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]

Lawyers love to armchair quarterback the trials of others. We strategize, we second-guess, we substitute our own brilliance for the wit and experience of learned trial counsel. It’s our professional equivalent of Tuesday Morning Football.

However, on the rarest of occasions, there comes a time when a legal strategy is just so outrageous that our armchair quarterbacking risks incurring hoots of derision.

I’ve been reading about a particular trial for the past few weeks (yes, it’s now, at the time I’m writing this, in week 6 of what could be a 9 or 10 week trial). I believe, officially, that . . . [more]

This week in biotech was very slimming:

There have been three obesity drugs presented to the FDA for approval this year. The agency has very stringent criteria for obesity drugs because while they could see wide application (sic), the condition they treat is not generally life-threatening. So any signs of dangerous side effects can doom candidates’ applications. The third and final drug, however, Orexigen’s “Contrave” product, .

The Indian Drug Manufacturers’ Association is lobbying heavily to slim down the free trade agreement being negotiated between India and the EU. They want to accomplish this by keeping “data protection” and . . . [more]

Yesterday LAWPRO posted an update and warning to Ontario lawyers about the ongoing bad cheque frauds it is seeing. LAWPRO continues to get daily calls and emails from lawyers that are being targeted by fraudsters attempting bad cheque frauds. Lawyers must not let their guard down.

If you have any doubt about the extent to which fraudsters are willing to work to engage lawyers and dupe them, take a look at the back-and-forth email exchanges on the Melissa Andersen and Siam Rai fraud attempts. You will be totally amazed at the level of detail in the information exchanged and the . . . [more]

And a bit of substantive law, too, for those with too much time on their hands this very cold (in Toronto) December day.

Different courts in different jurisdictions sometimes arrive at different answers to the same question. Sometimes, though, they arrive at the same answer by different routes. Those interested in the art of judging, even in the development of the area of jurisprudence involved, may sometimes find it useful to compare the cases. (I’ll mention them eventually.) . . . [more]