I thought I knew everything about legal research.

I don’t (although I suspect Simon, Simon and Angela do).

And to my surprise, it was Wikipedia that was my source for new information (in particular Wikipedia’s entry on the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council).

We all know that civil appeals from the Supreme Court of Canada to the Judicial committee of the Privy Council were abolished in 1949.

In telling students this, I think I inevitably left the (mistaken) impression, by inference, that one did not need to worry about noting up Supreme Court of Canada cases after 1949 . . . [more]

The Kingdom of Bahrain has launched the Bahrain Chamber for Dispute Resolution. This initiative of the Ministry of Justice and Islamic Affairs will deliver international ADR services in cooperation with the American Arbitration Association. TimesOnline’s Law Central has the story.

What makes this project interesting is that Bahrain has passed legislation ensuring that when parties agree to arbitration by the BCDR the result will be binding and beyond challenge in the Bahrain courts. Presumably, they’ll have better luck with their “privative” provisions than has been the case elsewhere.

At present the link to the BCDR opens only . . . [more]

Concluding twelve years of efforts from a lot of JTAC members, Justice Fran Kiteley, from the Ontario Superior Court and a former JTAC member, rendered the first judgment using neutral citation in R. v. ANDREW DEL RICCIO, 2010 ONSC 01. Congratulations!

It’s been a little while since I wrote about The Law Librarian podcast created by Richard Leiter and available over at BlogTalkRadio and iTunes. I am one of several regular panelists; panelists now take turns participating in the shows depending on the topics. Richard has also expanded the schedule from once a month to once a month plus frequent updates, which will hopefully mean a new show every couple of weeks.

In case you missed them, the last two shows are:

Google Scholar Legal Opinions and Journals: A Conversation with Anurag Acharya (Dec. 4/09)
– Anurag Acharya is a . . . [more]

Louise Hamel, manager of the Judges’ Library for Ontario Courts, just announced to Canadian legal publishers that beginning January 2, 2010, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice will assign a neutral citation to their decisions, except for the Small Claims Court.

The Neutral Citation Standard for Case Law was developed in 1998 by the Canadian Citation Committee, an informal group that brought together various specialists in legal information from the judiciary, academia and the publishing industry, including slawers Martin Felsky and Daniel Poulin. The standard was approved in 1999 by the Canadian Judicial Council and has since then been . . . [more]

A story that’s been making the rounds this week (Lawyerist –Legal Blog Watch –ABAJournal –@davidtsfraser) deserves to be passed along one more step: U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Robert Kressel got fed up with the way lawyers wrote the proposed orders submitted to him, so he sent a memo to the whole bankruptcy bar setting out his rules for doing it right. They’re a mix of regs on proper form and injunctions about some stuff that should have been learned in grade school.

For instance, in addition to a request that documents be submitted in PDF electronically, . . . [more]

The Court of Appeal for England and Wales has ruled against Lucasfilm in its breach of copyright suit against Andrew Ainsworth, the British designer who produced the Stormtrooper costume for the Star Wars films. (Lucasfilm Limited et al. v. Andrew Ainsworth [2009] EWCA Civ 1328)

Ainsworth had been selling a few Stormtrooper helmets both in the U.S. and in Britain. Lucasfilm claimed that the models for the helmet were copyright works as “sculptures” within the meaning of s.4 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988. After a long review of the legislative history and the caselaw, . . . [more]

The Cross-Border Biotech Blog had a very blawg-y week this week with three posts on legal issues affecting the biotech world, thanks in part to my lovely and talented legal writer/spouse/editor/CMO Audrey Fried-Grushcow.

I kicked things off with a post on three need-to-know Canadian patent decisions that impact pharma, biotech and generics companies, pulling together three Ogilvy Renault bulletins into one executive-summary-level overview of key recent developments.

Audrey picked up the legal theme with a post noting oral arguments at the U.S. Supreme Court for a case under the False Claims Act (FCA) in which amici curiae PhRMA and . . . [more]

I don’t know how long this has been going on, but some courts are sending judgments to CanLII with hyperlinked tables of contents. Plain old text TOCs are nothing new, of course: long — long, long. . . — judgments pretty much demand them. But courts seem to have discovered that, because they create and submit their judgments to CanLII in MS Word format, it’s fairly easy to construct a hyperlinked table of contents.

A search for [table of contents] turns up recent “hot” TOCs from Newfoundland and Labrador, British Columbia, and Ontario.

This is, of course, . . . [more]

A notice to the profession on the Ontario Court of Appeal website reads:

Electronic Delivery of Copies of Reasons for Judgment

On January 1, 2010 the court will modernize its procedure for delivery of copies of its reasons for judgment to counsel and litigants.

Rather than requiring litigants or counsel to attend at the registry office of the court to obtain a paper copy of the decision, the court will send a PDF copy of the signed judgment by e-mail to those counsel and litigants who have provided an e-mail address. Copies will continue to be available for those parties

. . . [more]

“The Internet is an open door to knowledge, entertainment, communication – and exploitation.”

This quote is in R. v. Legare, 2009 SCC 56, Justice Fish writing for the unanimous majority (at para 1) (emphasis in original).

While I have no wish to write about the facts in this particular matter, it is interesting that a decision about exploitation should be published by the SCC in December.

Unfortunately, the holiday season is often rife with frauds. A grandson in jail scam was recently reported and McAfee has posted an article in their newsroom titled the 12 Scams of Christmas . . . [more]

Of the many challenges facing trial judges, one of the greatest is conducting proceedings with a self-represented accused. Invariably the self-represented accused comes to court with only a rudimentary knowledge of the trial process, often influenced by misleading depictions from television shows and the movies. He or she is unfamiliar with the substantive law, is confused by procedural requirements, and has difficulty grasping concepts such as relevance.

The burgeoning number of self-represented accused in the criminal courts may be explained by cut-backs to legal aid funding across the country, the cost of legal services, mental health problems that make it . . . [more]