The Women’s Court of Canada launches this week. (See the story in the Ottawa Citizen.) The WCC is a group of women academics and practitioners who combined to rewrite six Supreme Court of Canada decisions to take a full and proper account of women’s equality. The affected decisions are:

• Symes v. Canada, [1993] 4 S.C.R. 695
  deduction — child care expenses — women — taxpayer — income
• Native Women’s Association of Canada v. Canada, [1994] 3 S.C.R. 627 ((The citation is misprinted in the Majury article referred to below.))
  funding — freedom of expression — women —

The Supreme Court of Canada has published a special edition of its Bulletin of Proceedings that contains a statistical overview of its work for the period 1997-2007.

Tables include:

• number of complete applications for leave to appeal and notices of appeal as of right filed by litigants with the Court’s Registry each year;
• number of leave applications granted and the percentage granted of the total submitted;
• number of appeals heard each year and the number of hearing days over the year;
• information with respect to the number of judgments rendered each year;
• time lines in the life of a

Would you be willing to donate your intellectual property to the public domain upon your death, so it does not need to wait the 50 or 70 years to be released by law?

The idea (with action video!) resides on the website of experimental designers fi5e and max azare at ni9e.com.

An honourable idea, but it makes me wonder how valid will signing a sticker really be under the law?

Hat tip to Will Spaetzel for the link. . . . [more]

Here’s a note about a new bibliography of published sources of English medieval legal documents. The announcement is on several lists.

In a long-term labor of love, Hazel Lord, Senior Law Librarian at the University of Southern California School of Law has been tirelessly working on a bibliography of published sources of English medieval legal documents (covering the years 600-1532). What she had thought originally would only be a few hundred sources, has blossomed into a list of close to 1,000 sources!

Because of the nature of the project, Hazel decided that it might be most useful as a wiki.

The group Librarians Without Boders, started at the University of Western Ontario, and aimed at founding “an organization that would benefit libraries around the world” has been asked by Doctors Without Borders / Médecins Sans Frontières to stop using the name.

It’s the white coats the librarians wear: that’s the problem. Far too many people in the world have been summoning librarians to the bedsides of the ailing; far too many donors have been sending money by mistake to “those doctors, you know, those people with their hair up in buns and who wear glasses and say ‘shh!'” instead . . . [more]

The Canadian Journalism Foundation is presenting Michael Geist in both Toronto on March 6th and Vancouver on April 3rd. The session description:

The Internet and new technologies have ushered in a seemingly unlimited array of possibilities for access to knowledge, creativity, and public participation. University of Ottawa Law School professor and internationally renowned expert on law and the internet Michael Geist will highlight the role that the Internet is playing for new creativity and knowledge sharing, while identifying the business and policy challenges that this creates for journalists and journalism. The talk will be followed by a Q&A moderated by

The College of Law Practice Management (of which I am (ahem) the President) sponsors the InnovAction Award, which is designed to identify and honor innovation in law practice management. Slaw is pleased to be a Friend of InnovAction

The College of Law Practice Management is calling for entries for its 2008 InnovAction Awards. This is a worldwide search for lawyers, law firms and other deliverers of legal services who have invented and successfully applied totally new business practices to the delivery of legal services. The goal of the InnovAction Awards is to demonstrate to the legal community what can . . . [more]

MTagger is a tool developed at the University of Michigan to let online library users tag various library resources. For instance, a registered user can tag any item from the main catalogue, Mirlyn. Those not logged in can see the tags and the tag-clouds that appear for every item, and can view the resources bearing a given tag. You can see an invitation to tag an item in the image that appears in this post “below the fold.” At the moment there are just under 300 tags in the tag cloud for all items (where “screwball comedy” and “nouvelle . . . [more]

What follows is the opening of a book prospectus I am in the midst of developing for a work on John Locke and what I refer to as the “intellectual properties of learning.” This book grows out of an earlier article I did on Locke’s “common-wealth of learning” and will explore — well, if that’s not clear in the first 800 words of the prospectus, can I reasonably expect a hard-pressed publisher to bite? Putting this in Slaw follows on recent Web 2.0 data-mashups that would drag the book-in-progress into the network, setting it adrift in the blogosphere and giving . . . [more]

As reported in the Globe,

In my mind, sir, and in the minds of many of my colleagues and many, many Canadians,” said Mr. Batters during a Jan. 31 meeting of the Canadian Heritage committee, “the purpose of Telefilm is to help facilitate the making of films for mainstream Canadian society – films that Canadians can sit down and watch with their families in living rooms across this great country.

No comment. . . . [more]

Be sure to check out the University of Calgary Law School’s newest effort – ABlawg.ca.

From the About page:

The Faculty of Law is pleased to announce “ABlawg: The University of Calgary Faculty of Law Blog on Developments in Alberta Law”. ABlawg includes commentary by faculty members, sessional instructors, and research associates at our affiliated institutes on Alberta court and tribunal decisions as well as legislative and policy developments in the province. We are grateful to the funding provided by the Alberta Law Foundation in support of this project.

I’m also noting this project was funded by the Alberta . . . [more]

Must be the day. 

 Massive B.C. cockfighting raid sparks 13-hour cull 

And

Cockfighting raid shocks mayor of Surrey, B.C

“I know that it’s happened in other parts of the world where this sort of activity takes place, but this is certainly the first for me,” Watts said.

Was there some reason to assume it wasn’t? Were there rumours she was associating with a certain (currently suspended) NFL player? Dating a member of the BC legislature or Parliament?

The US goes to the dogs. Canada? We go to the …. chickens.

Figures. . . . [more]