Came across this article and thought SLAW readers might find it useful. It was originally published in the December 2010 issue of Deadbeat, the Ontario Bar Association’s Trusts & Estates Section newsletter.

Spelling and Grammar Query
Susan J. Stamm*

Lawyers love long and complex sentences. Lawyers love lists. Lawyers love semicolons and colons. If we are to maintain our love of semicolons, we must use them properly.
Typical usage of semicolons by lawyers is in long complex sentences, or in lists. However, either way, two primary rules must be followed:

1. You can use the semicolon to connect two independent

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The law student of 1594 passed Christmas revelling to The Comedy of Errors by Shakespeare. We know this because of the Gesta Grayorum which was printed in 1688 from a much older manuscript. This text has been conveniently reproduced with an introduction on the Mr. Shakespeare blog.

We can also look forward to a 3 volume set, part of the Records of Early English Drama series, to be published in January 2011 by Boydell & Brewer: Inns of Court, edited by Alan H. Nelson and John R. Elliott, Jr. According to the publisher’s blurb:

The Introduction provides

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Think of it as a stocking. (How did socks become stockings — and not sockings, eh? Blame belongs to the Old English, it seems, whoever they were.) Yes, a Christmas stocking just crammed with little goodies, the sort of things to keep you occupied while the rest of us sleep in for just a little bit longer, which is what we’ll be doing here at Slaw for the next little while, I imagine. (The Christmas stocking thing didn’t begin as a distraction, it turns out, but rather as boots with gifts for Odin’s flying horse, Sleipnir; Odin would . . . [more]

How many seasons have you watched “How the Grinch Stole Christmas”? “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer”?, “Frosty the Snowman”? The answer being several. In that spirit, I present to you a re-re-Blog posting. In my defence I have attempted to update this post, but the cases that appear would likely not do much to uplift your holiday spirit. So, in the proper holiday spirit let’s see how Santa Claus has fared in Canadian Courts.

From: Santa in the Courts

Community Funding Corp. v. Newfoundland (Department of Government Services and Lands), 2004 NLTD 236, 243 NFLD & PEIR 255.

A very . . . [more]

As this is my last Slaw post before the holiday, I would like to wish Slaw readers (and of course all the Slaw contributors) a happy and safe holiday season. Please enjoy the card, which was created for our firm by a London artist (a higher resolution image is here), and the Harrison Pensa Christmas video.

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Last year I let the Winter Solstice slip by unnoticed, only pointing back at it when the days were starting to stretch out. This year I thought I’d beat the rush and mark the shortest day a day early.

Fundamental as the law is in our society, it has little or nothing to say about the day the miserly sun stands still [solstice – mid-13c., from O.Fr. solstice, from L. solstitium “point at which the sun seems to stand still,” from sol “sun” (see sol) + pp. stem of sistere “to come to a stop, make stand still”], an . . . [more]

Though my father didn’t name me Autolycus[tippy title=”Autolycus”] My father named me Autolycus; who
being, as I am, littered under Mercury, was likewise
a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles.
Winter’s Tale, Act 4, Scene 3 [/tippy], I, too, am something of a “snapper-up of unconsidered trifles,” as anyone who reads Friday Fillips will agree. It’s often the little things, the throw-aways, that prove to be, if not treasures, then sources of delight.

Take comic books. Yes, my mother, too, threw them away, in my case while I was away at university pondering matters of great moment. Those slim, cheap — “trashy” . . . [more]

I’ve only just come across Books Ngram Viewer, a Google Labs tool that lets you derive graphs from their Books database at the text level. You can enter up to three terms and graph the frequency with which each term occur in a given corpus over time. Drawn from five million of the 15 million books Google has digitized thus far, there are five corpora in English, and one for each of Chinese (simplified), French, Spanish, Russian, and German.

In English, the basic corpus has books ranging from 1500 to 2008 and is offered without any filtering except as . . . [more]

Becoming an official regulatory body will enable the HRPA to ensure that human resources professionals are competent and behave in an ethical manner.

Dear Friends, Colleagues, Readers,

I’m writing a paper for a CLE conference that’ll be held in Vancouver next June. I’m trying to gather anecdotal information as to whether the SCC decision in Resurfice v Hanke, 2007 SCC 7 and the “material contribution” doctrine mentioned in the case are helping plaintiffs get before-trial settlements — by using the Resurfice“material contribution” notion to get them past difficulties in proving factual causation using the “but-for” test — which are settlements that they might not have been able to get before Resurfice. I’m not after settlement details, just a yes or . . . [more]

Young Mr. Byron Bennett sells chocolate. He has an elaborate shop in Manhattan offering 36 brands of the luxurious substance, hailing from ten countries. He also believes in order, so his chocolates are ranged on shelves with careful precision as to type and origin. To reflect this combination of succulence and seriousness he named his shop The Chocolate Library. It would seem to be a sensible and harmonious marriage…

…to everyone, that is, except the New York State Education Department.

What, you might ask, does a department of education have to do with a chocolate shop? The answer makes about . . . [more]

OneLook… the one dictionary to find it all.