Courtesy of the Goa Blog (although it’s also in today’s Hindu (Chennai edition):

Country’s first e-law library inaugurated

Panaji (PTI): Goa Chief Minister Digambar Kamat inaugurated the country’s first e-law library here aimed at facilitating legal practitioners. . . . [more]

Dear slawers,

Even if I became a very very occasional contributor, and not the contributor that I was supposed to be, may I again be permitted to contact slaw’s great audience in publicizing the next event that I am co-organizing October 2nd (PM) and 3rd, 2008 named “Is eCommerce Law different?” Behind this question, we ask ourselves if we must approach IT law in the same manner we do traditional law or rather as a “law of the horse” as coined by Llewellyn and used by Judge Easterbrook in his debate with Lessig? Fifteen years after . . . [more]

Hong Kong has a unique legal situation, being a former British colony inheriting the common law. As a result the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) has a different legal system than the civil code found in the mainland.

To complicated it further , Hong Kong borrows from other common law jurisdictions when necessary. Chapter 4, S. 4 of the Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region states,

Article 84
The courts of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region shall adjudicate cases in accordance with the laws applicable in the Region as prescribed in Article 18 of this

DISMISSED WITHOUT COSTS / REJETÉES SANS DÉPENS

Jean Coutu Group (PJC) Inc. et al. v. Metcalfe & Mansfield Alternative Investments II Corp. and Other Trustees of Asset Backed Commercial Paper Conduits Listed in Schedule “A” to this application et al. (Ont.) (Civil) (By Leave) (32765)

(The motion to expedite the applications for leave to appeal brought by the Respondents on August 27, 2008, is granted. The applications for leave to appeal and other relief sought from the judgment of the Court of Appeal for Ontario, Number C48969 (M36489), 2008 ONCA 587, dated August 18, 2008, are dismissed without costs.

Coram: . . . [more]

September 2, 2008 was the 10th anniversary of Swissair Flight 111 disaster in the Atlantic Ocean just off Peggy’s Cove (about 40 minutes outside of Halifax). It is one of those events where anyone who was in the region at the time, can tell you exactly where they were and what they were doing when they found out. The 10th anniversary was a solemn event and the events of that day and their aftermath strike many Nova Scotians to their core; especially those volunteers and fisherman that aided with the recovery efforts.

The resulting investigation by Transportation Safety Board (TSB) . . . [more]

The recent decision of the Ontario Superior Court in De Wolf v. Bell ExpressVu has been hailed, at least by the plaintiff, as a win for the consumer. Myself, I admit to some doubts: the reasoning of the decision suggests that any victory is Pyrrhic at best.

For those who haven’t read the decision, the plaintiff challenged Bell ExpressVu’s practice of charging an “administration fee” of $25 on delinquent accounts, on the basis of the Criminal Code prohibition of “interest” exceeding 60%. Bell argued – and, in fact, the court agreed – that the fee was a fair estimate of . . . [more]

I have a drawerful of fountain pens and a cupful of other writing implements on my desk. I also have perhaps half a dozen computer keyboards in various boxes around the house — but it’s not the same thing. Not at all. There’s writing, and then there’s writing. And now, in September, when bevies of reluctant happy children are flushed back to school, I still get a hankering after a pencil box with a sliding tongue lid full of brilliantly sharpened 2B pencils. Remember the quiet thrill of breaking the silence of that blank white page with the first . . . [more]

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