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Archive for ‘Substantive Law’

Walrus Magazine Profile of Canada’s Chief Justice

The most recent issue of The Walrus has a profile of Beverley McLachlin, Chief Justice of Canada.

The article, The McLachlin Group – How Canada’s first female Chief Justice has taken the heat off the Supreme Court, is by Susan Harada. . . . [more]

Posted in: Miscellaneous, Practice of Law, Substantive Law

The History of Computer-Assisted Legal Research

Here’s a link to a first chapter by the Advanced Legal Research instructors at Stanford Law School in a work on the history of CALR. I suspect they need to get into the stacks more

It’s interesting as far as it goes, but it doesn’t capture as much of the early detail as Jon Bing’s Handbook of Legal Information Retrieval. Jon’s book led me to Louis O. Kelso’s Does the Law Need a Technological Revolution in 18 Rocky Mntn. L. Rev. 388 (1945-1946) – yes 1946. It discusses the application of computers to the task of legal research. . . . [more]

Posted in: Education & Training: Law Schools, Legal Information, Legal Information: Libraries & Research, Miscellaneous, Substantive Law, Technology

Canadian Contract Law, 2d Ed. (Angela Swan)

I have just received my copy of Canadian Contract Law, 2d ed (Toronto: LexisNexis Canada, 2009) authored by SLAW’s own Angela Swan (with the assistance of Jakub Adamski).

At 959 pages and the most recent treatise on the topic, it stands to be an important addition to the Canadian legal literature. . . . [more]

Posted in: Legal Information, Legal Information: Libraries & Research, Substantive Law

IP Essay Contest

The the Intellectual Property Institute of Canada and IP Osgoode have inaugurated an IP Writing Challenge. The winner in each of three categories — law student, graduate student, professional — will receive a $1000 prize and the publication of the work. Works in either English or French are eligible. The precise rules are set out on the IP Osgoode website, but a brief description of the scope of eligible essays is set out below:

Entries must develop a thesis of importance in an emerging area of intellectual property law from a Canadian, comparative or international perspective. Topics can be

. . . [more]
Posted in: Education & Training, Legal Information, Legal Information: Libraries & Research, Legal Information: Publishing, Substantive Law

Access to Justice and “Going Electronic”

In a comment to the recent post by Patricia Hughes, Justice B. T. Granger of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice referred to a set of slides for a presentation he had given at the 2008 CBA Canadian Legal Conference in Quebec City entitled “The Future is Now: Improving Access to Justice: The Need for Lawyers and the Judiciary to Go Electronic.” I thought that this was a presentation that might interest more than a few Slaw readers and got in touch with Justice Granger, who kindly agreed to let Slaw publish the slides.

Of course because this was about . . . [more]

Posted in: Education & Training: CLE/PD, Practice of Law, Substantive Law, Technology

Free and Commercial Access to the Law

Slaw’s own Ted Tjaden is quoted in this week’s Lawyers’ Weekly on whether the free access to the law movement has reached the point of such reliability and comprehensiveness that it can be considered as an adequate substitute for the commercial giants. Canlii’s Daniel Poulin comes to the defence of Canlii.

“I rarely use free resources,” Tjaden said.

“We have the luxury of having one of the better-equipped law libraries in a Canadian law firm with extensive print resources and online subscriptions.

“Although free search engines do supplement the legal research I do, we continue to rely on the value-added

. . . [more]
Posted in: Legal Information, Legal Information: Libraries & Research, Legal Information: Publishing, Substantive Law: Judicial Decisions, Technology

SCC as Greater Influence on Foreign Law Than the US Supreme Court

That’s the proposition advanced in an interview with Justice Ginsburg reported in the NYT and the Post yesterday. She comments on the comparative law question:

“Why shouldn’t we look to the wisdom of a judge from abroad with at least as much ease as we would read a law review article from a professor?”

For Slaw readers, the most interesting line is:

The Canadian Supreme Court, she said, is “probably cited more widely abroad than the U.S. Supreme Court.” There is one reason for that, she said: “You will not be listened to if you don’t listen to others.”

This . . . [more]

Posted in: Legal Information, Practice of Law, Substantive Law, Substantive Law: Judicial Decisions

This Week’s Biotech Highlights

They say the key to a good golf swing is in the follow-through. Hopefully the same is true of blogging, because this week on the Cross-Border Biotech Blog saw a lot of our trends and stories revisited with new developments and new perspective:

Electronic medical records drew a lot of attention this week, with the annual Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference and the first EMR implementation by a large hospital group being topped by an even larger and more influential implementation — the U.S. military.

Budgets and bailout issues were also active. There was good news . . . [more]

Posted in: Substantive Law, Technology: Internet

Fiji Constitution Suspended

From the Pacific a significant decision has prompted a new Grundnormon the judgment of the Fiji Court of Appeal which resulted in the President suspending the constitution and reappointing the interim executive that came to power in the coup. Here is the judgment appealed from. . . . [more]

Posted in: Legal Information, Substantive Law, Substantive Law: Judicial Decisions

How Outsourcing Copes With Dutch Anonymization Laws in the Production of Caselaw Databases

From last week’s Publishers’ Weekly, a good overview of how the trade publishing industry is employing Indian coders to embed .xml into works. But a paragraph on Innodata Isogen, which I thought of as doing law firm outsourcing shows just how globally linked the outsourcing of the production of legal information has become.

No KPO (knowledge processing outsourcing) project is too complex for Innodata Isogen. Take a recent job that entailed producing marketable Dutch jurisprudence information within the guidelines of European laws, which prohibit the disclosure of any information that could identify the parties involved. “The anonymization

. . . [more]
Posted in: Legal Information, Legal Information: Publishing, Substantive Law

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This project has been made possible in part by the Government of Canada | Ce projet a été rendu possible en partie grâce au gouvernement du Canada