Recent developments regarding the official status of legislation available online are certain to have an effect on the legislative products offered by Canada’s commercial legal publishers.

As noted in a recent SLAW posting, Ontario now recognizes its legislation website as an official source of the law. As of November 30th, 2008, an “on-screen display of a statute or regulation viewed on, or downloaded from the e Laws website” is now official.

Quebec is expected to follow suit. Just prior to the recent dissolution of the National Assembly, a bill was pending that would recognize the official character of its legislation . . . [more]

Last night I wrote about RSS and whether we need to do something simpler over on my Crosby Group business blog, Connection. It seems to have struck a nerve with a number of people since there is now a good discussion going on in the comments. An excerpt: . . . [more]

Amazing that our friends at Mozilla have released a beta version of Firefox in Esperanto. This on top of offering it in Occitan.

And since they’ve got Telegu, can Kannada be far behind? . . . [more]

Chilling reading about the threats to the integrity of global communications that President Elect Obama will shortly face.

It comes from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) Commission on Cybersecurity for the 44th Presidency. Its mandate was to develop recommendations for a comprehensive strategy to improve cybersecurity in federal systems and in critical infrastructure.

The report was released on December 8, 2008 on Capitol Hill. . . . [more]

The Geographies of Legal Education: Policy, Practice and Theory
May 25-27, 2009 Carleton University Ottawa
The 2009 annual meeting of the Canadian Association of Law Teachers (CALT) will be held May 25-27, 2009 at Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario. The annual meeting will be held in conjunction with Congress 2009 of the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences (CFHSS), and will follow the Canadian Law and Society Association’s meeting of May 23-25. This year’s CFHSS Congress theme is “Capital Connections: Nation, Terroir, Territoire.”
Building on Congress’s aim to consider the ways in which globalization has impacted the relationship between . . . [more]

We haven’t mentioned the Symposium (from the Greek – a Drinking Party) at Ryerson University. Billed as The Ryerson Symposium – Innovation in Legal Education: Ideas for the 21st Century, it was held on Tuesday, November 25th.

On the heels of reports published by two separate task forces examining aspects of legal education in Canada, expert panels examined key issues:

How will Canadian law schools shape society in the next century?

What are the latest developments in the licensing and accreditation of law schools and will it impact legal education?

Can new legal education models unleash innovation and increase accessibility?

Considering that it has the potential to profoundly reshape the nature of American legal education, I’m a little surprised that the Interim Report of the Outcome Measures Committee of the ABA’s Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar hasn’t received more attention since its release in June. Aside from brief mentions at the places you’d expect — Best Practices for Legal Education and the Law Professors Blog Network — I haven’t seen the report and its implications discussed in much detail. So I thought I might take a crack at it.

What follows isn’t really a summary of . . . [more]

Before curtailing her recent trip to Europe to deal with the political situation at home, Governor General of Canada, Her Excellency Michaëlle Jean was participating in a discussion about Canadian culture diversity at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech on November 29, 2008.

Her blog CitizenVoices.gg.ca reprints notes from two related talks: . . . [more]

The Peterson Institute for International Economics, a research institute located in Washington, D.C., has a summary and a table of US and Canadian Climate Legislation by State and Province. The table, which glosses legislation in 8 provinces and 22 states, can be downloaded in PDF.

[via Bill Dimitroff] . . . [more]

The current newsletter from my office:

Vol. 12, No. 7, December 5, 2008
ISSN 1489-954X

contents:

1.Studies, Legislation and Conventions:

Canadian Government Commitment to Copyright Reform
World Blind Union Proposes WIPO Treaty
WIPO Deadlocked on Traditional Knowledge Treaty

 2.Legal Cases:

Harvard Professor Challenges Copyright Law
Judge Approves Google Book Agreement

3.Of Interest:

MySpace Allows Copyright-Protected Videos, With Advertisements

4.Seminars and Publications:

E-Tutorial Copyright Courses
Certificate in Copyright Management
The Copyright & New Media Law Newsletter . . . [more]

Here are the slides from a talk I gave on Dec. 1 at the Schulich School of Business in a session held for practicing marketers.

What I found most interesting from the discussion that ensued afterward was the suggestion that vote monitoring tactics observed during the U.S. Presidential election could be duplicated here, specifically for the proposed vote-swap.

The concept behind it was that all of the other parties would work together to ensure they all got as many seats as possible. Ridings where the race was close were identified, and participants were matched with a person in a . . . [more]

A sad but significant report from the U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics publishes the data concerning capital punishment in 2007 in that country. Some 17 tables of statistics explore such matters as the demographics of persons under sentence of death, the number of persons executed in the last decade, method of execution by state, and so forth.

As of the end of December 2007, the median elapsed time since sentencing for inmates under sentence of death is 133 months. That is a month longer than 11 years.

[via beSpacific] . . . [more]