An announcement early today from Google Distinguished Engineer Anurag Acharya that Google Scholar now features major cases, as well as an ability to search in legal periodicals for case citations.

I thought initially it was just American, but searching on the following names brought interesting results:

Donoghue v. Stevenson 2380 hits
R. Drybones 849 hits
Delgamuukw 956 hits
Mabo v. Queensland 2770 hits

Google hat-tips “several pioneers, who have worked on making it possible for an average citizen to educate herself about the laws of the land: Tom Bruce (Cornell LII), Jerry Dupont (LLMC), Graham Greenleaf and Andrew Mowbray (AustLII), . . . [more]

Although tweeting from a courtroom remains controversial, tweeting the content of a live webcast should be rather conventional, but is still a useful enterprise.

I was in the middle of a take-home midterm when I realized that the Omar Khadr hearing at the Supreme Court of Canada was on CPAC. After a few searches on Twitter, I realized that although people had posted that it was occurring, nobody in the legal community was covering the contents live (or almost live – a Senate broadcast delayed it).

I gave it a go, although the proceedings were well under . . . [more]

In C.H. Giles & Co. Ltd. v. Morris, [1972] 1 W.L.R. 307, [1972] 1 All E.R. 960 at 971 (Ch.D., Megarry J.) said:

… In this judgment I have referred to a number of authorities not cited in argument. On the procedural point I have reached no final conclusion, and so the citation of additional authorities in that respect does not raise any particular difficulty. But it is otherwise in relation to the question of specific enforceability. On this, the only authority cited to me by either side was Fry, cited by counsel for the defendants. Wilson v West

The Supreme Court of Canada is hearing Prime Minister of Canada, et al. v. Omar Ahmed Khadr tomorrow, November 13 — a Friday the 13th, as it happens. There is a webcast of the hearing scheduled to begin at 9 a.m. EDT.

You can read the SCC Case Information Summary to get a quick overview of the matter. The appellant’s (i.e. government’s) factum is online [PDF], as is that for Khadr [PDF].

The appeal is from a judgment of the Federal Court of Appeal: Canada (Prime Minister) v. Khadr, 2009 FCA 246 (CanLII), which in turn was an . . . [more]

Chatting with Angela this morning about judgments, and then the Ontario Reports undermines my certainty about my prior views.

One expects that such issues as what is a judgment, and what is an endorsement, would have been determined years ago, when the basic rules of precedent were laid down by common law courts.

However, this morning’s copy of the Ontario Reports has me wondering. There are 80 pages of reported judicial decisions in part 10 of volume 96 of the Ontario Reports, Third Edition.

However, four of those decisions from the Superior Court totalling 61 pages are nominally endorsements. I . . . [more]

One of the things I enjoy about reading the Language Log, a cooperative blog by academic linguists, is the ease with which some of the authors slip into high dudgeon. (I suppose I might be like that, too, if my subject were language, in which everyone is an expert.) The latest target of Geoff Pullum’s indignation is U.S. Supreme Court Justice Kennedy, who, it turns out, doesn’t know his active from his passive, when it comes to voice.

The offending passage occurred in the judge’s dissent in Jones v. United States 526 U.S. 227 (1999) where Kennedy is interpreting a . . . [more]

Cross-posted on The AvoidAClaim blog (www.avoidaclaim.com)

As part of a brief endorsement dated November 3, 2009 in RE: IN THE ESTATE OF Evelyn O’Reilly, et. al., Justice D. M. Brown of the Superior Court Of Justice–Ontario provided some useful direction on the form and content of an order in applications to prove a lost will under Ontario Rule 75.02. Ontario lawyers handling this issue on estate matters will find Brown J.’s comments helpful. . . . [more]

University of Toronto law professors Ben Alarie and Andrew Green have posted a draft of a new paper to the Social Science Research Network.

The paper is entitled Interventions at the Supreme Court of Canada: Accuracy, Affiliation, and Acceptance:

“Do interveners matter? Under Chief Justice McLachlin the Supreme Court of Canada has allowed an average of 176 interventions per calendar year and interveners have cumulatively made submissions in half of the cases heard by the Court. This level of activity suggests that interveners are doing something. But what is it that they are doing?”

“In the abstract, there are

I am amazed that the three minutes extracted from an interview that I gave in the summer of 2009 with the thought that parts of it would be used in a tribute video to be shown at the 2009 AALL Convention has caused such a kerfuffle. [Ed. note: see Berring’s Scepticism on the Future of Free Legal Information, Berring, CanLII and Kobe Beef, Berring, free legal information, and making good choices] (Glad to see that someone used one of my favorite words). The context of the remarks matters because they were meant to be light in tone. . . . [more]

Tip of the hat to my friend and partner Stan Freedman, the Supreme Court of Arizona en banc this week held that if a public entity maintains a public record in an electronic format, then the electronic version, including any embedded metadata, is subject to disclosure under our public records laws.

The case involved an employment discrimination action by a Phoenix policeman David Lake who suspected that there had been some backdating or manipulation of his employee file. He moved to see access to the metadata.

As the Phoenix paper reported:

A suspicious Lake requested the metadata from the . . . [more]

The Incorporated Council of Law Reporting (ICLR) in the United Kingdom, the people who bring us the authoritative and official Law Reports, have their very own YouTube video channel.

Videos include interviews with the Law Report editors, a history of the ICLR, a video on the process of how a case goes from trial to official report, and a brief introduction to case law research using both online databases and hard copy reference works.

And check out their wonderfully produced video A Tale of Two Citations:

“This short featurette featuring two barristers. One of them serenely competent

The Supreme Court has just released its judgment in the case of Galambos v. Perez, 2009 SCC 48 (CanLII). The opinion of the court was written by Cromwell J., his second[1. His first was R. v. Godin, 2009 SCC 26 (CanLII)], I believe, since his installation on the court, and concurred in by all eight other members of the court.

This judgment might be of special interest to the bar as it deals with relations between a bookkeeper for a small firm and the bankrupt firm. Essentially, the bookkeeper and de facto office manager loaned large sums . . . [more]