The RCMP Task Force on Governance and Cultural Change has recently made its Final Report (pdf) available on the web. The Introduction to the report and other information can be found here. As part of its mandate the Task Force commissioned several other reports which can be found at the URL above. These include:

* Background paper prepared for the Task Force on Governance and Cultural Change in the RCMP
by: Gilles Paquet

* Report to the Task Force on Governance and Cultural Change in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police: Examination of Internal Management Structures of Police Forces
by: Police . . . [more]

An article in today’s Washington Post addresses a number of instances in which U.S. border security personnel have invaded the privacy of traveller’s laptops, requiring them in some cases to yield their ID’s and passwords and in some cases confiscating the equipment. The people whose computers have been the subject of American interference are described by the author of the article as typical business travellers.

I believe it would make sense for other Canadian law firms to do as Blaney McMurtry LLP has done and travel across the U.S. border with completely clean, i.e. empty, laptops. Lou Brzezinski of Blaney . . . [more]

Thinking that the resource might be of some interest to our readers, I followed a link from an email list that promised the Association of College and Research Libraries’ Women’s Studies Section–Women’s History Sites [http://libraries.mit.edu/humanities/WomensStudies/history.html], with a section on Canada.

• That actually leads to an error message on MIT’s website, one annoying feature of which is that it wipes out the erring URL and replaces it with the totally unhelpful 404 URL. This means that as you attempt to reform the original URL, moving higher up the nested directories looking for a substantive hit, you have to paste the wrong

Subway is suing Quiznos, more or less, because Quiznos ran a contest in which it asked people to make a video showing that Quiznos’ sandwiches were superior to Subway’s. The resulting entries were posted on the web, of course, and, Subway alleges, made false claims and defamed their product. (The winning video is available in the story in the New York Times — and in my view it’s fairly wretched and wouldn’t have won the $10,000 prize in any contest I ran.) Apparently, the novel issue stems from the fact that Quiznos didn’t make the ads but only instigated . . . [more]

The Law Commissions of the UK and Scotland yesterday published their 18th in a series of proposed statute law repeals. A draft Bill containing the proposed repeals will be introduced soon into the House of Lords.

“In reforming the law, the Law Commission does not just propose new laws. It also proposes the repeal of laws that have become obsolete. The purpose of our statute law repeals work is to modernise and simplify the statute book, reduce its size and save the time of lawyers and others who use it. This in turn helps to avoid unnecessary costs. It

Today’s Bloomberg News has a stimulating review by their architecture critic of Rafael Viñoly’s new Bronx County Hall of Justice. . . . [more]

I wanted to make sure we acknowledge Michel-Adrien Sheppard’s excellent post 20th Anniversary of the Supreme Court of Canada Morgenthaler Decision on Abortion at the Library Boy blog. He includes links to and summaries of related commentary from a range of viewpoints. . . . [more]

I seem to be moving in the unlit corners of the law lately. See my interest in the Champerty Act and legislation that’s still in force but not included in the normal indices of acts: 1275 and the Business of Law. This time I’m rooting around in 1763, modernizing rapidly it would seem, but stumped again at finding what I need online. Hence this request for help.

I want a digital copy of the official version of the Royal Proclamation of 7 October 1763, a fundamental document in Canada’s constitutional law concerning the rights of Aboriginal peoples. I . . . [more]

The most recent issue of the Canadian government’s Weekly Checklist features the 2006 annual report on electronic surveillance from Public Safety Canada.

The report outlines the use of electronic surveillance of private communications by law enforcement agencies to assist in criminal investigations.

Under the Criminal Code, agencies must obtain judicial authorization before conducting the surveillance.The government is required to prepare and present to Parliament an annual report on the use of electronic surveillance.

The 2006 Annual Report covers a five-year period from 2002 to 2006. The Report includes new statistics for the period of January 1, 2006 to December . . . [more]

Today marks the 35th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court landmark decision on abortion, Roe v. Wade. CNN.com’s report appears to be one of the more balanced I found– 35 years after Roe: A legacy of law and morality. For additional detail on the decision itself, see the Wikipedia entry Roe v. Wade. . . . [more]

An announcement that’s appropriate, given that this weeks Column is on e-discovery:

The Sedona Canada E-discovery Principles [PDF] in English are now up on the Canadian E-discovery Portal, which is hosted by Lexum. The French version will be posted soon.

You will also be able to find Canadian e-discovery related precedents (common law, civil law) on the Portal.

Congratulations to everyone involved, particularly the “content managers” Peg Duncan, Dan Pinnington, Frédéric Pelletier and (Slawyer) Dominic Jaar. . . . [more]

We learn yet again, from a recent N.Y. Times piece that book titles can’t be copyrighted: there are now two books in print (one 30 years old, mind you) called The Saucier’s Apprentice.

Apart from the fact that Raymond Sokolov, the author of the older book, has done a brilliant job of promoting his work through this piece — it’s the work that comes up when you search for “the saucier’s apprentice” — what interests me is the question of why. Why can’t you copyright a book’s title? Or, to put it more broadly, why can’t you protect . . . [more]