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]

R v Ferguson 2008 SCC 6

[73] A final cost of constitutional exemptions from mandatory minimum sentence laws is to the institutional value of effective law making and the proper roles of Parliament and the courts. Allowing unconstitutional laws to remain on the books deprives Parliament of certainty as to the constitutionality of the law in question and thus of the opportunity to remedy it. Legislatures need clear guidance from the courts as to what is constitutionally permissible and what must be done to remedy legislation that is found to be constitutionally infirm. In granting constitutional exemptions, courts would be

The facts:

The opinion:

Movie: click to download (5.6MB)

No comment. . . . [more]

Wayne MacPhail, columnist for Rabble.ca (among other things–Wayne wears many hats), tackles the the topic of How Media Can Misrepresent the Web using the sensitive topic of reporting that takes place regarding child pornography. From his article:

A couple of weeks ago, Canadian media outlets reported that, across the country, 44,970 computers were actively engaged in trading child pornography – 15,140 of them in Ontario.
…

First, this story is a classic case of mainstream media slipping casually into the “Internet as source of all evil” mindset. Yes, child pornography is heinous and those who either abuse children and/or collect

. . . [more]