Thanks to a tweet by Colin Lachance, I found out about the U.S. site Supreme Court Haiku, where judgments of that court are rendered in seventeen syllables. Colin challenged Slaw to come up with mini-poems for our own high court opinions, and I’m picking up the glove here, with the hope that our readers will add to my effort.

Supreme Court Haiku follows the typical move of this Japanese form into English, as described in Wikipedia:

Haiku (俳句 haikai verse?) plural haiku, is a form of Japanese poetry, consisting of 17 moras (or on), in three phrases

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Since I’m in rural Spain, I’ve no facilities for lengthy posts, so three pointers to interesting items from elsewhere in the world.

Let’s start with the best legal research sites you’ve never heard of. In an interview with LegallyIndia today, the ILS Pune Mooting Team – on their way to DC for the Jessup moot – were asked what research databases they used. Here is the answer:

MPL: How many online databases did you use for mooting research? Which, according to you, is the best online legal database?

Madhupreetha: Westlaw, Lexisnexis, Maxplanck, Oxford reports and Oxford Scholarship online were some

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But not to smoke in city parks, in Clayton, Missouri, at least. And Arthur Gallagher is fuming about it to the point that he’s hired a lawyer to sue the city for having infringed his constitutional rights. This is hardly a newsworthy event in the land of litigation. What made Courthouse News Service pick up the story was the humorous way in which the lawyer, W. Bevis Schock, set up the complaint. I’ll reproduce the opening bit, and let you peruse the rest of the complaint [PDF] on the Courthouse News site, if you’ve a mind to:

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I had a couple of bright ideas recently, one of which I forget and the other of which — well, like my idea for creating a website for good ideas — turns out to have been already done. The thought was to have a web page for each year, where you could find the signal events of that year along with links to news stories and so forth. And Wikipedia had that thought, too.

If you Google 1944 — or 1987, for that matter, though why you would I can’t imagine — the first thing in your results will . . . [more]

From OpenMedia.ca :

We have a unique opportunity to stop phone and cable company gouging if we act now.
Thanks to the nearly half-a-million people who signed the Stop The Meter Petition, the CRTC is now reviewing its decision to impose new fees on nearly all Internet users.

Industry Minister Clement told Parliament he will not allow the same decision to be passed by the CRTC, but has not specified whether he will accept a watered-down version of that decision. We know a Big Telecom-friendly compromise is being pushed behind closed doors. If we don’t speak up now we could

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The issues of prayers and religious symbols in provincial legislatures and municipal councils; religious-based schools and practices; and Canada as a multicultural country have caused widespread debate in Quebec and across Canada of late. You can hardly open a newspaper or listen to a news report and not catch at least one instance of it. Furthermore, with the recent increase in immigration, many Quebecers—and Canadians—are trying to define their identify: what does it mean to be a citizen of Quebec and a citizen of Canada? It has become a national issue!

Every so often — it seems to happen as Spring approaches — I ask your indulgence as I leave the law track to wander off to some shiny thing or other that pleases me so much that I need to write about it on Slaw. I ask it now, in order to point you to a pair of developments at Google that might just please you while you wait impatiently for Winter to end.

If you enjoy food, you may cook. And if you cook, you may occasionally want to glance at a recipe. It used to be that you’d . . . [more]

We learn last week that the Cornish pasty is safe at last from plain pasties passing themselves off as being from Cornwall, thanks to a decision by the European Union to give that delicacy Protected Geographical Indication status. In this it joins 19 other UK products and over a thousand from elsewhere in Europe protected by GI (“geographical indication”), DO (“designation of origin”), or TSG (“traditional speciality guaranteed”) status under European law.

There’s a designation database available online that you can search or browse by country, product and protection type.

A very few non-European nations can be found in the . . . [more]

There may be times when you’re be tempted to think that science has a lock on who we are and how we work. But just consider that some of the most basic things that make us human, that play important roles in our lives, remain rather mysterious. We don’t really know why we laugh, cry, dream, sleep — or how we smell the scents around us.

Smell is a loaded matter. Gets right to the heart of things, often things that we don’t generally talk about in “polite society” — which might, for that reason, be called “smell-blind” society. (Curious, . . . [more]

Did you know that if you attach a rock to a lightbulb and drop it into the ocean, the bulb will implode at about 100 metres with a peculiar “bang”?

I didn’t either. (If you’d like to hear that “bang,” click on this.)

More interesting, I suppose, is the fact that the undersea is a “blooming, buzzing confusion” of sounds, most of which are made by living beings. We, unfortunately, are responsible for noise pollution, causing distress to some ocean creatures, among them whales. These great beasts moan and whoop and click and pop, typically beneath the range of . . . [more]

The Quebec National Assembly announced during a sitting on February 15, 2011, a series of interim changes to the process for appointing Quebec judges.

I have updated the Law-Related Movies page on my Legal Research and Writing website by adding 16 titles for an overall new total of 114 law-related movies listed on my site.

In addition, where available, I have added a link to the Netflix listing for 21 of the 114 titles that are available on Netflix for ease of viewing for those readers with Netflix subscriptions (note: I have no connection to Netflix other than being a subscriber).

Although I was aware of all of but one of the newly added 16 movies (and have seen most of them), I am . . . [more]