Well unlike 2007’s dubious image, Google and Robert Indiana have combined with a lovely image for the chosen day:

The Law Society of England and Wales asks us today:

Tweet for justice

Justice for All is calling for supporters to assist in tweeting their love for legal aid on Valentine’s day. Please retweet I love #legalaid @MoJGovUK @JusticeAll. You can also send justice secretary Kenneth Clarke an electronic Valentine’s card.
Send a Valentine’s e-card

Since I did a composite post on Law and Love – An Eclectic Research Nosegay for Valentine’s Day five year’s ago, here it is . . . [more]

Analysis is a destructive process. It involves dissolving the whole so as to get at the constituent parts, something human beings seem to like to do. I know I was into it as a kid, “analysing” my bike, my radio, and pretty much anything that wasn’t a clearly solid lump. (Now putting it all back together was a different story. But that’s a different story.)

There’s legal analysis, of course. And then there’s fun breakdown. One good example of the latter is the separating out of the tracks that are combined to make our recored music. I seem to recall . . . [more]

I recently read on the Chaire en droit de la sécurité et des affaires électroniques blog that on February 1, 2011, the British police service has launched a website that allows their citizens to obtain statistics of crimes in their region and neighbourhood. It allows a person in the United Kingdom to track local crime levels.

Governments, courts, school boards, and people in general too often focus on the wrong aspects of new things. Whenever a new tool arrives – such as various forms of social media or smart phones – two seemingly opposite things happen.

First, as we experiment with new tools, people inevitably do stupid things with them. Such as making comments or posting something on social media that the person would never have posted on a physical bulletin board, or written in an open letter to a group of friends.

Second, because humans have flawed risk perceptions, we are more comfortable with the . . . [more]

As we sometimes do on Slaw, I’m pointing out the Google doodle of the day. February 8 turns out to be Jules Verne’s birthday, and in its honour Google has done up a view from below, replete with a lovely lever that moves the ship forward, back, up and down.

Go and take the real thing for a test dive.

And because, good as it is, it’s only lumière without son, I’ve got an extra treat for you: a clip from an authentic (US) submarine dive horn recording. (You might want to turn your volume down.) If it . . . [more]

On the occasion of the OBA Institute 2011 last week, another law blogger meetup was held in Toronto. Unlike the previous week’s Toronto law blogger meetup, this one was female dominated. It is great to see so much interest in blogging! One participant, a law blogger wannabe, said she wants to start blogging once she finds a focus for content. While focus on a specific topic (or range of topics) is helpful if one is highlighting a specific practice, the actual type of content does not need to be restricted.

Law blogging is particularly challenging because of the need . . . [more]

The New York Public Library has unveiled its $50 million exterior renovation. There is a brief and entertaining article on it here, and another with a good photo gallery here.

Here is a little more on Library President Paul LeClerc, who seems to be a remarkable person. . . . [more]

You’ve seen them many times. You know them well. Often you seek them out eagerly. And you recognize them without any difficulty. But good as we human beings are at facial recognition, it’s not their faces that we hunt for, which, after all, have a mean and meaningless mien.

I’m speaking of Mr. and Ms. Helvetica, as they’re sometimes called. And we know them by their outline. They are their outline:

Most commonly displayed as the lares et penates of toilets around the world, they are marvels of economy in design and clear (because stereotyped), useful symbols. (After all, who . . . [more]

Here is a link to a Press Release from Los Angeles this afternoon, announcing that Richard Susskind, the controversial (in some circles anyway) author of The End of Lawyers?

Note the importance of the final question-mark.

Integreon’s Client Advisory Board will be composed of managing partners at law firms and general counsel at organizations that Integreon serves. The board will provide Integreon’s clients with an opportunity to share ideas about legal service trends, specify future requirements for Integreon’s services, and identify opportunities for collaboration.

Integreon (according to its website) “applies technology intelligently to legal solutions to automate processes and . . . [more]

There has been a firestorm of protest recently over the issue of usage based billing for internet access. 

It is widely recognized that the future of Canada is digital. This concept has broad government and community support. This future depends on cost-effective, easy access to the internet. 

Anything that inhibits internet access and use (either wired or wireless), such as the usage based billing we are now seeing, is counterproductive, and a step back to the stone age. We can’t afford to have have an environment where existing or prospective businesses or consumers have any hesitation to use . . . [more]

Today Google launched its Art Project, which it describes as a “unique collaboration with some of the world’s most acclaimed art museums to enable people to discover and view more than a thousand artworks online in extraordinary detail”. Here is gli Uffizi

Essentially Google has taken its Street View technology to explore museums and move around seventeen of the world’s top museums, with 1000 works of art, with the ability to navigate through 385 rooms with interactive floor plans. Zoom by Artwork View at high resolution coupled with related YouTube videos. . . . [more]

Toronto law bloggers get together