Last week Nicole Garton Jones, a BC-based lawyer and fellow Slaw contributor, provided some thought-provoking commentary on the position of the Law Society of British Columbia on the topic of Virtual Law Firms, as discussed in the latest edition of the organization’s Bencher’s Bulletin. In the bulletin, and subsequent response to Ms. Garton-Jones’ post, the LSBC identifies several key concerns relating to cloud computing for BC-based law firms, namely:

 [This is the second in a series of articles about the trends, theories, principles and realities that have influenced the redesign of the library of Osgoode Hall Law School — part of the renovation and rebuilding of the law school currently underway.]

The chief glory of the Osgoode Hall Law School Library is its world-class collection of early Anglo-American legal materials, including the largest collection of legal Canadiana anywhere. Despite pressures to recover space and plans to send some materials offsite (see my earlier column) when the Osgoode Library moves into its new facility in Summer 2011, we . . . [more]

Take a look at the ♀IFLS site. The Institute for Feminist Legal Studies at Osgoode Hall Law School has been running a blog since the beginning of summer. All, or nearly all, posts are by the Director of the institute, Professor Sonia Lawrence, and they range across a wide spectrum of kinds — as should be the case in a good, general topic blog.

For example, the latest post is about a book by Professor John Kang called “The Man Question”, there’s a post about the state of feminism, a post about the recent court decision striking . . . [more]

In an earlier column I noted that we use the idea of justice in two different ways. According to the first, to call something just is to praise it morally and to call it unjust is to condemn it. This, the general sense of justice, does not signal any particular grounds for praise or condemnation: ‘just’ is little more than a thumbs-up, ‘unjust’ a thumbs-down. But we also use ‘justice’ in a second, more specific, way, to pick out a particular virtue that arrangements might have or lack. This is what Justinian’s Digest has in mind when it tells us . . . [more]

The last couple of years I have been living vicariously through Twitter, doing my best to follow the discussions at the Internet Librarian International (ILI) conference that takes place in the UK each October. When people who are attending start emailing me things they have learned (as happened this year), I really know I am missing something!

Some highlights from ILI2010

Dr. Hazel Hall, Director of the Centre for Social Informatics at Edinburgh Napier University, spoke about “relevance of social tools for information professionals” in her talk Getting Real About Social Media. Owen Stephens has a nice blog . . . [more]

This past week the Alberta Queen’s Bench released Pridgen v. University of Calgary, 2010 ABQB 644, a decision which quashed the academic discipline of students who had criticized a university professor.The applicants were participants in a Facebook group that used potential defamatory statements, which prompted in a complaint by the professor that resulted in non-academic discipline for misconduct.

The university did not allow the students to appeal the decision to the Board of Governors Discipline Appeal Committee, thereby preventing them from exhausting all internal remedies before seeking judicial review. . . . [more]

Readers will notice that we’ve added a small new feature to Slaw. Down at the bottom of entries, at the end of the after-post line that invites you to “Share,” you’ll see this: . . . [more]

There’s a time in the fall when I realize that colour is fading and we’re once again headed for the blacks, whites, and greys of winter — when, as it were, the world is putting on the drab of business clothing because the holiday is over. (How we wound up as a society that enforces dress in shades of dull is another story, perhaps.)

I comfort myself with the thought that great things are possible in black and white. Print. Early television. Yousuf Karsh portraits. The night sky…

And evocations, too, of our human “dark” side. Some of these can . . . [more]

Here’s an interesting paper outlining what looks to be a very interesting research tool currently being developed for Google: A “research trail” generator as a browser feature.

We propose the concept of research trails to help web users create and reestablish context across fragmented research processes without requiring them to explicitly structure and organize the material. A research trail is an ordered sequence of web pages that were accessed as part of a larger investigation; they are automatically constructed by filtering and organizing users’ activity history, using a combination of semantic and activity based criteria for grouping similar visited web

In the course of this profession you occasionally come across little oddities that catch your attention and amuse you. When it happens to me I often share them here at Slaw. The most recent oddity to catch our attention is an interestingly named case from Nova Scotia in 1919, The King v. Fifty Gallons Rum, (1919) 53 NSR 131, 31 CCC 10. Hitherto I had been unaware that an inanimate object could be named in an criminal case. In this instance it seems that Fifty Gallons of Rum, was caught at the wrong place, at the wrong . . . [more]

There is a commonly held myth that the gender gap in partner compensation is due to women billing fewer hours and spending less time on client development due to their greater responsibilities at home. This myth has been exploded in a recent study [PDF] published by The Project For Attorney Retention and sponsored by the ABA Commission for Women in the Profession.

Amongst other findings, the report states that factors that work against women partners include the lack of women on compensation committees where bonuses and compensation criteria are set; the lack of transparency around compensation criteria; the lack of . . . [more]

As it did a number of years ago with his earlier book, In the Public Interest, Irwin Law has just released a new book of essays edited by Michael Geist in both print and in PDF. And, as before, the version available online is offered under a Creative Commons license.

From “Radical Extremism” to “Balanced Copyright”: Canadian Copyright and the Digital Agenda is a book of 20 essays by Canadian scholars that tries to move the current copyright debate “toward an informed analysis of Bill C-32 and the future development of Canadian copyright law.” Bill C-32, as readers . . . [more]