Google honours Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi on his birthday by giving him pride of place at the front of their name today:

Mahatma (“Great Soul”) Gandhi was a lawyer, we should remember. I find that an encouraging thought. . . . [more]

Today’s episode of the Law Librarian podcast will be recorded at 3 pm ET or 12 noon PT on Blogtalkradio. Our topic today will be social media and law libraries. Join us live (listen via the website –headphones recommended at the office) and call in with questions, or listen to the recording later. I will be participating in this episode. Richard Leiter hosts with his new co-host Marcia Dority Baker.

Incidentally, I was away during the last recording on September 3rd but have had a listen. The focus of the episode–“What’s Real in the Real World?”–was on resources used . . . [more]

Today’s the day the new United Kingdom Supreme Court, the replacement for the House of Lords, begins operation. (What’s with the brown? Ugh.) And, because this is the age it is, the new institution’s familiar, the blog, is born along with it.

The UKSCblog (I’m not liking uk-suk as the way to say the new court) is designed frankly as a “mirror” of the American SCOTUS blog.

I’ve taken a quick look and like what I see — with the exception that, curiously, the URL remains fixed as www.ukscblog.com whether you’re on the “home,” “about,” “archive” or, . . . [more]

A couple of weeks ago Google Labs released Fast Flip, a way of browsing news stories from mainly print media. About 40 newspapers and magazines have partnered with Google, which then provides you with images of their news stories. (The images are in PNG format, so you can’t copy the text as you might with some PDFs.) Thumbnail images of pages are presented in four rows, which filter, respectively, for “recent,” “sources,” “sections,” or “topics.” Helpfully, there’s a headline below each image to let you decide where you’d like to jump into the stream. Once . . . [more]

Back in July I talked about a petition urging to improve PACER, the online access service to U.S. court records and documents. Until improvements are made, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard have stepped in to provide a tool to give open access to court documents that originate on PACER in cooperation with the Internet Archive. The video below is a presentation by Steve Schultze, fellow of the Berkman Center and new Associate Director at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy at the September 8, 2009 conference Gov 2.0 Expo Showcase explaining how the . . . [more]

There’s something of a buzz in the blawgs about a recent decision from the California Northern District Court in which the court ordered Google to close the email account of a non-party. According to Online Daily Media, in Rocky Mountain Bank -v- Google, Inc. the bank explained that it had sent a file containing a wealth of sensitive information about clients by email to the wrong Gmail address. The bank tried to contact the addressee but received no response. It then got in touch with Google, which said that it would reveal the account information for the addressee if . . . [more]

At lunch today, Joe Altonji of Hildebrandt in Chicago screened a neat four minute viral video which is well worth a view.

Here it is

And Merrilyn Astin Tarlton suggests that this one if fun too, and this one too, for those of us who are typography buffs. Be patient while it loads.

Joe’s viral video is by the author of this book:

. . . [more]

Ah, the unreported judgment…or in this case Order. Sometimes, interesting tidbits come out of discussions that flow to my ears via conversations from our lunchroom.

The walls of the Harvey A. Bodner Q.C. Lounge, named after one of my favourite former bosses, recently absorbed a conversation regarding a Masters order that an student-at-law heard about in passing from a professor regarding an order for substitutional service via Facebook.

The rumour made its way to me and thanks to the great memory of many individuals, including Professor Billingsley who supplied me with an action number, and our students who never complain . . . [more]

Although SEO specialists have long denied that metatags matter, there have been lawsuits over them for a number of reasons, including trademark infringement, attempt to divert business, and even defamation.

Dany Sullivan of Search Engine Watch outlines some of the major American suits over metatags.

Google’s Matt Cutt publicly confirmed yesterday for the first time that their search algorithm does ignore metatags. See the video here.

Eric Goldman of Santa Clara Law says,

Although occasionally judges have gotten it right (see, e.g., Standard Process v. Banks). most courts still treat the presence of a third party trademark in

I find it a little puzzling that when it comes to proving emails there isn’t more fuss and bother than there appears to be. Doubtless I’m missing things that Slaw readers, particularly the e-discovery folks, perhaps, will point out to me. But it strikes me that the very thing making email so wonderfully convenient is also likely to make it difficult to prove an email in a court of law. I’m referring, of course, to email’s etherial nature: the fact that an email exists both everywhere and nowhere in particular.

Unlike a printed letter, which has an actual, physical, unique . . . [more]

The City of Toronto currently operates under 43 bylaws inherited from the various municipalities that were amalgamated to make up the existing City. Work started in 2003 to rework the bylaws, and today they are working towards one proposed draft zoning bylaw. Public consultations have been taking place, with the last one coming up this Thursday in the North York Civic Centre Council Chamber. A report on the public consultation will be made at the November 4th Planning and Growth Management Committee meeting. As well, over 500 stakeholder groups have been identified. They hope for completion and adoption of . . . [more]

A new site launched less than a month ago was brought to my attention recently. Persuasive Authorities is a blog by faculty at various American law schools. But it was the Canadian contributors that I’ve encountered previously that really caught my attention.

I know Richard Albert of Boston College through political activities in Canada. With an impressive resume that includes law degrees from Yale, Harvard, and Oxford, he also clerked in the Supreme Court of Canada. His latest post on the site is about his first class at Harvard, where Duncan Kennedy described how law travelled around the world.

Comparative . . . [more]