Today, October 2, 2009, is the last day of Right to Know Week in Canada.

Right to Know Week was originally started in Sofia, Bulgaria in 2002 as a result of a meeting of Access to Information Commissioners from around the world. Its purpose is to raise awareness of the necessity of access to information in democratic societies. This is the fourth year that it has been formally recognized in Canada and it has started to pick up momentum. The Office of the Information Commissioner of Canada set up a website at righttoknow.ca to detail the many events that were . . . [more]

We have recently learned of the Alberta order for service of process by Facebook.

An English court has now ordered service of a injunction via Twitter — where the Twitter user was anonymous, impersonating a blogger (it’s a complicated world out there!): http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8285954.stm

I suppose there could be interesting questions if the Twitter user was not in the jurisdiction of the court, depending on (among other things) whether the rules of practice permit service out of the jurisdiction without prior leave of the court.

The complainant thought it was more efficient to get an ex parte injunction and serve it . . . [more]

Today’s the day the new United Kingdom Supreme Court, the replacement for the House of Lords, begins operation. (What’s with the brown? Ugh.) And, because this is the age it is, the new institution’s familiar, the blog, is born along with it.

The UKSCblog (I’m not liking uk-suk as the way to say the new court) is designed frankly as a “mirror” of the American SCOTUS blog.

I’ve taken a quick look and like what I see — with the exception that, curiously, the URL remains fixed as www.ukscblog.com whether you’re on the “home,” “about,” “archive” or, . . . [more]

The National Archives and Records Administration of the United States and Footnote.com yesterday announced the release of the Internet’s largest Interactive Holocaust Collection with hundreds of thousands of records, including:

• The Ardelia Hall Collection of records relating to the Nazi looting of Jewish possessions, including looted art
• Concentration camp registers and documents from Dachau, Mauthausen, Auschwitz, and Flossenburg
• Captured German records including deportation and death lists from concentration camps
• Nuremberg War Crimes Trial proceedings

Access to the collection will be available for free on Footnote.com through the month of October.

On the matter of looted art, there are a number . . . [more]

The debate in legal publishing circles continues with regard to retro case law builds. Does anyone really need them? If so, which ones and why? Do any of retro builds in the planning or development stages have any real value to the legal researcher?

Unreported court cases that pre-date 1970. Boxes and boxes of older full text court cases that were not reported in print law report series still haunt some court houses and some legal publishers. What should be done with them? Tens of thousands of these cases exist in hardcopy and rest heavy on the consciences of those . . . [more]

A patron asks you to find (and update) a Canadian federal private Act. How do you do it?

The legal research literature lacks detail on the process, so I thought I would test the following approach with SLAW readers and ask if there is a better way. I also provide links to some additional resources on researching federal private Acts.

In the following example, I have (arbitrarily) picked the Stanmount Pipe Line Company (which would appear to no longer exist – at least based on Google searches; as such, it is not a very realistic example, but I needed . . . [more]

No post-High Holiday edition of the week in biotech would be complete without some repentance and some new beginnings:

• Cardiome seemed to regret ever getting into R&D and is looking for external funding for one of its pipeline products.
• A new start in Canada for the Michael J. Fox Foundation, which registered as a tax-exempt charity in Canada and will hopefully bring its commercialization-oriented approach to funding here as well.
• Regrets for MDS as it moves a step closer to divesting another business — this time its analytical technologies business, but there’s more to come.
• A new lease

Back in July I talked about a petition urging to improve PACER, the online access service to U.S. court records and documents. Until improvements are made, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard have stepped in to provide a tool to give open access to court documents that originate on PACER in cooperation with the Internet Archive. The video below is a presentation by Steve Schultze, fellow of the Berkman Center and new Associate Director at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy at the September 8, 2009 conference Gov 2.0 Expo Showcase explaining how the . . . [more]

Running a call-girl business is an inherently risky venture. The lines frequently blur, and participants end up in what the law would describe as prostitution.

To sort out these complicated legal dilemmas operators frequently have to hire counsel. Should these expenses be reportable for tax purposes?

The now-defunct Exchequer Court examined the issue back in 1964, in Canada (Minister of National Revenue – M.N.R.) v. Eldridge, when several employees of the respondent were arrested on prostitution charges.

. . . [more]

A month ago the Vancouver Sun picked up on study done by two South Carolina economists at Clemson University, Bentley Coffey and Patrick A. McLaughlin, entitled “Do Masculine Names Help Female Lawyers Become Judges? Evidence from South Carolina” (American Law and Economics Review, January 2009, 11 (1), pg. 112-133 — behind paywall). The gist of the article, if there can be such a thing in a heavily statistics-based study, is that in South Carolina a woman lawyer has a better chance of advancing in her career and of becoming a judge if she has a “masculine . . . [more]

There’s something of a buzz in the blawgs about a recent decision from the California Northern District Court in which the court ordered Google to close the email account of a non-party. According to Online Daily Media, in Rocky Mountain Bank -v- Google, Inc. the bank explained that it had sent a file containing a wealth of sensitive information about clients by email to the wrong Gmail address. The bank tried to contact the addressee but received no response. It then got in touch with Google, which said that it would reveal the account information for the addressee if . . . [more]

Abousufian Abdelrasik, the Canadian citizen stranded in Sudan, is suing the government for $27-million.

The Statement of Claim asks for general and special damages of $20,000,000 for false imprisonment, torture negligence, intentional infliction of mental suffering, breach of fiduciary duty, and Charter breach of ss. 6, 7, and 12. Abdelrazik is also asking for punitive and aggravate damages $4,000,000, and an additional $3,000,000 for a similar basis against Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon.

Simon Chester previously linked Zinn J’s decision on the case.

The April 3, 2009 letter denying him an emergency passport can be found here. . . . [more]