India, either the world’s most or second most populous country, in any case boasting damn near 20% of the planet’s people. A country worth paying attention to for this and a host of other reasons. And that’s the beauty of it: we can pay attention to what’s happening in India in a way that we cannot with its “semblable, son frère,” China, because in India English is a widespread lingua franca. There are reputable newspapers in English. Indian novelists sometimes write in English. Laws, judgments and the proceedings of Parliament are all available in English.

But today . . . [more]

Those of us Canadians who live in Toronto or Vancouver know not to be smug about England’s riots; we’ve been there recently, albeit on a smaller scale, thankfully. We might, however, be in a good position to reflect on the question of why people riot, or, to put it impersonally, because a mob does seem to deprive its members of effective personhood, what makes a riot. On a personal note, I can attest to this mob mentality, having been in a riot in my youth — one, I might add, that had absolutely no good pretext and was formed entirely . . . [more]

Fastcase has just announced the Fastcase 50, the “fifty most interesting, provocative, and courageous leaders in the world of law, scholarship, and legal technology”. The entire list is interesting but let’s mention 5 friends who may be familiar to Slaw readers.

Congratulations to each of them:

David Whelan
David Whelan is a lawyer, librarian, and technologist who has truly seen it all. He currently serves as the Manager of Legal Information for the Law Society of Upper Canada (as head librarian of the Great Library, the job is often referred to as “the Great Librarian”). David previously served as . . . [more]

When you teach at law school, as I have, you become familiar with a variety of reasons as to why students choose to study law—perhaps there’s a history of lawyers in the family; or their parents want them to do something, anything professional; or they want to right wrongs, get that BMW, enter politics, point damning fingers at witnesses… Even with those students who wound up in law school with apparently only a shrug for a reason, some explanation eventually surfaced.

Now there is a novel explanation—at least for a small portion of the student body. Two recent studies have . . . [more]

Last year, when Thomson Reuters acquired the Canada Law Book Company, we expected that CLB’s President and CEO, Stuart Morrison would enjoy a well-earned retirement, after winding up all the Cartwright Group businesses that West didn’t acquire. That is why we were shocked to learn that he died of leukemia on Saturday. . . . [more]

These are notes are from a panel presentation session at the American Bar Association 2011 conference in Toronto last Thursday. Panelists included lawyer/librarian Matthew Braun, Legal Reference Specialist at the Law Library of Congress in Washington, DC, Sara Sommarstrom, Program Director, Minnesota Justice Foundation, and Prof. Nanette Elster, Vice President, Spence & Elster and Adjunct Faculty, The John Marshall Law School, Chicago, IL. Note: these are my selected notes from this session; any inaccuracies or omissions are my own. I welcome your comments and follow-up thoughts!

This session was made up of three very different presentations exploring . . . [more]

A couple of years back, I took you to a place in Germany where they were making penguins fly. Today I’d like to take you back there again, because this time they’ve managed to make a herring gull fly. Big whoop, you say. Yes, except that the herring gull is a construct of foam and carbon fibre — and it flies by flapping its wings, something no other human construct has been able to do reliably.

The place is the Festo firm, and the gull is SmartBird:

This bionic technology-bearer, which is inspired by the herring gull, can start,

http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/elephant-in-the-room.html

Reece v. Edmonton (City), 2011 ABCA 238

Substitute child for animal in the Alberta legislation involved (the Animal Protection Act, R.S.A. 2000, c. A-41) , call it the Child Protection Act, and assume everything else is effectively the same.

Would the majority have made the same decision and on the same grounds? If not, their analysis is wrong.

If they didn’t see that, they should have.

If they would have made the same decision, imagine the public screaming.

Given that, do you think the decision would still have been the same or would the majority have found . . . [more]

Two disparate articles caught my eye this morning that are worthy of pondering.

Apple has sued Samsung claiming that Samsung’s tablets violate Apple tablet patents. Some of the features in question are actually part of the Android operating system, not just the tablet itself. In Australia, sales of Samsung’s new Galaxy Tab 10.1 are on hold pending court action. Setting aside the legal issues, and the debate over whether such patents are a good or bad thing for innovation, consider this point of view by Mike Masnick of Techdirt:

But, really, all Apple has done with this lawsuit is

We here in Canada hark with yearning for the likes of Pandora or Spotify. (I exaggerate slightly.) And we likely will for a while, because the Canadian arms of the big music copyright owners can’t seem to strike a deal with the internet. Which, some might think, only leads to circumnavigation.

One such music-purveying “wide sailor” has made available a bunch of Illustrated Mixtapes that you might enjoy. Gigawatt, a designer, has created sets of mixtape albumns designed to offer you listening pleasure throughout the various stages of your day. Thus, each of the five (soon to be six) . . . [more]

With the Canadian Law Blogs List now surpassing 300 entries (100 in the past year), along with the continued growth of law firms and lawyers using Twitter, Canadian legal web-commentary is definitely on the rise. One segment that’s lacked exposure, however, is the number of in-house perspectives from north of the border.

Happily, that change has started, with the Canadian Corporate Counsel Association (a Stem client) providing a foot in the Twittersphere door. Launched earlier this month to coincide with a website redesign, @CCCA_News will provide a mix of:

• news stories relevant to corporate counsel from Canada, the United

Google+ is the latest social media tool. It will take some time before we know how it will fit in with twitter, facebook and linkedin. Opinions range from it being a nuisance as it is just another thing we need to follow, to being a superior tool that will supplant other social media. But for now its growth rate has been phenomenal – 20 million users in 24 days.

So I thought it would be interesting to look at what I would have learned so far this week from Google+ if that was my only source of information. These are . . . [more]