The United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights created a mechanism in 2006 to review the state of human rights in member countries. Canada’s turn comes up in 2009. The first step in the process is a self-evaluation by the target country. Canada submitted its report in September, and has made the submission publicly available here.

I’ve had only a brief look so far, but the report looks very interesting. The first bit provides insight into what programs/legislation/processes are in place to create a society which meets the goals of the UN. The second part provides a . . . [more]

What colour is that noise?

No, this isn’t about synesthesia, that cross-over effect in the senses where letters in the alphabet can have colours and sounds can smell — if you’re like Nabokov or Duke Ellington or Ludwig Wittgenstein. (Okay, okay: no one is like Ludwig Wittgenstein.)

It’s about noise, pure and not-so-simple, noise without tune or harmony but noise blended in just a certain way.

Let’s start with white noise. Most people have heard of white noise and may even have used it to block out other and distracting sounds. Turns out, though, that white noise . . . [more]

Prof. Errol Mendes of UofO has stated that PM Harper’s recent decision to prorogue government is not just a bad idea, but “very dangerous.”

Any time that the prime minister wants to evade the confidence of the House now he can use this precedent to do so…

This is certainly an unprecedented situation that we saw unfold. I hope that we won’t come to the brink of this type of effort to unseat a sitting government going against the democratic wishes of the people of Canada.

Mendes is the same person who contemplated seeking an injunction when the election was . . . [more]

Yesterday, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada tabled her annual report on the Privacy Act. While she came down hard on a number of federal bodies such as the passport office, one aspect of the report should be of interest to lawyers generally.

The Commissioner reports on a whole range of complaints against tribunals and quasi-judicial bodies for publishing sensitive personal information about parties and non-parties. Decisions and tribunal records have always contained such information, but now that more of these decisions are readily available online, complainants are not happy that searching for their names online will bring up . . . [more]

CanLII announced this evening that, together with LexUM, it has released Reflex, “a tool allowing you to hyperlink your documentation with CanLII’s material.”

The simple notion is that, on the Reflex page, you upload a document (or a case name or single citation) from your machine and Reflex, recognizing case names, citations and legislation data, will edit that document by supplying citations (where necessary) and hyperlinks to the appropriate text. You can save the final result as an HTML document (which, of course, you can then convert to other formats as needed). Reflex accepts material in the following formats: . . . [more]

Senator Goldstein has reintroduced his anti-spam bill in the Senate, as of last month. It is now Bill S-202. A similar bill (I have not compared them) was on the order paper before the last election. (It’s interesting that Senate bills die too when elections are called, considering that the Senate is not elected and the Senators all continue in office despite elections for the House of Commons. Yes, I understand the principle, but its application is not inevitable – though it is not going to change, either.)

You can read the Senator’s comments as he began second reading debate . . . [more]

Netlegal.ca is the latest legal service company to cross my radar. This Canadian company (headquartered in Charlottetown with servers inside our borders) offers several services through their site surrounding the premise of connecting people and paper electronically. The main components of their platform of services include:

NetService – firms, lawyers, and judges can choose to upload files that can then be served BY CONSENT through another Netlegal member or by fax. The fax service to the courts uses the correct forms for all Canadian jurisdictions. Judges may also set up e-filing on a case making an order that parties file . . . [more]

Starting today, the New York Times online edition is linking to stories from outside sources, including blogs. Sort of. Clearly nervous about sending you directly to news from outside sources — something that was verboten until now — the Times offers a link on its main web page to something called Times Extra. Clicking that gives you the same front page, but now each story has a suffix of links to other news sources’ take on the tale. So, for example, the opening paragraphs of the story on the cutting of rates by the central banks of Europe are followed . . . [more]

Internet Law News this morning reports that Australia will propose national legislation to criminalize identity theft.

I am not sure I understand the story. Presumably Australia has laws against fraud. The story mentions using another person’s credit card and stealing personal information to open bank accounts and take out loans in the name of the victim. Would not such actions already be illegal? They certainly would be here.

It is arguable that it should be illegal simply to acquire the personal information, without actually using it – but then would protective or limiting measures be needed to prevent abuse, or . . . [more]

There have been a couple great BigLaw blog lists that have come out over the past week, and both are well worth noting here on Slaw.

First up, 3 Geeks and a Law Blog have published a list of officially sanctioned BigLaw law blogs, with the term sanctioned being defined as a link from the firm’s main website. A good metric, IMO. This list now totals 141 blogs from 56 law firms, and is based on looking at the NLJ 250 firms.

The second list comes from the crew over at Law Blog Builders Lexblog, and is an . . . [more]

If you follow us by RSS or email and don’t visit the website, you’ll likely be missing a couple of interesting conversations in the comments to recent posts. (You can, of course, subscribe to the comments either by email or RSS, though many readers haven’t yet done that.)

Alex Manevich’s post on arbitral awards and limitations periods has generated an interesting series of exchanges between him and John Gregory. Well worth taking a look.

And Dave Bilinsky’s post, Shouldn’t It Just Work?, sparked a bunch of comments on tablet PC’s.

So drop by the website for a good read. . . . [more]

A recent WSL Blog posting on legal outsourcing to India (a topic covered quite extensively on SLAW), reminded me I was going to mention the panel that spoke on this topic a few weeks back at the Canadian Law and Technology Forum in Toronto. One speaker discussed offshore outsourcing and the other speaker discussed outsourcing domestically to Canadian lawyers.

The offshore outsourcing speaker was lawyer Gavin Birer of Legalwise Outsourcing Inc. (who wrote a good introductory article on the topic here on SLAW earlier this summer). Given good high-speed Internet, secure communications and a body of qualified lawyers in India, . . . [more]