The Globe and Mail has a long and interesting obituary for Glen How, lawyer for Canada’s Jehovah’s Witnesses, who died December 30, 2008, at the age of 89. How will be remembered for a trio of cases involving civil liberties in the Duplessis era in Quebec:

The Boucher, Saumur and Roncarelli cases went to the Supreme Court in the 1950s. The Boucher case [Boucher v. the King, [1951] S.C.R. 265], which used truth as a defence, eliminated an archaic Quebec law defining sedition as criticism of the government and led to the dismissal of nearly 125 sedition

The medical and law students at UofT collaborated recently to hold the First Annual Interprofessional Health Law Conference.

The health sector is already a significant portion of the governmental budget, comprises a major element of today’s economy, and is relatively recession proof. Legal issues in this growing area will inevitably be part of the portfolio for the lawyer of tomorrow.

The keynote speakers for the event were Dr. Sarita Verma, Deputy Dean of Graduate Postgraduate education at UofT Medicine, and Elyse Sunshine of the Health Law group at Gardiner Roberts.

Dr. Verta explained the role that various stakeholders . . . [more]

The Woodruff Library at Morehouse College in Atlanta has just made their collection of M.L.K. papers, books and other items available to the public. Via the website you can find the archival descriptions and other study aides. They purchased the collection in 2006 with the help of the Atlanta Mayor just before it was to go to auction, a coup for the city and an end to the controversy surrounding the estate.

From the website:

The Morehouse King Collection includes approximately 1,000 books from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s personal library with his handwritten notes throughout. In addition, there

Good fun over at the latest RIAA show trial. The defendant, Joel Tenenbaum, (who has countersued), has hired Harvard law prof Charlie Nesson, whose law school team is employing a full range of social networking and IT tools to effectively embarrass the RIAA, which has since the start of the trial abandoned its policy of suing downloaders. (See my post over at Ipilogue for more on the story.) As part of this strategy, Nesson moved to obtain permission to live-stream video of the trial. The judge has today agreed to let the January 22 hearing be streamed over the internet, . . . [more]

In the form of David Bilinsky, I start this post with a lyric:

♬ power to the people, power to the people, right on ♬
John Lennon

As Connie posted this week our current parliamentary situation is facilitating a raft of public discussion.

Coming up in Edmonton on January 22, and presented by the Centre for Constitutional Studies, the Legal Resource Centre, the Department of Political Science, and the Department of History & Classics we have this:

Canada’s 40th Parliament in Crisis: What Happened, What’s Next?

Join faculty from the University of Alberta in a panel discussion addressing the . . . [more]

Project Gutenberg has released Pleasantries of English Courts and Lawyers: A Book about Lawyers, by John Cordy Jeaffreson, originally published in London in 1875. (The book has been variously available over the years, last published by Hein in 1974.) Gutenberg makes the book available for downloading in HTML and plain text formats, in addition to Plucker format, which is new to me but makes texts suitable for reading on smart phones and the like.

This is a quaint, not to say arch, look at life at the English bar that can be amusing and may provoke thoughts about . . . [more]

Traditionally, a key indicator of the quality and the utility of any case citator is the breadth and depth of its coverage. The better citators purport to cover all of the cases reported in print. Law reports published by a competitor are included as a matter of course, both as an original reference and as a correlative or parallel citation.

Online databases and “electronic citations” have not been treated in the same manner. Initially electronic citations were not seen as “legitimate” citations and were considered to be unworthy of the same attention as print citations. Case citators ignored them. There . . . [more]

“We’ve decided that it will be better for his later development if we speak to him only in legalese.”

. . . [more]

Can we stand to hear about one more Toronto-based event?

Parliament 2009: What Kind of Country Will We Have?
A Forum Exploring Parliamentary Democracy in Contemporary Canada

is an evening being hosted by the The Churchill Society for the Advancement of Parliamentary Democracy

Date: Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Time: 7:30pm – 10:00pm
Location: Campbell Conference Facility, Munk Centre for International Studies
Street: University of Toronto, 1 Devonshire Place
City/Town: Toronto, ON

Please register by emailing awards@churchillsociety.org
by January 18, 2009.

Description

The political crisis that occurred before the Governor General prorogued the most recent legislative session on Parliament Hill caused . . . [more]

I want to take the opportunity to let Slawyers know about a law reform symposium that the LCO is organizing for this coming May 12th and 13th, in collaboration with Lorne Sossin, the Director of the Centre for the Legal Profession at the University of Toronto. It will be held at U of T. The Symposium will explore the interrelationship between theory and practice in law reform and will include people with strong opinions about what law reform should mean and activists who have played a major role in reforming law, and will be based on an attendee participation format. . . . [more]

Just posted to the CanLII blog:

CanLII invites you to a user meeting in Toronto

CanLII is pleased to invite you to a user meeting in Toronto on February 11 2009. On the agenda:

• demo of SATAL – the point-in-time legislative system soon to be launched on CanLII;
• creation of a CanLII users group;
• demo of APIs developed to streamline use of CanLII content by institutional users.

The presentation will be followed by a cocktail. They ask you inform them if you plan to be present.

For more info, check their blog post for time, location and RSVP contact . . . [more]

Here’s a new US title that should be of interest to Slawyers. Its available in print from Yale UP, or online for free.

Daniel Solove, a lawyer and blogger, takes a look at the long term effects of the Internet on personal privacy and the legal ramifications of a loss of reputation. People often struggle with the fine line between privacy and free speech on the Web. You can share personal information about yourself or a friend on a blog, not realizing that it will be there for anyone — including future employers and dates — to see. […] The