Legal Watch blog recently reported that Apple has applied for a patent on technology that, among other things, would allow Apple to identify and punish users who “jailbreak” or unlock their iPhones or who otherwise tamper with their devices against Apple policy.

I was delighted to learn from a tweet by Lyonette Louis-Jacques, the International Law Librarian at the University of Chicago (and a Slaw columnist), that two of Karl Llewellyn’s lectures are available in audio on the U of Chicago website. Llewellyn was an adherent of the U.S. “legal realism” movement and, perhaps most famously, the force behind the drafting of the Uniform Commercial Code.

One of his duties at Columbia, and later at the University of Chicago, was to deliver introductory lectures to first year students. His book The Bramble Bush, still read with pleasure today, came out of . . . [more]

Driving the other day, I saw the following electronic highway sign:

Seattle:
Rte. I-90 19 mins
Rte. 520 14 mins

There are only two bridges from Bellevue to Seattle, so I had to choose one of these routes. No-brainer, right? Take Rte. 520 and save five minutes.

Not so fast, so to speak. Seattle’s not a small town. Both these routes lead there, but they leave drivers in very different places. Does “Seattle” refer to where each road enters the city, or to a specific spot? If the latter, where? Depending on where I want to go in Seattle, I-90 . . . [more]

A California town has decided not to have a Facebook page after being advised by its lawyer of the legal risks.

The ABA Journal has the story.

Excerpt:

The legal issues include:

• May city officials remove vulgar posts and misinformation, or are the comments protected by the First Amendment?
• If a quorum of city council members comment on a Facebook post, is it a violation of the open meetings law? Such laws require advance notice of meetings and an opportunity to attend, blogger Robert Ambrogi writes at the Media Law blog.
• Is the city obligated to retain user comments

. . . [more]

This is the second part to a post from a week ago in which I made a note to the CBA legal project management panel and issued a three-question survey.

To follow up, I’ll use the survey to identify issues relating the current pressures how we litigate on behalf of our clients. I have not yet developed strong views on this subject matter, so will simply present the survey results and some thoughts about each question.

As I did last week, I use the term “litigation” in the broad sense, to refer to any form of representation in an adjudicative . . . [more]

We all know that editing a Wikipedia entry is fairly straightforward – and that the Wikiguardians keep a vigilant eye over entries and edits that stray from the norms of objectivity and verifiability.

So the announcement that the Correctional Service’s internal operations arm is investigating an edit made to the Wikipedia entry on Canada’s Official Languages Act, which appears to have been made from a government computer connected to the Corrections Canada server at the department’s offices on Laurier Street in Ottawa, is arousing the interest of the mainstream media. Denis Coderre appears to have noticed the edit a . . . [more]

♫ Let the pendulum swing.
Let the old guard surrender
It is a new day, a new world…♫

Lyrics and music by Steve Wood and Julia Loggins, recorded by Kenny Loggins.

The ABA Journal on Aug 23, 2010 released an article entitled: A Law Prof Explains Why He is a Cell Phone Luddite.

The article starts with this statement:

Some high-profile professionals are ditching their cell phones, giving them more power over their time and eliminating distractions that interrupt their work and their relationships.

Having experienced a period of time this summer effectively ‘off the grid’ where . . . [more]

Forbes published a story online yesterday about the use of “backscatter x-ray vision” in mobile vans. This scanning technology is the same as that employed at some airports, enabling authorities to see through clothing and luggage. The article features the product being advertized and sold by American Science and Engineering, which has sold more than 500 of the scanners. Their (in my view, creepy) promotional video is embedded below:

The backscatter technology and safety are discussed in the Wikipedia article on the subject.

The use of this technology creates obvious privacy problems, particularly when wielded by or on behalf of . . . [more]

Earlier last week, I presented the CCCT IntellAction Working Group selection of principles that should guide the design and organization of court web sites and further explained, in a later post, principles 4, 5 and 6 on notification, content organization & search and security. In this post, I further explain the next three principles:

• Principle #7: Bilinguism
• Principle #8: Accessibility
• Principle #9: Interactivity

Comments and suggestions are welcome! . . . [more]

I recently had the opportunity to ask some of my clients a few questions about their outsourcing deals. The following is based on those discussions…

1. What is one of the biggest challenges you faced at the procurement stage of an outsourcing and how did you manage that challenge?

Procurement of long-term, high-value outsourcing contracts is complex. You need to be able to negotiate appropriate risk transfer, service levels and pricing, while maintaining competitive tension between vendors bidding for the work. It is not as simple as firing off an RFP with pre-defined services and waiting for a crate of . . . [more]

We all have our grievances about law school, as remote as it may or may not have been for us personally. Maybe what’s needed is greater academic discourse about the pedagogue of legal education.

The University of Western Ontario Law School is hosting Canadian Clinical Legal Education Conference on October 22-23, 2010. The program features a sitting Supreme Court Justice, legal academics, and legal administrators. Law societies should also be interested because John Campion, President of the Federation of Law Societies of Canada (FLSC) will also be speaking.

Speaker bios can be found here, and a draft agenda . . . [more]

I tend to live in the future. I think about what it will be like when I’ve paid off all my debts, how I’m going to celebrate a significant event coming up next year, and what my next job will look like. So last December, when the legal outsourcing firm Integreon announced the first “Shared Information Service”, or outsourced law library services, I was very intrigued. At the time, I remember thinking, “how are they going to do this?” I can understand outsourcing research (be it legal, business development or competitive intelligence), but how do you outsource the physical . . . [more]