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]

Here’s a quick tip from digital inspiration (via Lifehacker). If you don’t use a password generating/saving application, you may want to turn to the computational engine Wolfram-Alpha the next time you need to come up with a “random” password. Simply enter into the search box on that site [password of n characters] where ‘n’ is the number of characters you want. Wolfram Alpha returns this (for a 7 character request):

The phonetic form may help you memorize the new password. (I’d prefer the sort of thing we do with our postal codes; thus, for this, perhaps: “Why two? Ask . . . [more]

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

On the website now:

This week’s Maritime Law Book case summaries are up, precis on Slaw and full at cases.slaw.ca.

• York Estate v. York et al. 2011 BCCA 316
• Robinson Estate, Re 2011 ONCA 493
• McNamee v. McNamee 2011 ONCA 533
• Mathusz v. Carew 2011 NLTD(F) 28
• R. v. Jones (D.C.) 2011 NSPC 47

Thus far, seventy-five summaries in total are available on cases.slaw.ca. . . . [more]

Publishers across the board, not just legal publishers, are under George Monbiot’s microscope in this very interesting article in The Guardian the other day. The title is enough to make you look twice — ‘Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist’.

It is a similar tale in legal publishing. We need to be aware of the added power we put into publisher hands every time we cancel a paper subscription…. . . . [more]

I never had the opportunity to take Law and Economics, and almost everything I remember from undergraduate economics courses I could have learned at Father Guido Sarducci’s Five Minute University. In spite of my lack of knowledge about the subject I’m beginning to suspect that whatever you’re thinking about, it’s important to follow the money.

I doubt that thinking most Aboriginal issues are about money, rather than constitutional law principles, international law principles, or human rights principles is any kind of insight. But I wonder, are there foundational legal principles about money? For example, is there a legal principle . . . [more]

The results of a recent survey conducted by Leger Marketing for SAS, a business analytics software and services provider, on the use of social media by companies have been published today: only 1 in 5 Canadian companies post on social media networks and monitor social media conversations on a regular basis. These two actions are considered the fundamental pillars of effectively using social media.

A lack of resources and a view that it is a waste of time and energy are cited as explanations as to why companies choose not to use social media or not to monitor mentions of . . . [more]