Hate speech laws have always come in for criticism, balancing as they do on the slack wire between freedom of speech and violence to others. The brouhaha involving Mark Steyn, MacLeans and some law students is only the latest wobble on the wire, and one that I won’t go into here. But I thought Slaw readers might be interested in a provision in the Alberta Human Rights, Citizenship and Multiculturalism Act that the venerable (and very pro speech, shall we say) LanguageLog poked fun at today. The provision is found in section 3(1) and the part that attracted their attention . . . [more]

The Tuscaloosa News yesterday had a pot-pouri of useful information under the heading Lawyers Open Their File Cabinets for a Web Resource, focussing on JDSupra, a database for contributed legal documents and PreCYdent.

The San Diego Business Journal describes this under the headline PreCYdent Legal Research Web Site Takes on LexisNexis, Westlaw. The product was built in San Diego and Milan, and offers a free and quite robust interface to U.S. Supreme Court and Court of Appeals cases.

It describes its content as:

US Supreme Court: complete with official US citation and pagination since 1759

Federal Reporter . . . [more]

Thanks to Jon Smithen for a link to a BBC piece discussing the availability of The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913, which is a fully searchable edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing 197,745 criminal trials held at London’s central criminal court.

The site is fascinating, although I would advise North American readers of Slaw to look at the site in the evening, since there is so much traffic from British researchers that the site is crashing.

A conference on the use of these resources is planned for later . . . [more]

Friday night 9,000 Toronto Transit Commission’s unionized workers voted on a tentative deal with the TTC and, despite the expectation by both the media and Toronto residents that they would either accept the deal or give 48 hours notice of any strike action, they did not accept the deal and went on immediate strike at midnight. Amalgamated Transit Union Local 113 President Bob Kinnear had endorsed the deal, but it is speculated that a number of maintenance workers were not happy with the lack of job security given in the agreement.

The immediate strike action was taken because the union . . . [more]

Previously I was not aware that the Supreme Court did theme weeks, but in what seems to be Evidence Week at the S.C.C., I noted, with interest, the following article in the Globe and Mail earlier this week: A chance encounter that might rewrite the rules by Kirk Makin. I have nothing to add to the commentary but given the significance of the case and the precedents involved, I thought I would do a little web 1.0 and provide the linking.

The Precedent, which has been cited over a thousand times in a little over 10 years:
R. . . . [more]

This from Maritime Law Book to Slaw:

Effective June 1, 2008 Maritime Law Book will provide free access to over 215,000 cases in our 12 databases that cover every common law jurisdiction in Canada plus the House of Lords and Privy Council (U.K.).

No registration is required. And the databases are searchable.

Free access is limited to the judgment without a headnote. Also the free access does not include the MLB Key Number System.

Existing subscribers will continue to have access to our time saving headnote material at existing prices. And note that all users will now have access to

The international NGO Human Rights Watch recently published a report on the upcoming Beijing Summer Olympics that states that the “corporate sponsors of the Olympics risk lasting damage to their brands if they do not live up to their professed standards of corporate social responsibility by speaking out about the deteriorating human rights situation in China.”

The report targets the 12 highest-level corporate benefactors of the Beijing Games, known as the TOP sponsors (“The Olympic Partner”): Atos Origin, Coca-Cola, General Electric (GE), Manulife (parent company of John Hancock), Johnson & Johnson, Kodak, Lenovo, McDonald’s, Omega (Swatch Group), Panasonic (Matsushita), Samsung, . . . [more]

A legal low-tech note for a Friday — which is still law and technology and, so, fit meat for Slaw:

The Premier of Ontario will announce today that a regulation taking effect immediately will undo any existing bans on the use of clotheslines by homeowners and preclude any such bans in the future. The regulation, which hasn’t yet made it to the e-laws site, is made pursuant to the Energy Conservation Leadership Act, 2006, S.O. 2006, c.3, Schedule A:

s.3(2) A person is permitted to use designated goods, services and technologies in such circumstances as may be prescribed, despite

John Ruggie, appointed UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General on business and human rights has recently released his report, “Protect, Respect and Remedy: a Framework for Business and Human Rights.” [PDF]

From the summary:

Responding to the invitation by the Human Rights Council for the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on the issue of human rights and transnational corporations and other business enterprises to submit his views and recommendations for its consideration, this report presents a conceptual and policy framework to anchor the business and human rights debate, and to help guide all relevant actors. The framework comprises

The New York Times has a story on the copyright infringement lawsuit by J.K. Rowling against the proposed publisher of a Harry Potter Lexicon, created by Steven Jan Vander Ark, a librarian. Unable to resist some of the stereotypes associated with librarians (e.g. the very opening line: “Shhh! The librarian at the heart of…”), the Times reports that Rowling got emotional enough to cry during testimony Monday, and Vander Ark wept yesterday.

And in case you’re interested, it comes from the horse’s mouth that the “unlocking spell” Alohomora! does not come from Aloha, as Vander Ark had surmised, but rather . . . [more]

Boing Boing gives us Carl Malmud’s report that U.S. free access sites Justia and Public.Resources.Org have received take-down letters from the Oregon Legislative Counsel in connection with their publishing of Oregon’s laws. Apparently West Publishing, which has also reproduced Oregon’s laws without a licence from the state, will not receive a similar demand.

I know that Canada and Ontario claim Crown copyright in our laws but explicitly permit copying if the material is reproduced accurately and that copyright is acknowledged. . . . [more]

Adam Kolber, who teaches law at the University of San Diego School of Law, and who is currently teaching at Princeton University, studies neuroethics. You might well ask. Well, folks have always been trying to mess with our heads one way or another — just ask any of my students — and now there needs to be some greater discussion of ethical standards to hamper, if not to restrain, some of the more enthusiastic and direct neural intruders. And we need to think about how to understand and use what we’re learning about neural functioning.

His blog, the Neuroethics . . . [more]