This is an interesting addendum to the ABA session ““Friend” Is Now a Verb: Judicial Ethics and the New Social Media“. In the Financial Post‘s Legal Post section from August 2nd, Mitch Kowalski notes Oklahoma’s Judicial Ethics Advisory Panel released an opinion on judges and social media in that state on July 6, 2011. The Oklahoma State Courts Network (OSCN.net) has the full Judicial Ethics Opinion 2011-3.

From the opinion:

¶1 Questions: 1. May a Judge hold an internet social account, such as Facebook, Twitter, or Linkedin without violating the Code of Judicial Conduct?

¶2 2.

As we often do here on Slaw, we’re drawing your attention to the current Google Doodle, in this case an animation to honour Queen’s marvelous Freddie Mercury (1946-1991), whose birthday is Monday, September 5. The screenshot below shows only one moment of a longish Flash movie that accompanies Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now.”

Google tells us that it won’t be seen in the US until a day later, September 6, because of Labour Day. (Er… Canada too.) But that indignity to Freddie is no impediment: Check it out on the UK Google site for the next few hours at least: . . . [more]

This past week the Ontario Superior Court released the decision in Baglow v. Smith, where the plaintiff’s claim over an allegedly defamatory blog post was dismissed on summary judgment. The decision is also of interest for Judge Peter Annis’ discussion on how to “remove the sting” of internet postings, and the application of the fair comment defence. Matthew Nied has also posted a more concise summary of the case on his site.

Background

The plaintiff, John Baglow, is relatively renowned in Canadian political circles and operated under the moniker of “Dr. Dawg” on Dawg’s Blog. He describes . . . [more]

For the last few days this video of two robots having a conversation has been making the rounds. It is fascinating, and hilarious. The Cornell Creative Machines Lab also has other fascinating videos of robots at work. There has not been much in the way of interesting comment on the video, but Kevin Kelly actually called the grad students involved to find out a little more. It is a pretty good take on the Turing Test. . . . [more]

On September 15, two legislative research experts will help to uncover the hidden gems in Ontario and federal legislation.

Caroline Hyslop is no stranger to CALL – some of you may have already attended great presentations she has given in the past. And I may be a little biased because I work with him, but Rick Sage is both an engaging speaker and experienced e-Laws spelunker.

This is the second in CALL’s 2011-12 series of webinars. More information is available at the CALL website. (Online registration available!) . . . [more]

As the great Oscar once wrote, “I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.” So here I am, passing upon advice, admittedly not quite the same thing. And let me say at the outset that since advice is something lawyers give, or, rather, sell, I find it good.

Of course, lawyers aren’t the only ones charging for advice (which, curiously, is rooted in the Latin for “seeing” — as in “the way in which a matter is looked at.” [OED]). Lucy famously charged a . . . [more]

Everybody wants something for free. It’s human nature. And it’s rarely more prevalent than when it comes to technology. “It’s all just bits and bytes, why should it cost anything?” says one. “Information wants to be free” suggests another. 

Today’s generations have grown up in the age of Napster and Google and surveys indicate that there is almost an expectation that digital content, including music and movies, is free. Much to the chagrin of the entertainment industry who has been battling since the invention of the tape recorder and VCR to figure out how to keep making money off a . . . [more]

This is a post in a series to appear occasionally, setting out some articles, videos, podcasts and the like 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.

Courtney Minick has written a post on Universal Citation for State Codes over at VoxPopuLII, a blog published at the Cornell University Law School.

She discusses the spread of universal, or vendor-neutral, citation in the United States. The bulk of the article is devoted to developing neutral citation for state laws, but one detail attracted my attention. In contrast to Canada, where neutral citation has been widely adopted for caselaw, the practice is still not very widespread South of the border:

To date, 16 states assign universal citations to their highest court opinions. (To date, Arkansas, Illinois, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi,

Slaw news — for those who read Slaw only via RSS or email.

On Slaw you’ll find a brief excerpt of this week’s SlawTips posts. The links in the following will take you to the full versions, along with 100 more tips. Advice you can use — short and to the point — every Tuesday, Wednesday & Thursday.

• Tuesday: Technology: Privacy Commissioner Launches Handbook to Help Lawyers Apply Privacy Law to Their Practices
• Wednesday: Research: Understand the Acronym
• Thursday: Practice: A Moment of Time…

You can get to SlawTips at either tips.slaw.ca or slawtips.ca . . . [more]

Profiling the behaviour of air travellers to help identify potential terrorists has been news in the United States for several years now, but there has been little public discussion of the practice in Canada. Indeed, airport authorities haven’t included profiling among their security tools here, until last year when the federal government began developing a pilot “passenger-behaviour observation program” for Canadian Air Transport Security Authority officers.

Now that the pilot program has ended, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada is making her position known. Jennifer Stoddart says she’s not convinced the technique will actually help . . . [more]

Quicklaw and Westlaw Canada use “*”. CanLII uses “!”. I’m referring to the symbol that these databases use for as a “wildcard”, that is the symbol used to represent one or more characters in a string when carrying out a search. Conversely, when it comes to the symbol used to truncate a word, Quicklaw and Westlaw Canada use “!”, but CanLII uses “*”. (Google does not allow users to truncate search terms at all, although it does use “*” as a wildcard in phrase searches.)

Not only does the symbol used for the wildcard vary among online services, but . . . [more]