2010.

The article shows that police are solving more crimes than in the past.

Among the highlights:

• In 2010, three-quarters of homicides were solved by police.
• In 2010, almost three-quarters of violent crimes were solved by police compared with about one-quarter of property crimes.
• Police solved just over 8 in 10 aggravated assault and aggravated sexual assault incidents in 2010, among the highest clearance rates for violent offences.
• About 4 in 10 robberies were solved by police, the lowest of any violent offence.

. . . [more]

There was a time when the career path of a lawyer was straighter than an arrow.

You went to law school, articled with a firm that hired you as an associate. You worked hard, made partner, at some point took part in management, then retired.

Or perhaps you shifted your practice to one other firm, but essentially the road in front of you was well-worn and clear.

Yes, I’m talking about life before 1990.

Now the road is strewn with rocks and pebbles, and juts around landslides.

The career path of lawyers is less linear.

As a result, an interesting . . . [more]

According to a recent study conducted by the Quebec Commission des droits de la personne et des droits de la jeunesse (Quebec's Human Rights Commission), equally skilled and qualified candidates are 60 percent more likely to be invited to a job interview when their family name is of "Québécois origin" (as stated in the study) than if it sounds like a name of African, Arab or Latin-American origin.

Raise your hand if you have ever used the interlibrary loan service of a public or educational institution library. Are you sure? This service is fairly transparent and may have included interlibrary borrowing between far flung branches of a regional library system. My little library in the town of Onoway, Alberta – population hovering around 1000 people, offers a library catalogue of nearly 3 milion items. Plenty of these items are shipped using the Library Book Rate, a Canada Post services that has provided a reduced rate for mailing library books since 1939.

In 2008, a Strategic Review of Canada . . . [more]

Big doings in the sky today — so big, in fact, that no one alive now will ever see their like again. Which is perhaps some small justification for intruding this information into a site on law. You’ll likely have read about it in your newspaper. But I thought you might like a reference to some websites that go into the phenomenon in greater detail and that offer a chance to see the event online, in case your sky is clouded over at the crucial time.

Go to TransitofVenus.org, where you’ll find pretty much everything you need to . . . [more]

The UK Supreme Court last week handed down its 5-2 split decision upholding the extradition of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to Sweden, but later the same day the Court issued a “Further Statement” explaining it had granted Assanges’s lawyer 14 days to apply re-open the appeal for further written or oral submissions.

On reviewing the Court’s reasons Assange’s lawyer submitted the decision was made on a ground that was not argued at the hearing.

The question for the Court was whether it should validate the European Arrest Warrant seeking to extradite Assange to Sweden to be questioned concerning . . . [more]

We write. And become attached to what we write. We put something of ourselves into it, even if it’s a routine patch of prose for work. How discouraging, then, to have our words thrown back into our faces as unworthy.

One of the steps to becoming a lawyer, I’d say, is learning that professional writing, at least, is a collaborative venture. You give your draft to colleagues who feel free to wield the red pencil, or its slightly nicer Word “comment” version; and with varying degrees of irritation you suck it up and hit “accept changes.” Nothing personal. Still. . . . . [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.

. . . [more]

It is no secret that the hottest item in the news these days in the province of Quebec has been the student protests over tuition hikes and Bill 78. Among the plethora of articles and opinions, one recently caught my eye: provincial politicians have not been utilizing Twitter to its fullest extent and to their advantage during time.

It is clear that Twitter has played a huge role these last few weeks, as public protests have been organized more spontaneously, with the Montreal police and public transportation system keeping the population abreast of developments as affected by the protests. Twitter . . . [more]

Among the top dozen creditors of Dewey & LeBoeuf which filed for bankruptcy yesterday were some familiar names:

Thomson Reuters $2.363 M

Lexis Nexis $1.413 M

Wolters Kluwer $653 K

I find the relative scale of the debts interesting, as well as the fact that the three publishers must have been prepared to continue to extend credit long after the newspapers were spreading word of Dewey & LeBoeuf’s troubles far and wide.

We’ve had scant experience of law firm insolvencies so I don’t know what has traditionally happened to the library when a firm closes its doors. Or in today’s . . . [more]

Statistics Canada has released the latest batch of stats from the criminal courts (2010/2011). As usual, The Daily has a handy overview; those who are interested in the finer details will find them in the corresponding Juristat publication.

Some points of note:

• The caseload has remained pretty much the same as it was the previous year, at 403,000 cases.
• The great majority of cases involved non-violent offences (77%).
• The most commonly-occurring offence was impaired driving (12%).
• Young adults (18-24) are greatly over-represented: 30% of all accused vs. 12% of the population.
• Two-thirds of cases resulted in a finding

. . . [more]