Wealth of comparative and historical material in Hein Online’s Classics.

I just stumbled over a book I never knew existed:

1884 W. T. S. Daniel, The History and Origin of the Law Reports,
Together with a Compilation of Various Documents Shewing the Progress and Result of Proceedings Taken for Their Establishment and the Condition of the Reports on the 31st December, 1883

We have been debating law reporting for longer than we suspected. . . . [more]

Yesterday the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador created history when it introduced and passed Bill 75 (now S.N.L. 2008, c. A-1.01), Abitibi-Consolidated Rights and Assets Act. The legislation takes away land and water rights, including ownership of all hydroelectricity rights from the generating station at Star Lake, and timber rights to forests on Crown land, from the U.S.-based company AbitibiBowater as of the end of March 2009 given to the company’s predecessor in 1909. Media are characterizing this both as “expropriation” and “repatriation” of the lands. . . . [more]

So says Nick Abrahams in his similarly titled post of last week:

Today in what appears to be a first in Australia and perhaps the world, Master Harper of the ACT Supreme Court ordered that a default judgement could be served on defendants by notification on Facebook.

I wonder how long before this happens in Canada? After all, Canada is the country in the world with the highest Facebook penetration, as a percentage of its population… 29% in July 2008! Too bad Facebook doesn’t send back read receipts to lawyers serving documents on Facebook. . . . [more]

I came across the following enthusiastic review of a new book on the law of Bail:

Faris on Bail is the most extensive and insightful book written on the law and practice of bail in Victoria. It is clearly written and structured and includes a reference and link to every relevant case on the topic. It provides lawyers and judges with a complete resource on the relevant law and is one of the few legal publications that provides an exhaustive treatment of a subject matter.

Well what’s unusual about that, you might ask.

Legal publishing in jurisdictions like Victoria – . . . [more]

Last week Family Law Education for Women (FLEW) unveiled a public education campaign called “All Women. One Family Law” to ensure that women in Ontario know their legal rights under provincial family law. FLEW is a public legal education project funded by Ontario to develop materials to inform women’s decisions about family law issues.

Here is the English language website, the French website and news announcements in both English and French. The information itself is in English, Chinese (traditional), Punjabi, Tamil, French, Chinese (simplified), somali, Urdu, Arabic, Farsi and Spanish.

I particularly liked the embedded video in the . . . [more]

The folks over at Orange Legal Technologies have put together a news feed they are calling “Unfiltered Orange” focussing on electronic discovery. You can access Unfiltered Orange a few ways:

• directly from the Orange Legal Technologies website. Scroll down for the latest headlines, click through for the full news item from its original source.
• if you are on Twitter, follow the tweets from @complexd.
• if you are using a feed reader, or want to repurpose the feed, the RSS feed is available here.

They are apparently using Twitter to create the original feed. They have created this . . . [more]

Canadian citizen Omar Khadr is the only Western national left in Guantánamo Bay. Khadr and fellow detainee Mohammed Jawad are believed to be the first child combatants ever to face prosecution of alleged “war crimes”. Khadr was only 15 years old when he was captured by US forces in Afghanistan and later transported to the infamous US detention centre where he has now spent more than a quarter of his life. Khadr faces trial by US military commission. The military commissions fall so far short of international human rights standards that it is impossible for Khadr to receive a fair

An article in the recent Communications of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), “Got data?: a guide to data preservation in the information age,” makes the case for urgent investment in data cyberinfrastructure — whatever is required to store, manage, catalog and access data.

(Note: that link won’t give you much joy unless you happen to subscribe to the ACM portal. Fortunately, the author, Francine Berman, who is Director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center, has put up on her website a version of the piece in PDF, “Surviving the Data Deluge.” Such is the . . . [more]

Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.
– Master Yoda, P.C., C.J.C.

In this award-winning 2006 film produced in cooperation with the CBC, Steel Toes tells the story of a neo-Nazi living in Montreal. He viciously attacks an Indian immigrant without provocation, mistaking him for a Muslim, with serious injuries that resulted in death.

He is frustrated, angry with the millions of immigrants who come to Canada and reproduce in large numbers. They supposedly take jobs away from working-class whites like him and are changing his . . . [more]

An arbitrator under the WIPO domain name dispute resolution policy has held that Meg Whitman, CEO of eBay for ten years, has no remedy against someone who registered several domain names relating to a possible attempt by Ms Whitman to run for governor of California in 2010. The report on OutLaw.com has a link to the decision itself.

Some of the domains were megwhitmanforgovernor.com and meg2010.com.

The essence of the decision is that Ms Whitman did not have a custom of commercial use of her name and thus had not established a ‘common law trademark’ in it. Mere fame was . . . [more]

Last week Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a collaborative service of Britain’s Internet Service Providers, banned a page of Wikipedia that contained a picture of a record album cover (in the UK called the ‘sleeve’) from 1976. The picture showed a young girl, about 10 perhaps, naked, in a sexually suggestive pose.

The ban was done by putting the page on a blacklist that IWF updates twice a day to help British ISPs avoid making potentially illegal images available.

An unintended consequence of the ban was to prevent any British internet users from editing any page on Wikipedia. This consequence comes . . . [more]

The ubiquitous Karlheinz Schreiber has lost his latest round of legal whack-a-mole. This morning, the Supreme Court of Canada rejected his application for leave to appeal the most recent court decision allowing his extradition to Germany.

Germany initially requested Mr. Schreiber’s extradition on August 27, 1999. Since then, he has sought leave to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada no fewer than five times, and obtained it once (not counting his earlier trip to the SCC in 1998, challenging Canadian assistance to a Swiss investigation). He managed to delay the first court decision on the merits of his extradition . . . [more]