Rwandan general, Emmanuel Karenzi Karake, is deputy commander of the joint United Nations/African Union “implementation” force in Darfur, UNAMID. General Karake (there is some uncertainty in the media as to how his name is properly to be given; I am following the Rwandan government’s use of “Karake.”) was also the commander of Rwandan troops during the reprisal killings of Hutus by the Tutsis. In February a Spanish judge of the National Court indicted Karake, along with 39 other Rwandans including president Paul Kagame, with crimes against human rights, claiming “universal jurisdiction” to do so. As a result there . . . [more]

Just a short post to raise a question that’s discussed on Law.com today, which is why American legal blogs seem to be populated by boys and abandoned by women.

That doesn’t seem to be the case here at Slaw. Is that something about Slaw? Or Canadian law? Or simply that our focus on legal information, technology and research isn’t the same as those blogs that Law.com was looking at?

It offers three theories (none of which is particularly compelling:

Theory #1: Women law bloggers are out there, you just don’t see them. ((Women bloggers aren’t as relentlessly self-promoting))

Theory

The chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, John Roberts, warned law students in a speech last Thursday about relying too unthinkingly on internet sources for legal research. Delivering Drake University‘s Dwight D. Opperman Lecture, he pointed to what he described as the growing practice of using simple word searches to uncover precedents, when the cases recovered in this manner may have little doctrinal connection to the issues at hand. Thinking “outside the box” is fine, he said, but “…You cannot think effectively outside the box if you don’t know where the box is.” And that requires the . . . [more]

Few people probably noticed the changes to one of the software features in Google Pack last month. Fewer still have considered the privacy implications.

Picasa, a photo management and sharing system, launched a facial recognition system. Users tag their photos, and the software searches through pictures to find the same people and place tags on them too.

Google, who owns Picasa, has had these capabilities for a couple years now since they acquired Neven Vision.

Theoretically a user could pick off other people’s photos from Flickr or Facebook, upload them to their Picasa account and tag . . . [more]

Some Slaw-ers already know that I am currently on sabbatical from my position at the university and have returned to school for a year. It has been an adjustment to go from doing to learning but has been enjoyable so far. One thing that I anticipated, which is not quite like I thought it was, is the use of laptops by students. Being around a law school for the last several years I have observed that the first thing to happen in most law school classes is that anywhere from 75-90% ((The numbers I cite in this post are completely . . . [more]

Speaking with an accent is what other people do, right? Perhaps we Canadians, especially, think that our standard speech is the “norm” against which other ways of saying things stand out. But of course that’s bunkum. Every speaker has an accent and none is “right” or “correct,” Professor Higgins notwithstanding.

Thanks to the marvels of the internet and diligent scholarship, we can have some fun listening to how other folks say it.

The Speech Accent Archive is a wonderful site where you can hear the same paragraph of English text spoken by people for whom English is a second language . . . [more]

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the ascendance of individual lawyer brands. Today, I want to write about the corresponding decline of law firm brands. And there’s no better place to start that discussion than with the fate of Heller Ehrman.

Heller Ehrman, if you’re not familiar with it, is a century-old California law firm that dissolved last week. You can find detailed coverage here, here and here. The lasting impression you take away from these reports is that Heller was neither evil nor incompetent. Its rivals were sad to see it fall, and many . . . [more]

Michael Lenczner and Craig Davey have launched a site that does one thing very well: OurParliament tells you in French and in English how every MP voted during the 2nd Session of the 39th Parliament.

How’d They Vote? is a similar project that first hit the internet three years ago. It fell out of date, but has recently been updated, and offers more complex information in a somewhat less attractive format. Thus, you can find a list of bills voted on in this session; and the chart setting out the MPs voting record can be sorted by province, type of . . . [more]

I have to apologize for falling down on the job in my contributing to Slaw since my inclusion among the exalted Slawyers a few weeks ago. I have to confess I’ve been distracted by a combination of being busy at work and rediscovering a passion for photography. (You can check out some of my recent work on my site or on Flickr.)

I find it interesting that regularly taking photos changes the way you look at things. Colours, shadows, textures and perspectives stand out a lot more than they used to. Everyone walks around with particular filters affecting their . . . [more]

Our colleague here at Slaw, Dominic Jaar, after working for years as a house counsel for Bell, has struck out on his own with a practice — Ledjit — aimed at helping businesses, including law firms, manage information flows. An expert in IT law and particularly e-discovery, Jaar is based in Montreal. His website explains more fully. (You will have better luck with the French version, ledjit.ca; the English version — ledjit.com — still needs some work on the links.)

Giving his enterprise a healthy boost, La Press today has a long piece in the business section on Jaar . . . [more]

I love using google as a verb (see: post headline). Keeps life interesting waiting on that C&D letter. :)

You may have come across this already in your web travels, but Google’s restore of their January 2001 index makes for some fun & interesting searching. Especially for those terms not yet coined…

As Phil Bradley points out, “Try searching for IPOD, Weblog, Twitter, “Wayne Rooney”, wii, iPhone, “David Cameron”, “credit crunch”, “sarah palin” – you’ll laugh or be amazed at just about all of the results you get!”

Or better yet, how about some legal keywords? A search for . . . [more]

The Canarie/Orion summit will be held in Toronto in early November. It’s bringing together a truly impressive variety of speakers and appeals to infogeeks of all kinds. The Cloud Computing session grabbed my attention, as does the session on how Web 2.0 is changing teaching and learning. I see that Nora Young, from CBC’s Spark, is also on the agenda.

If anyone does attend this, I’d be really interested in a report back to the group…please? . . . [more]