One of the tasks a law librarian might carry out is legislation monitoring. At the Field Libraries we keep a detailed spreadsheet of which bills lawyers or clients may want status updates for, we monitor legislation from any jurisdiction and we email interested parties whenever there is a status change for a bill. We also watch for regulations, proclamations, government news releases and other published legislation hints. It is one of those tasks that is best carried out by a small organized team so that only the relevant information is disseminated to the many. I confess to a geeky interest . . . [more]

We learn last week that the Cornish pasty is safe at last from plain pasties passing themselves off as being from Cornwall, thanks to a decision by the European Union to give that delicacy Protected Geographical Indication status. In this it joins 19 other UK products and over a thousand from elsewhere in Europe protected by GI (“geographical indication”), DO (“designation of origin”), or TSG (“traditional speciality guaranteed”) status under European law.

There’s a designation database available online that you can search or browse by country, product and protection type.

A very few non-European nations can be found in the . . . [more]

Once law reform on the topic of electronic communications had dealt with first-level issues like how to satisfy writing requirements or signature requirements electronically, people started paying attention to harder questions. One of these was how to meet a requirement that a document must be transmitted or stored as an original. 

The approach to such questions at the  United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL), which has tended to lead world thinking on the subject, is to seek a ‘functional equivalent’ of what satisfies the requirement on paper. What is the function or policy purpose served by the requirement, . . . [more]

The Canadian Bar Association has released a discussion paper by Ottawa law prof Adam Dodek, “Solicitor-Client Privilege in Canada, Challenges for the 21st Century” [PDF]. Although, as Professor Dodek says, the privilege has evolved into a “quasi-constitutional right,” its future is far from clear or, indeed, secure. From the conclusion to the 50-page paper:

As the CBA’s interventions with governments demonstrate, legislative intrusions on the Privilege are frequent, possibly more so. We live in an increasingly globalized legal world and Canadian law on the Privilege differs in significant respects from other jurisdictions which are important both in terms

Because international law supported European assertions of sovereignty over Indigenous territories beginning in the 15^th century it’s appropriate for international law to deal with the issue of Indigenous rights now. The current situation of Indigenous peoples was created by international law. European nations created an international law that allowed European powers to divide up and colonize the rest of the world and profit from it. Europe exported enough of its population to at least some of the colonies in the Americas and the Pacific that when they were decolonized, Europeans or their descendants continued to govern on the basis . . . [more]

Google’s Gmail service is suffering an outage that has left 120,000 of its 150 million Gmail users without e-mail, contacts, labels and other content since the weekend. While some will no doubt use the incident as a basis to proclaim the cloud as unreliable, the truth of the matter is more complex. Both on-premise and cloud-based services can, potentially, suffer from data loss. With on-premise services, you (or your IT staff) are typically 100% responsible for backing up your data, securely storing it, and testing recovery procedures. All (or at least most) cloud-based services will take care of this for . . . [more]

We are hearing so much these days about the changing landscape of legal services. See ‘The End of Lawyers?’ by Richard Susskind http://www.susskind.com/endoflawyers.html, or the writings of Jordan Furlong – http://www.law21.ca/consulting-services/ (also see his SLAW contributions).

One recurrent theme in the legal press now is that lawyers enjoy a legislated monopoly over the provision of certain services which do not require legal expertise. . . . [more]

Last Saturday, I shared on Slaw the first two recommendations of the CCCT IntellAction Working Group on Court Web Site Guidelines. In this post, I’m sharing our draft recommendations 3 and 4.

(note: in the next few days, I will share our two remaining recommendations, 5 and 6)

As usual – your comments and suggestions are welcome! Please let us know if you think we are in the right direction… . . . [more]

Brock Rutter, a member of the New York and Vermont bars and former research assistant at the Berkman Center and now enrolled in the master’s program at McGill Law School, wrote to me about his proposed thesis topic, wondering whether he might run it by Slaw’s readers for any advice they might have. I thought it would make sense to present his work and proposal in Q & A format:

Q. You say you’re working on “a bibliometric analysis of citations between provincial courts of appeals.” Can you explain what it means in plainer terms?

A. I will pick a

Professor Joseph Weiler, Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal of International Law, recently posted an entry on his blog about a criminal defamation charge lodged against him in France for publishing a negative book review. [See also Libel Accusation from a Book Review on Slaw] That post got me thinking about how one would go about finding a criminal procedure code of a foreign country. It’s good to know in case someone charges me with a crime because of any of the book reviews I’ve written.

Image from The Life of Emile Zola

Discovery Tools

To find a foreign code . . . [more]

This is an article by Malcolm Mercer, partner and general counsel at McCarthy Tetrault in Toronto. It originally appeared in the September 2010 edition of LawPRO Magazine.

Risk is an inevitable reality of law practice. The only way to eliminate risk is to stop practising law – an option most readers of this article are not yet contemplating. A more realistic option is to actively mitigate risk through structured, systematic risk management. This approach is particularly helpful at the law firm level, where risk management can sometimes be seen to be contrary to the perceived self-interest of individual lawyers . . . [more]

The University of Western Ontario has been the only common law school in Canada without a student-run law review. Until now.

After years and several attempts of starting a student-run law review, the faculty finally approved the launch of a new peer-reviewed legal journal. This current effort started over a year ago, when I thought that it was ridiculous that we didn’t have our own academic publication that our student body could get involved with and administer themselves.

After consulting with a number of other colleagues in my year with a background in publishing, notably Joel Welch, Kamila Pizon, and . . . [more]