As it did a number of years ago with his earlier book, In the Public Interest, Irwin Law has just released a new book of essays edited by Michael Geist in both print and in PDF. And, as before, the version available online is offered under a Creative Commons license.

From “Radical Extremism” to “Balanced Copyright”: Canadian Copyright and the Digital Agenda is a book of 20 essays by Canadian scholars that tries to move the current copyright debate “toward an informed analysis of Bill C-32 and the future development of Canadian copyright law.” Bill C-32, as readers . . . [more]

I’ve been distracted today by a book that arrived in the morning mail: Frederick Vaughan, Viscount Haldane: ‘The Wicked Step-father of the Canadian Constitution’ (Toronto: Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History / University of Toronto Press, 2010)(LAC Amicus no. 38031823)(UTP pid no. 2758). For those not familiar with the name, this is from pages xv and xvi of the introduction:

It is fair to say that no jurist in our history has received so much learned abuse as Viscount Haldane of Cloan. Twenty years after his death, he received a scholarly tongue-lashing from the late chief

Yale Law School’s Lillian Goldman Library has an exhibition up entitled “Superheroes in Court! Lawyers, Law and Comic Books.” Some details about the curator and the exhibition are here. There’s a humorous description of the exhibit at the NYT. Another NYT notice of the event contains this nice description of the personality behind the event:

The exhibition is organized by Mark S. Zaid, a comic book collector and Washington lawyer who often represents employees of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency. On his Web site, Mr. Zaid writes, “Many of my

We all know that editing a Wikipedia entry is fairly straightforward – and that the Wikiguardians keep a vigilant eye over entries and edits that stray from the norms of objectivity and verifiability.

So the announcement that the Correctional Service’s internal operations arm is investigating an edit made to the Wikipedia entry on Canada’s Official Languages Act, which appears to have been made from a government computer connected to the Corrections Canada server at the department’s offices on Laurier Street in Ottawa, is arousing the interest of the mainstream media. Denis Coderre appears to have noticed the edit a . . . [more]

We’ve posted before about the work that the Canadian Bar Association has been doing on conflicts of interest and the development of tools for the profession to manage conflicts of interest. Two Slawers were closely involved, here and here, with a fine italic hand evident.

Today’s Lawyers’ Weekly front page reports on the CBA’s response to a report of an Advisory Committee to the Federation of Law Societies of Canada. The Advisory Committee had released a report in June which had departed radically from the analysis of the CBA Task Force on the key issue of current . . . [more]

What Slaw talks about, the world talks about tomorrow. Well not quite. No illusions about our reach.

So we’ll just put it down to coincidence or the zeitgeist that John Gregory’s mention of Henry VIII Clauses (he initially undervalued the monarch at a mere VII) here triggered global interest. But a few days later, the English legal press revealed that the Lord Chief Justice spoke on just this subject.

Lord Judge, who as Lord Chief Justice is head of the English judiciary, was speaking at the annual Lord Mayor’s dinner for the judiciary, the day before John Gregory’s comment; . . . [more]

I have been very impressed with all the new columns here on Slaw.ca. Fantastic work, everyone! Hopefully others have also stopped by on a daily basis to check out the column each day in addition to the daily blog posts.

For readers looking for more, here are five other law-related blogs — by bloggers not already featured as columnists or contributors on Slaw — that I consider “must-read”:

• Michael Geist’s Blog – Michael Geist not only tracks intellectual property issues in Canada, but also he influences them. This blog is essential reading for those of us interested in copyright, digital

I see from Carswell’s online catalogue that a new 7th edition of the the Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation (the “McGill Guide”) is due out on July 19, 2010.

There are separate records for what appears to be a softcover version ($50) or a hardcover version ($93) with no immediate indication of there being an online option.

I have long been critical of parts of the McGill Guide so it will be interesting to see what is new in the 7th edition.

I found with the 6th edition there were no good examples of citing to the Canadian Encyclopedic . . . [more]

Although I was going to blog at some point on using the iPad for legal work (e.g., including the useful tip to use the “two finger swipe technique” to properly scroll pages when using the Safari browser on iPad when searching Westlaw or Lexis – see video here for the technique, which works), the reality is that the iPad has been for me an entertainment device.

While I was successfully able to use the iPad in place of a laptop on a recent 1-week business/pleasure trip (with the business-side of things largely being checking email, taking notes and doing some . . . [more]

Statistics Canada has released a difficult study, “Police-reported Crime in Inuit Nunangat” by Mathieu Charron, Christopher Penney and Sacha Senécal. Difficult because it shows us something about our country, our society, that we commonly prefer to ignore, and difficult too because the problem revealed is amenable to no easy solution.

The term Inuit Nunangat, I learn (I’m ashamed to say), refers collectively to the four settled regions at the top of Canada in which forty of the fifty thousand Inuit live. See the map below (click on it to enlarge it):

I should point out that, as the . . . [more]

The CALL/ACBD/MichALL law library conference currently underway in Windsor, Ontario, has had lots of useful sessions, as previously mentioned here on SLAW by Shaunna Mireau.

A busy schedule at the conference, combined with outrageously expensive wireless Internet access at the Caesars Windsor conference hotel, has prevented “live” blogging but I hope to post some entries shortly on lessons learned.

In sharing a panel session of free Internet legal research with Connie Crosby and two American law library colleagues, I learned about and briefly perused Connie Crosby’s new book called Effective Blogging for Libraries available from Neal-Schuman so wanted to . . . [more]

The venerable Journal of Information, Law & Technology (JILT) is reborn as the European Journal of Law and Technology. Volume 1, Number 1, available free online, is a special issue, “A History of Legal Informatics”:

• Let there Be Lite: A Brief History of Legal Information Retrieval (Jon Bing)
• The Global Development of Free Access To Legal Information (Graham Greenleaf)
• How Structural Features of the U.S. Judicial System Have Affected the Take-Up of Digital Technology by Courts (Peter W Martin)
• Legal Informatics – A Personal Appraisal of Context and Progress (Richard Susskind)
• Jurimetrics Please! (Richard De Mulder)
• The Rise