This is a post in a series to appear occasionally, setting out some articles or videos that contributors at Slaw are enjoying and that you might find interesting. The articles tend to be longer than blog posts and shorter than books, just right for that stolen half hour on the weekend. It’s also likely that most of them won’t be about law — just right for etc.

Please let us have your recommendations for what we and our readers might like.

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The riots that started in Tottenham, London on 6^th August and spread throughout London and England for the subsequent 3 days, could not have been predicted. Initially people thought that the shooting of police suspect Mark Duggan had sparked community tensions that eventually boiled over. But this theory has been quickly discounted. Others initially blamed government cuts for causing public anger. Others, including the Prime Minister, David Cameron, blamed a ‘Broken Britain’. None of these theories really provide us with a satisfying answer as to why so many young people looted, vandalised and attacked property and people without . . . [more]

Last week, the Law Commission of Ontario released its proposed Draft Framework for the Law as it Affects Older Adults:

“The Framework is intended to assist with the development and evaluation of laws, policies and practices to ensure that the realities of the circumstances and experiences of older adults are taken into account, and that laws, policies and programs promote positive outcomes for these members of society.”

“It is accompanied by an extensive Interim Report, which sets out the research and analysis which form the basis for the Framework, and provides examples of its implications and implementation.”

“It is

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According to the Google Docs Blog today, they’re introducing the ability to control access to documents at the page level:

Using page-level permissions, you can make some pages private for certain users while keeping other pages public for everyone to see. For instance, let’s say you have a Google Site that you’ve shared with your team and your manager. You can allow your team to see one set of pages, let your manager edit another set of pages, and keep yet another set of pages private for only you.

As is usually the case with innovations, they’re not available right . . . [more]

Yes, lawyers are conservative. Yes, they’re slow to respond to social change. And yes, they’re by and large technophobic (ask any lawyer you meet about venerable RSS and watch their incomprehension).

But.

Some innovate. Clearspire, a firm in DC, if it can be said to have a location, is one of the innovators, and a firm worth taking a look at. It’s almost tedious to count the ways in which Clearspire differs from Rumble, Bump & Stiltskin, but the Economist does its usual good job of summarizing matters. These are three of the highspots:

• No billable hour. Instead:
  

  Clearspire

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The Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission’s appeal of the Whatcott freedom of expression case to the Supreme Court of Canada is scheduled to be heard in October 2011.

It is almost trite to say that you don’t computerise a mess, it simply makes it happen faster. The problem is the legal system, particularly litigation; and it is something we are stuck with, though changes are afoot. 

A leading Australian judge has recently sounded the death knell for the traditional system for litigating civil disputes and urged the legal profession to abandon it.

“There is no point in tinkering with the present system and its problems. It is time for a fresh start.”

US-based e-discovery guru, Ralph Losey has long advocated that the system is broken, and that most . . . [more]

These are notes are from a panel presentation organized by the ABA Section on Labor and Employment Law at the American Bar Association 2011 conference in Toronto on Sunday, August 7, 2011. Panelists included Douglas E. Dexter, Farella Braun & Martell LLP, San Francisco; Roy L. Heenan, Heenan Blaikie LLP, Montreal; Mauricio Paez, Jones Day, New York; and Lauren Schwartzreich, Outten & Golden LLP, New York. The moderator was Cynthia E. Nance, Professor of Law, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Arkansas. Note: these are my selected notes from this session; any inaccuracies or omissions are my . . . [more]

♬ An’ now I’m flyin’ through the air.
On a cloud, on a cloud.
On a cloud, lookin’ down…♬

Lyrics and Music by Cody Canada, recorded by Cross Canadian Ragweed.

Further to Simon Fodden’s post on August 16, 2011 entitled: “Privacy Commissioner Releases PIPEDA Guide for Lawyers“, I thought that a relevant passage in that report dealing with safeguarding personal information and in particular, with reference to mobile devices and cloud computing, would deserve its own post. The section in question on Safeguarding Personal Information is as follows (relevant paragraphs bolded for emphasis):

Safeguarding personal information

Lawyers

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The Federal Court of Canada announced yesterday that the Chief Justice, the Honourable Allan Lutfy, will be resigning effective Sept. 30, 2011.

Prior to his appointment to the Federal Court, he acted as counsel for the McDonald Commission, the Restrictive Trade Practices Commission (State of Competition in the Canadian Petroleum Industry) and the Dubin Commission. He was also counsel for the Security Intelligence Review Committee and the Canadian Parliamentary Press Gallery

He was appointed to the Federal Court Trial Division in 1996, and became the Chief Justice on July 2, 2003. . . . [more]

There has been a lot written lately about the disturbing trend towards becoming a surveillance society. And the equally disturbing trend for governments to try to interfere with various kinds of communications to squash activity. Mathew Ingram has a good article about that on gigaom.

There is a great hue and cry about this when it occurs in countries that we feel suppress their people – but we are also seeing the trend in North America and Britain – such as the recent British riots and San Fransico’s Bart transit system shutdown of cell service. 

And yet at the . . . [more]

For the last few months, I have been tracking new issues of Canadian law journals for Bora Laskin Law Library’s Recent Law Journals Tables of Contents service (July issue here) . This was as part of a bigger project, that will hopefully see the light of day someday. One of my collaborators on that project Andrea Davidson (a lawyer who is currently a masters student at the University of Western Ontario’s Faculty of Information and Media Studies) thought it was worth noting that a number of the journals we were looking at were not available on either Lexis . . . [more]