A couple of years ago I posted about Ubiquity, a Firefox add-on that let you summon up and execute a variety of useful browser commands with simple shortcuts. For various reasons I never did make the use of the feature that it deserved, and then I switched away from Firefox because I found it slow.

Now the idea is back again, this time in a cross-browser way that’s going to make it more useful. The application, if that’s what it is — perhaps “feature” or “set of commands” would be a better description — is called Quix, and . . . [more]

Access to justice is a hot topic, having been discussed on Slaw in the past few months here and here. Here in Winnipeg, the catalyst was the release of the 2008 United Nations Report, Making the Law Work for Everyone. Our response to this report is the Legal Help Centre.

Executive Director Karen Dyck envisions the Legal Help Centre as a place “… to assist disadvantaged members of our community to access and exercise their legal and social rights.” This agency will help people determine their next course of action in solving a problem, which may not even . . . [more]

This week was a week of small steps in biotech. And not the kind of small steps that are actually giant leaps, either.

Canadian VC funding saw a big leap for tech and cleantech funding, but only a marginal increase for biotech. This news roughly coincided with the purchase of the VenGrowth funds by Covington Capital this week, which seems like a big leap, but will probably end up only being a minor step in the reshaping of the industry in Ontario.

Both the United States and Europe took small steps toward increasing the availability of biosimilars (“generic” . . . [more]

Despite the favourable piece in today’s Information Today Dayton is waking up to learn of the power of Michael Bloomberg’s cheque-book. The IT piece says that LexisNexis has learned from WestlawNext’s debacle of a launch—which “involved telling everyone at the same time about a new product while only providing it to one market and leaving other markets to the guesswork; not telling anyone the price; and generally irritating librarians by promoting the new but often unavailable service directly to patrons”.

Instead, LexisNexis is doing it differently. LexisNexis is targeting the solo and microfirms with the new Lexis Advance. These lawyers

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]