Great sign from Frank Hatzman on Cottesloe Beach, Perth.
. . . [more]

My salad days,
When I was green in judgment: cold in blood . . .
Anthony & Cleopatra, Act 1, Scene V.

And in a sense these are the salad days — not that we’re inexperienced or at the peak of our powers, two ways in which that phrase is now understood — no, simply because it’s high summer, when edible green begins to tumble out of the bushel baskets at the market and it’s too hot to cook. Who better to discourse on salads than we here at a blog named Slaw?

Well, the New York Times, for one. . . . [more]

There isn’t a great deal more to say about the great census debate than has been said in different fora in different ways. It all comes down to whether Canadians should have the policy that affects their daily lives determined on the basis of reliable data capable of tracking long-term trends (or developments about which much fuss may be made, but that have no longevity) or not. At the Law Commission of Ontario, we can say that law reform agencies are as reliant on the rich core of data produced by the census as are many other organizations. Being able . . . [more]

The Google Scholar Blog has pulled up a metric dozen “entertaining legal opinions” for our amusement — and, presumably, to remind everyone that Scholar makes many U.S. judgments available free. For example, there’s a reference to US v. Syufy Enterprises 903 F. 2d 659 (1990) which is said to contain the names of over 200 movies smuggled into the ordinary text.

(The blog helpfully provides a link to an article that marks up the titles in the judgment for you. Me, I think it’s interesting that in Syufy one of the judges is named Quackenbush, because that’s the . . . [more]

Every year at about this time I find myself looking up to the evening sky more often. In addition to the recent full moon, I’ve noticed a lot more news coming out of NASA about stars and planets. Forgive my jaunt away from law to see what is happening in this other field.

Today out of NASA’s Kepler Mission comes news of the discovery of possibly 700 more planets, 140 of which may be bodies similar to Earth. Kepler is a telescope that, unlike the Hubble telescope, is not meant for taking images of specific astronomical objects. Instead, . . . [more]

In what will likely be the most startling news event this year, Wikileaks has obtained secret military files and given them to the New York Times, , and , who agreed to coordinate the release of their news stories. These thousands of United States military incident and intelligence reports detail a great many combat actions that have been hitherto unreported, telling a sorry tale of civilian deaths, armed conflict among allies, and mounting chaos in Afghanistan.

The Guardian calls it the biggest intelligence leak in military history.

From my initial examination of the news sites, it seems that each . . . [more]

I went to Niagara-on-the-Lake this weekend to catch a few plays at the Shaw. Friday night, after getting back to the B&B, I found myself sitting on a bed, using my netbook and an external mouse rather than the touchpad. The bed’s surface wasn’t quite suitable. The solution was immediately obvious. The convex back wasn’t a problem at all. More proof of Job’s genius.

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Given the Conservative government’s program of “getting tough on crime,” the Economist’s piece from Thursday, “Rough Justice in America: Too many laws, too many prisoners“, might be of special interest up here in Canada. It’s not a new story: we’ve known about the high incarceration rate in the United States for many years now. But in my view it’s a story worth repeating.

Herewith a few of the more telling portions:

. . . Between 2.3m and 2.4m Americans are behind bars, roughly one in every 100 adults. If those on parole or probation are included, one adult

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Okay, pop quiz:

Name the society that the following people all belonged to –
Benjamin Franklin, Charles Darwin, Alexander Graham Bell, Karl Marx, Peter Ustinov, and Stephen Hawking . . . [more]

Increasing legal complexity threatens even the social myth of the rule of law.

I recently read a biometrics-related article on CNET News (I am obsessed with the subject) indicating that a group of Japanese railway companies has installed 27 facial recognition-enabled billboards in subway stations around Tokyo as a one-year pilot project that will collect data on passersby in order to tailor advertisements to them in real time.

Various news outlets picked up the story over the last week that “authorities” had shut down a free blogging site, Blogetery.com, that, according to its owner, was home to 73,000 blogs. (The New York Times blog Bits has a good account.) Two things make this story interesting to me.

First, it has a cross-border aspect: Blogetery is — or, rather, was — an outfit run by a Torontonian; and the server on which its blogs were hosted was run by BurstNet Technologies, which seems to be located in Pennsylvania. This might be a lesson for some website owners about . . . [more]