World Cup 2010 has been full of intrigue and interest; in posting about the legal aspects of the world cup last week I felt that was too much of interest to post at one time so this post continues the legal aspects of the world cup as we prepare for the round of 16.

It seems that World Cup 2010 has been a boon for South African Law Firms.

FIFA does indeed have a legal committee but I haven’t had much luck trying to discover the terms of reference for the legal committee nor even a description of what . . . [more]

This entry’s a mixed bag of five items of interest, each of which deserves a post on its own. But here in blogland news and links come rushing by and are easily lost in the wake if they aren’t at least noted in passing. Herewith, then, NB:

FreeLegalWeb

U.K. publishing consultant Nick Holmes’s grand dream of 

. . . a collaborative project designed to join up and make sense of publicly accessible law and authored commentary, and to encourage ongoing contribution and participation, for the benefit of lawyers, advisers and the public at large . . .

is now a . . . [more]

Downtown Toronto because of the G20 or the GTA’s various “Little Italys” because of the World Cup result?

 Italy was just eliminated in the first round. Didn’t win a game. Lost to Slovakia? and the Swiss. (Oops, Spain lost to the Swiss. Italy tied New Zealand. That would be like Canada tying with Khazakhstan in hockey. Were the Vatican guards playing for Switzerland?) I could understand that if this were hockey, but football? France? It pancaked yesterday, pouting.

Italy and France eliminated early sounds like a scorecard for a mid to late 2d millenium European war. 

The bars in Toronto . . . [more]

From the U.S. Geological Service:

click image to enlarge

I have to say that this is where Google’s real time updates comes into its own. I searched for [earthquake], hit “latest”, and the reports roll in at one a second. . . . [more]

Wikipedia records the event, before the mainstream or electronic media.

Quake hit at 13:45 EST

Twitter feeds start reporting 13:50

Wikipedia entry for Ottawa edited to show quake 13:51

Globe and Mail reports quake 13:56 . . . [more]

This is simply too good not to pass along.

The website ThinkGeek (“Smart Stuff for the Masses” — robots, zombie blood, all edges brownie pan, and more ejusdem generis) — got a 10-page Cease & Desist letter from the 475-lawyer firm, Faegre & Benson, on behalf of their clients, the U.S. National Pork Board (delightfully at pork.org). Seem ThinkGeek had made use of the phrase “the new white meat,” and the NPB took the view, through their lawyers, that this trespassed on their registered trademark, “The Other White Meat.”

The only catch? The page that the NPB . . . [more]

Unfortunately for them, polar bears currently don’t have a vote in a jurisdiction that matters enough to anyone in power.

Jocelyn Stacey and Shaun Fluker (University of Calgary – Faculty of Law) have posted The Polar Bear is Not a Species at Risk in Canada (Contrary to what the Rest of the World Thinks): When is a Decision Not to List Unreasonable in Law? on SSRN.

 Here is the abstract:

There is general scientific and ethical consensus that the polar bear species is in peril and in need of protection if it is to avoid extinction. However Canada has

Rats, I missed Bloomsday, an event I like to note here on Slaw. It happened last Wednesday, which was June 16, the same date on which, in 1904, Leopold Bloom wandered through Dublin as Joyce’s Ulysses.

My Bloomsday offering to our readers is a Joycean oddity, by Lance Wakeling (whose Private Circulation is often good), Stately, plump Buck Mulligan. On this site you’ll find all of Ulysses serialized as it were . . . one . . . word . . . at . . . a . . . time. You click on a word and the next . . . [more]

I was reading an interesting article in the Lawyer’s Weekly today on the recent Supreme Court of Canada decision in R. v. Morelli, [2010] SCC 8. In his article, “Reforming Search & Seizure” (sadly, not available online), Professor Benjamin Goold makes the following comment that I tripped over while reading:

Although Justice Fish almost certainly went too far when he claimed that it is “difficult to imagine a search more intrusive, extensive or invasive of one’s privacy than the search and seizure of a personal computer,” the fact remains that such a search represents a serious infringement of an

One way to describe my life is as a slow movement from strict prescriptivist to not entirely relaxed descriptivist. I’m talking about, well, talking—and even more about writing. Although I still will say to myself that it’s wrong to say “between you and I,” and “presently” doesn’t mean “now,” I have managed to contain those judgments for the most part and damn near don’t even wince anymore. I long ago let go of “hopefully,” and have come to use the third person plural as a means of obscuring gender.

A little like law, English changes and it does so balancing . . . [more]

It was more than 28 years ago but here is something for those of you who might have been wondering where he went.

. . . [more]