While Scrabulous is still dealing with various legal and copyright issues and two game companies are rumoured to be creating legitimate online versions of the game, one can easily forget about the joys of playing this board game for real. Yes, with real live people, pen and scorepad (and calculator for us mathematically-challenged), an agreed upon dictionary, and a few hours to kill, you too can spell your way to fun! But why not take it one step further and participate in Frontier College’s Scrabble Night in Canada:

The SCRABBLE® Friends and Family Challenge is a SCRABBLE® event that . . . [more]

Spring–wedding season–is just around the corner! This post is in response to a question that came to me via email this morning. Here are some key resources for those looking for information about same sex weddings in Toronto:

• City of Toronto – Registry Services – Marriage – details on obtaining wedding license
• Tourism Toronto – Wedded Bliss – includes details on wedding ceremony locations
• Gay Toronto Tourism – Same Sex Marriage
• Google search for additional wedding locations
• “Panel tackles same sex marriage in Canada” – March 7, 2008 Globe and Mail panel discussion on same sex marriage and

From the Torys Speaker Series at the University of Ottawa Law and Technology:

Facing up to Facebook
A panel discussion on social media and social networking

Please join the Law & Technology group as Professors Jane Bailey, Jeremy de Beer, Michael Geist, Ian Kerr, and Valerie Steeves discuss legal issues arising from Facebook and related social media technologies.

Date: Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Time: 11:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.
Place: Fauteux Hall, room 351
Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa

Please RSVP to techlaw@uottawa.ca.
Join the Facing up to Facebook event page.

Note about this event . . . [more]

The Women’s Court of Canada launches this week. (See the story in the Ottawa Citizen.) The WCC is a group of women academics and practitioners who combined to rewrite six Supreme Court of Canada decisions to take a full and proper account of women’s equality. The affected decisions are:

• Symes v. Canada, [1993] 4 S.C.R. 695
  deduction — child care expenses — women — taxpayer — income
• Native Women’s Association of Canada v. Canada, [1994] 3 S.C.R. 627 ((The citation is misprinted in the Majury article referred to below.))
  funding — freedom of expression — women —

The Supreme Court of Canada has published a special edition of its Bulletin of Proceedings that contains a statistical overview of its work for the period 1997-2007.

Tables include:

• number of complete applications for leave to appeal and notices of appeal as of right filed by litigants with the Court’s Registry each year;
• number of leave applications granted and the percentage granted of the total submitted;
• number of appeals heard each year and the number of hearing days over the year;
• information with respect to the number of judgments rendered each year;
• time lines in the life of a

Would you be willing to donate your intellectual property to the public domain upon your death, so it does not need to wait the 50 or 70 years to be released by law?

The idea (with action video!) resides on the website of experimental designers fi5e and max azare at ni9e.com.

An honourable idea, but it makes me wonder how valid will signing a sticker really be under the law?

Hat tip to Will Spaetzel for the link. . . . [more]

R v Ferguson 2008 SCC 6

[73] A final cost of constitutional exemptions from mandatory minimum sentence laws is to the institutional value of effective law making and the proper roles of Parliament and the courts. Allowing unconstitutional laws to remain on the books deprives Parliament of certainty as to the constitutionality of the law in question and thus of the opportunity to remedy it. Legislatures need clear guidance from the courts as to what is constitutionally permissible and what must be done to remedy legislation that is found to be constitutionally infirm. In granting constitutional exemptions, courts would be

Wayne MacPhail, columnist for Rabble.ca (among other things–Wayne wears many hats), tackles the the topic of How Media Can Misrepresent the Web using the sensitive topic of reporting that takes place regarding child pornography. From his article:

A couple of weeks ago, Canadian media outlets reported that, across the country, 44,970 computers were actively engaged in trading child pornography – 15,140 of them in Ontario.
…

First, this story is a classic case of mainstream media slipping casually into the “Internet as source of all evil” mindset. Yes, child pornography is heinous and those who either abuse children and/or collect

Over on his Law Firm Web Strategy blog Steve Matthews announced that JD Supra has been launched. I had a preview of this service back in September, so I had a fresh look am pleased to see the further development of this new service.

JD Supra allows for law firms, law schools and other legal organizations and individuals to share documents. Having a name behind the documents lends credibility to them, while the contributors get to be known for having expertise in their respective areas. This is combined with a profile that will drive traffic back to their websites. A . . . [more]

Yesterday’s federal budget contained a series of security and justice measures:

• $400 million to encourage provinces and territories to recruit 2,500 new front-line police officers – this amount is non-recurrent. In other words, once the funds have been spent, provinces will have to find the cash to pay for new officers hired with the federal funds
• $122 million over two years to help overhaul the federal corrections system. A report in December 2007 called for a modernization of the service, cracking down on narcotics in prisons as well as improving rehabilitation services
• $32 million over two years for the new

The National Centre for First Nations Governance has announced the publication of “The Jurisdiction of Inherent Right Aboriginal Governments” [PDF] by Osgoode Hall Law School Scholar Kent McNeil. From the press release:

The inherent right of the Aboriginal peoples to govern themselves has become a generally accepted aspect of Canadian constitutional law.

But what is the scope of the governmental authority, or jurisdiction, that can be exercised by inherent right Aboriginal governments? And how does the jurisdiction of Aboriginal governments interact with the jurisdiction of other governments in Canada, especially the federal and provincial governments?

This important research

A 2.5 million dollar grant is being given to a group of 8 academic researchers by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Announced today, the grant is to be spent over seven years in the study of how and why average citizens are being watched by public and private organizations. The study is being titled “The New Transparency: Surveillance and Social Sorting.” Part of the study will be to look at the flow of surveillance information that is now possible with computer use.

From the Queen’s University press release:

The new project will examine