Though my father didn’t name me Autolycus[tippy title=”Autolycus”] My father named me Autolycus; who
being, as I am, littered under Mercury, was likewise
a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles.
Winter’s Tale, Act 4, Scene 3 [/tippy], I, too, am something of a “snapper-up of unconsidered trifles,” as anyone who reads Friday Fillips will agree. It’s often the little things, the throw-aways, that prove to be, if not treasures, then sources of delight.

Take comic books. Yes, my mother, too, threw them away, in my case while I was away at university pondering matters of great moment. Those slim, cheap — “trashy” . . . [more]

Many judicial and quasi-judicial proceedings these days are recorded on audio- or videotape, rather than by a court reporter taking notes in person then transcribing them. Usually the audio tape is then transcribed, at least if someone needs a transcript. 

The recordings are often taken as the (or an) ‘official’ version of the proceeding. For example, a practice direction of Ontario’s Workplace Safety Insurance Board (WSIB) treats recorded and transcribed proceedings on an equal footing. The rules of practice of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission provide in Rule 2.237(a), “If the hearing is recorded on videotape or some other video . . . [more]

England’s top judge, Lord Chief Justice Lord Judge (that’s a great name!) has complained that “impenetrable” criminal justice legislation is causing major delays in British trials.

The remarks are contained in the most recent annual report of the Court of Appeal Criminal Division.

In his introduction, Lord Judge writes:

“It has been another year of unremitting commitment to the administration of criminal justice. That is as it should be. What remains less tolerable is the continuing burden of comprehending and applying impenetrable legislation, primarily but not exclusively in relation to sentencing. The search for the legislative intention in the

. . . [more]

Cynthia Vukets of The Star covered today a new study that predicts the success of lawyers based on their law school yearbook photo,

A University of Toronto professor has found that he can predict how much money a law firm will make just by looking at university yearbook photo of the managing partner.

“We found that power is what predicts their success,” said Nicholas Rule, a psychologist. “It’s the impression of power that one gets from someone’s face.”

He took yearbook photos of the managing partners of the 100 top US law firms and showed them to college students. Students

. . . [more]

It looks like Yahoo will be shutting down the social bookmarking service Delicious.com. Or Del.icio.us as we first knew it.

Techcrunch reported the story earlier today, citing Yahoo layoffs that included the entire Delicious team. The post was based on a leaked internal presentation slide that showed a number of services on the chopping block, including: Delicious, Altavista, Buzz, MyBlogLog, Yahoo! Bookmarks, and Yahoo! Picks.

There were other sources mentioned in the post, so it’s very likely this is more than a rumour. And while it’s entirely possible the user base will be heard, and the service saved… I . . . [more]

I’ve only just come across Books Ngram Viewer, a Google Labs tool that lets you derive graphs from their Books database at the text level. You can enter up to three terms and graph the frequency with which each term occur in a given corpus over time. Drawn from five million of the 15 million books Google has digitized thus far, there are five corpora in English, and one for each of Chinese (simplified), French, Spanish, Russian, and German.

In English, the basic corpus has books ranging from 1500 to 2008 and is offered without any filtering except as . . . [more]

Becoming an official regulatory body will enable the HRPA to ensure that human resources professionals are competent and behave in an ethical manner.

On December 15, 2010, the Attorney General of Quebec, Jean-Marc Fournier announced that the Quebec government has decided to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada the Eric v. Lola case to determine whether common law partners should have the right to claim alimony after a breakup.

[This is the third in a series of articles about the trends, theories, principles and realities that have influenced the redesign of the new library of Osgoode Hall Law School – part of the renovation and rebuilding of the law school currently underway. This instalment is written in response to Eric Appleby’s recent post on “The Future of Headnotes”.

When you walk into an academic law library, the first that meets your eye is row upon row of bookstacks as far as the eye can see, filled with published law reports. It’s an impressive sight; and, in the 21st . . . [more]

Welcome new columnists Simon, Robert, Lewis … and new Twitter followers Kathryn, Dana, Steven, Tiffany, Paul, along with dozens of others.

Dear Friends, Colleagues, Readers,

I’m writing a paper for a CLE conference that’ll be held in Vancouver next June. I’m trying to gather anecdotal information as to whether the SCC decision in Resurfice v Hanke, 2007 SCC 7 and the “material contribution” doctrine mentioned in the case are helping plaintiffs get before-trial settlements — by using the Resurfice“material contribution” notion to get them past difficulties in proving factual causation using the “but-for” test — which are settlements that they might not have been able to get before Resurfice. I’m not after settlement details, just a yes or . . . [more]

Yesterday’s United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit finding that e-mail held by a service provider cannot be accessed without a warrant has already been much discussed. For good American commentary, see blog posts by Professors Paul Ohm and Orin Kerr and the Electronic Frontier Federation’s news release. This is a short note to identify the links with our recent Supreme Court of Canada decision in R. v. Gomboc.

The American decision, United States v. Warshak, is very much about the societal value of confidential e-mail communications. The Court recognizes such value and grants it . . . [more]