This morning the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo (PRIO) announced that the international ‘Dieter Meurer Prize for Legal Informatics’ for 2008 ((Sponsored by the German Association for Computing in the Judiciary (‘Deutscher EDV-Gerichtstag e.V.’) and the German-language legal information service provider ‘juris GmbH’ (Germany’s ‘LexisNexis’ or ‘Lovdata’) )) has been awarded to Morten Bergsmo for his creation and development of the Case Matrix, a tool designed to make work on accountability for international crimes committed in armed conflicts more precise and effective.

Keen Slaw readers can read the award in Norwegian here.

Case Matrix is a unique, law-driven

If Twitter is more popular with lawyers than we expected, the best may be yet to come.

Yesterday Twitter launched a new design. The changes are largely cosmetic, but there are some functional changes as well.

I’m finding Twitter much easier to use, and some of the features are faster. If the public thinks the same it could increase in popularity.

So if you haven’t tried “Tweeting” yet, now might be the time to check it out. . . . [more]

Much in the media and the blogosphere in the last week about the use of private email by the Republican vice-presidential candidate for official communications.

But the trend is away from the preservation of even official websites for future scholars. The NYT reports: In Digital Age, Federal Files Blip Into Oblivion . . . [more]

I’m surprised that we haven’t talked about Ghana in Slaw – especially ((as every articling student in a corporate rotation knows)) the grand-daddy of modern corporate law statutes in the Commonwealth ((Yes, older than the Dickerson Report which led to the CBCA or the Iacobucci/Prithard/Pilkington report which spawned the ABCA)) was the work which Jim Gower did on company law in Ghana in the late Fifties ((See Reform of Company Law in Ghana, Journal of African Law, Vol. 2, No. 3 (Autumn, 1958), pp. 140-142)). Gower’s life is one example of a dying breed, the peripatetic English academic/law reformer . . . [more]

That’s the promise of Exit-Reality. If the gush of its Press Release is even half-true, it’s revolutionary.

ExitReality allows you to view not just that one website, but the entire World Wide Web in 3D,” said founder of ExitReality, 36-year-old Australian Danny Stefanic.

“The free Internet plug-in takes only 20 seconds to download, but opens up the user to a whole new universe. It transports you to a world where social network pages such as Facebook become 3D apartments users are able to decorate; a world where YouTube is transformed into the world’s largest 3D cinema where people can watch

Law firms ask a lot from their lawyers: work hard for long hours, respond immediately to clients and colleagues, accept and promote the firm’s culture, support overall firm profitability, and so forth. But law firms give a lot back, too: steady income and predictable bonuses, centralized resources, shared overhead costs, exposure to clients, and general collegiality, to name a few.

But the most essential thing law firms do for their lawyers is to share their brand — to give their lawyers the boost in personal prestige and profile that comes with being associated with a respected name and identity. Set . . . [more]

Two stories on cell phones, with a question or two:

1. An article from London Review of Books (“Short Cuts” by Daniel Soar) on how cell phone location records and use records can categorize the users — for marketing, for finding terrorists (or people who may be terrorists …), etc.

Is there a cure for this, besides just using land lines? Or is it a problem, rather than an opportunity?

2. A judicial decision in US district court [opinion of Magistrate Judge | order on appeal] saying that the state needs reasonable and probable grounds before . . . [more]

It was being reported generally yesterday (BBC News, New York Times) that hackers, a group called Anonymous, broke in to Governor Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email accounts and copied some material which they then made public.

It doesn’t seem as though the material taken will in any way compromise or even embarrass the Governor — except in so far as it reveals her injudicious use of a large public email system in connection with government and important personal matters. It’s unlikely that any of us will suddenly find ourselves nominated for vice-president of a country, even a small . . . [more]

Ever since Adrian Lurssen over on the JD Scoop blog from JD Supra posted the suprising list 145 Lawyers (and Legal Professionals) to Follow on Twitter last week, I have had a dramatic increase in lawyer, law student, and law librarian followers to my own Twitter account. I was surprised to be placed at #2 on the list, only behind our own Steve Matthews in the #1 position. Wow! Well, Steve gets special Twitter link love for having created Legal Voices, a website pulling together a number of key legal Twitter feeds.

I was asked by a friend in . . . [more]

Librarian Elisa Mason, who has worked at the UN High Commission for Refugees and the Refugee Studies Centre in Oxford, has created the Forced Migration Guide using wiki software.

The guide offers descriptions of resources for the study of refugees, internal displacement and human trafficking.

“The principal audience for this guide is students in a higher education setting who require an introduction to the main research tools and information sources in their subject area of interest. However, it should also appeal to novice researchers based in non-governmental organizations, governmental agencies, and international bodies who may not be familiar with the

That’s the implication of a piece in today’s NYT as part of its American exceptionalism series, entitled Supreme Court’s Global Influence Is Waning .

It has been surprising (in the twenty-five plus years) since the Charter was introduced, how little our courts regard the details of the US jurisprudence in their decisions.

I’m currently reading Toobin’s The Nine – and it also looks as if the US court is so ideologically riven that no court would look there for coherent principle.

The NYT piece doesn’t cite much research, though the following references are of interest:

From 1990 through 2002,

♫ So if I’m being honest with you and it seems like I’m being cruel
At least you didn’t get a rip off, a rip off, a rip off…♫

Words and Music by Ryan Adams, Brad Pemberton, Bradley Smith.

With news this week that a BC law firm has been hit by the counterfeit cheque scam that is washing over Canadian law firms, D. Ross McGowan of Borden Ladner Gervais LLP sent me this Fraud Alert, which I am posting to Slaw.ca with his permission:

Fraud Alert: Beware of “New Client” Cheque Scams

Every week the newspaper headlines name . . . [more]