♫ If you’ve got a plan
If you’ve got a master plan
Got to vote for you
Hey hey, got to vote for you
‘Cause you’re the man… ♫

Words and music by: Marvin Gaye and Kenneth Stover.

The fall election – in both Canada and the USA – is taking place at a particularly interesting time. Courtesy of blogs, the public are making their voices heard to a degree that has not been possible in the past. Access to the media was not particularly easy in the past, but by virtue of the Internet, that no longer matters . . . [more]

Here’s a link to a Tyee piece on the opening of the Community Court in Vancouver, and here’s some other background. It is based on New York’s Midtown Community Court, which has an interesting publications page. The courts are based on the Community Justice movement, which seems to have its origins in the UK and utilizes the Action Research approach. Here is a good entry into the literature. . . . [more]

As Michel-Adrien Sheppard reported here last week, the Supreme Court of Canada has a newly refurbished website. It was in fact launched over the weekend and is now up and running.

I find the re-design an improvement: there’s a more open feel from a greater use of white and lighter colours. The old site had a tendency to feel a bit claustrophobic at times.

If you’d like to see how the site had changed over time, pay a visit to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, where there are S.C.C. pages from 1998 to the present. Sadly, the . . . [more]

Former U.S. President Woodrow Wilson once said in a letter to his first wife, Ellen Axson, two years before they got married,

The profession I chose was politics; the profession I entered was the law. I entered the one because I thought it would lead to the other. It was once the same road; and Congress is [s]till full of lawyers.

One-hundred and twenty-five years later, and across an international border, this quote still holds true. A quick search of current members of the House demonstrates that 45 of the 308 MPs have their occupation listed as “lawyer.”

Earlier . . . [more]

The Public Policy Forum has released a report, “(Not as) Male, (Not as) Educated, (Not as) Experienced & (Still) White,” [PDF] by Jonathan Dignan, analysing the makup of our 39th Parliament and comparing it to comparable data for the current U.S. House of Representatives and the British Parliament. Among the many interesting nuggets are the facts that (only?) just under 16% of MPs are lawyers; 86.5% have attended university but only 32% have university degrees; and the cost of campaigns in Canada is much less than those in the U.S. and much more than those in the U.K: . . . [more]

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has nominated Nova Scotia Court of Appeal judge Thomas Cromwell to sit on the Supreme Court of Canada.

If appointed, he will fill the seat left vacant when Michel Bastarache retired earlier this year.

Justice Cromwell has worked at the Court before. He was the executive legal officer to former Supreme Court chief justice Antonio Lamer.

And I have heard that he loves law libraries. . . . [more]

The final version of the Spousal Support Advisory Guidelines is available in PDF and HTML format on the Department of Justice website. It is a report prepared by Professors Carol Rogerson, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto and Rollie Thompson of Dalhousie Law School, in conjunction with the Advisory Working Group on Family Law. Although it doesn’t represent the policy of the DOJ, it was prepared with Ministry backing and clearly has Ministry support, the idea being to provide a set of informal (i.e. not legislated) guidelines that courts across the country will find it useful to adopt.

The . . . [more]

Tomorrow evening, the Supreme Court of Canada will launch a new version of its website.

The new site has been redesigned to comply with the Common Look and Feel 2.0 design standards set by the Treasury Board of the Government of Canada.

The new standards:

• provide consistent presentation of government services and content
• facilitate online interaction
• improve navigation, menuing and format elements
• improve accessibility and ease of use

All of the content currently available on the Supreme Court of Canada website (rules of court, docket information, etc.) remains in place. It will just be easier to find and more . . . [more]

Via the Register:

Section 11.1 of the new Google Browser Chrome’s EULA:

11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights that you already hold in Content that you submit, post or display on or through the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content, you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free and non-exclusive licence to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content that you submit, post or display on or through the Services. This licence is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and

♫ Oh I…
I want to be with you everywhere… ♫

Words and music by Christine McVie, recorded by Fleetwood Mac.

It seems that we are living in a mini-renaissance with new technology applications being released seemingly daily. Google has released Google Chrome (see Simon Fodden’s post of Sept 1, 2008) with the stated justification that the web needs a solid foundation for modern web applications. Law firms face a similar problem – the need for a solid foundation for capturing of all the myriad bits of information that form the electronic client file into one place. . . . [more]

There’s quite a bit of buzz this week about open source software.

Earlier this summer Google banned open source code on Mozilla Public License,  claiming spiraling legal costs.

Chris DiBona of the Open Source Team says,

We did this because we have been trying as a company to make a statement against open source license proliferation. You see, we feel it is damaging to the larger world of open source development if there are too many duplicative licenses.

This week Google reversed the ban, looking for greater collaboration through the Eclipse Public License. . . . [more]

Despite a public apology and acknowledgement of responsibility, the tragedy from tainted meats in Canada may not yet be over.

Even in light of this incident, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) seems to be following through with a plan that would lower inspection requirements for domestic meat products, while maintaining higher standards for exports.

Although safety issue don’t appear to be a concern, consumer confidence is at stake. This would affect already cash-strapped beef farmers.

Susan Bourette, a journalist who worked undercover for Maple Leaf in 2004 to write her book, Carnivore Chic: From Pasture to Plate, . . . [more]