Seanna and I watched Gary Hustwit’s documentary film about the Helvetica font on the weekend. It’s led me to pose the question, “What’s your font of choice for formal legal argument?”

The movie explains that, aside from being ubiquitous, Helvetica is modern, minimalistic and neutral. I like it for formal legal advocacy for two reasons. One, I feel it’s a good “empty vessel” though which I can impose my own meaning without a font signaling something “off message.” Two, I’ve bought into the idea that persuasive argument is, first and foremost, digestible argument: writing point-first, plain language argument in Helvetica . . . [more]

This iPhone app gives Ontario lawyers handy Child Support and Land Transfer Tax calculators. Find it at the iTunes store for $1.99.

Cross posted at Avoid A Claim . . . [more]

A former Field summer student wrote this on my Facebook Wall:

I read your post on Slaw, but I can’t tell: what do you think of the new McGill changes? Are they retroactive– should we cite old cases with the new style? Won’t that make it difficult or impossible to do effective Westlaw citation searches? Do we *have* to follow the dumb ‘no periods!’ suggestion despite it being totally ridiculous? I’ve noticed the new AB courts judgments haven’t changed their style. If the SCC doesn’t start using the new guide suggestions (esp. the periods thing) in the upcoming term,

As readers will doubtless know, there’s a good deal of unrest in some quarters about the impending visit of the Pope to the United Kingdom. (He lands in Edinburgh on Thursday.) As the scandals about child rape by priests have multiplied over the last few years, calls for justice in the courts have grown. Of particular interest is the suggestion that the Pope should be arrested upon his arrival in Britain, and, in the words of English barrister and author, Geoffrey Robertson, prosecuted:

“under international law, for having assisted in the protection of sex offenders in a mass

Under the Author Information section of an article in Nature last week (August 5), there was a highly irregular reference to an unusual number of extensive contributors: “Foldit players (more than 57,000) contributed extensively through their feedback and gameplay, which generated the data for this paper.” As you might imagine, this throws a small wrench into the intellectual property concept of scholarly publication, in which the publisher reaps the profits, while the honors of priority and attribution go to the identified authors. In this case, the 57,000 anonymous authors suggest something new is afoot. 

In the article in question, “ . . . [more]

This weekend I was in Montreal for PodCamp Montreal, an event bringing together people interested in social media. Most sessions (at least, the ones I attended) took the format of presentation and then Q & A. Sunday morning, however, the session Is Social Media Really a Social Media? brought out the true spirit of podcamp conversation with a contentious discussion that delved into the semantics of the term. Pier-Luc Pettitclerc, IT Director at Commun, brought in his boss Martin Ouellette, a traditional ad agency owner, to battle out the question. . . . [more]

We all run into design-related questions when creating a web page. Questions like “Should this button be red or green?” or “What would the most effective headline for this paragraph be?”. While these decisions may have a dramatic impact on the overall effectiveness of a website, they are often the product of subjective judgement calls by an individual, or worse, a committee.

What if, instead, we could approach such design decisions scientifically? A/B testing makes this possible by treating a web page design instance as an “experiment” where multiple variations of a webpage are randomly presented to page visitors; data . . . [more]

Despite the advent of Smartphones (Blackberry, iPhone, etc.) and the many ways they facilitate our lives (i.e. we can now start a car, open a bank account, receive and send e-mails, read the news, etc.), the legal profession still seems to be behind on technology. Although the technology is clearly available, we unfortunately fail to take advantage of its full potential. We have all the tools and gadgets necessary to practice the law from our own homes, without ever even having to physically meet a client or go to court. In fact, the virtual world is less costly, greener, . . . [more]

Though we frequently mention New Jersey, we haven’t mentioned the Channel Islands – and their unique local laws and language. The local BBC news on Jersey mentions today that the Jersey Legal Information site was according to the BBC designed by Richard Susskind and that Richard is leading a conference on the use of social media within law, and how social media might enhance a legal information institute portal.

The event will look at using social media such as Twitter and Facebook to provide legal information for lawyers and citizens alike.

Richard notes that smaller jurisdictions may be . . . [more]

I’d forgotten about pastebins until recently, when someone I was following on Twitter linked me over to some text he’d parked on one of them. For those who don’t know, a pastebin is a web location that lets you put up some text on an ad hoc basis so that others can read it. That’s all there is to the thing. Sometimes a pastebin will let you password protect your text; other times not, relying on someone’s having to know the URL to offer a degree of privacy.

Why would you use a pastebin? Because you’ve got some text you . . . [more]

In Windsor Law, we do not just believe in social and legal justice, we live it.

One member of the faculty is challenging the validity of that slogan. Dr. Emily Carasco of Windsor Law has filed a human rights complaint against the law school and co-faculty member Dr. Richard Moon, as a result of the school’s search for a new Dean.

A background of the facts are available through The Windsor Star here, here and here. A copy of the Appendix to the complaint is also available through the Star here, which also outlines the background and . . . [more]

We’ve talked a whole lot on Slaw over the years about translation, as befits a law blog in a country rich with immigration and with two official languages:

[related-posts]

And while the computer translation services such as Google Translate are miracles, they don’t always get it right — and sometimes get it comically wrong. A couple of the tough nuts in translation are idiom and professional jargon. A new online service, Linguee, may help here. Linguee, as it says, uses “the web as a dictionary,” allowing you to search for a word or a phrase and find its . . . [more]