1. Introduction
A recent Global Television poll claims that 90% of Canadians are upset with Canada’s criminal justice system. Can anything be done to change this perception? Not while we have our present Constitution.

2. Constitutional Mistakes
The criminal justice system got off to a very bad start in 1867 when the framers of our Constitution made two fundamental mistakes.

First, they gave the subject of criminal law to federal legislators. This mistake overlooked the fact that most criminal conduct like most civil misconduct are best controlled by local or provincial law makers. The federated common law nations of Australia . . . [more]

I’d like to invite Slaw readers to come check out Quickscribe’s new BC Legislation Portal. Launched yesterday, this site provides daily updates (every 4 hours actually) for changes in BC Law.

To relay a bit about what’s going on under the hood, this site is actually extending the value of Quickscribe’s RSS feeds. I posted on the VLLB a while back about the detailed nature of these feeds, but as I got to use them more, wondered if there might be some value to aggregating them as a collection. The BC Legislation Portal does just that. . . . [more]

Usually in this spot I point you away from words, because, well, you’ve already used too many of them and something other is required. But today it’s more words, this time as objects in a video.

“The Child” is a short video by Antoine Bardou-Jacquet in which he tells the story of the birth of a child using typographical elements. Simple, effective, enjoyable. . . . [more]

It’s that time of year again. The red carpet is being rolled out, outfits are being coordinated, after parties are being planned……

You guessed it, it’s the Stellas! What are the Stellas? The Stellas are named in honour of Stella Liebeck who infamously sued a fast food chain after she spilled coffee on her lap and burned herself because the coffee was too hot; she was subsequently awarded 2.9 million in damages. From that lawsuit the Stella awards grew; in their own words: “(e)ver since, the name “Stella Award” has been applied to any wild, outrageous, or ridiculous lawsuits — . . . [more]

Huge tip of the Slaw collective headgear to our friend Michael Geist for being one of the winners of the Electronic Frontier Foundation 2008 Pioneer Awards: three awards, to the Mozilla Foundation and its Chairman Mitchell Baker, University of Ottawa Professor Michael Geist, and AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein.

Michael’s stance on the threat to community implicit in copyright change was one of the major reason’s for his win:

Dr. Michael Geist is a law professor at the University of Ottawa. Last year, he led the public protest to proposed Canadian copyright law changes that would have

LinkBlip lets you send someone a URL and then notifies you by email when they click on the link. I suppose this might be useful in certain situations where you want to have a rough measure of either compliance with some requirement or the effectiveness of a promotion. Feels a bit sneaky, though.

[via Infobunny’s Twitter] . . . [more]

The American uniform citation handbook, the Harvard Bluebook, is now online. You will need an account to access it, either a paid account of your own or an account of your subscribing institution.

We’ve talked at Slaw about the need for a free online Canadian uniform citation guide — indeed, even offered the services of our members to the McGill Guide folks, who declined our help. How hard would it be for us to produce a basic online guide that could then be improved over time?

[via Jim Milles on law.librarians] . . . [more]

One of the more frequently asked questions I would receive when I was at the Faculty of Law at U of Toronto was: “Is there an online version of the McGill Guide (the Canadian guide for legal citation)? (The answer of course was “no”).

Two posts just now by LawyerKM and Jim Milles indicate the American equivalent – The Bluebook – is now online for a very reasonable annual subscription fee.

I hope Carswell is considering doing the same for the Canadian McGill Guide (print version details available on Carswell’s site here). One of the better, free online guides . . . [more]

MIT Technology Review has released its list of the 10 technologies that it thinks are most likely to change the way we live. Some of the more interesting ones include:

• Offline web applications: Programmers using Web technologies to build desktop applications that people can run online or off.
• Reality mining: Using data gathered by cell phones to learn more about human behavior and social interactions.
• Wireless power: Moving towards a world of wireless electricity.

We just added a couple of links to our homepage to help with research. You can download a plugin that lets you search our catalogue from your toolbar. You can also search for any other catalogue or database, or make your own. Its all here.

It might help you come to grips with complex research tasks, which are described helpfully in a couple of recent ACRL blog posts, here, and here.

Finally, if none of that helps, try what this guy tried. . . . [more]

University of Toronto law professors Andrew Green and Benjamin Alarie have posted a new paper on the Social Science Research Network entitled Should They All Just Get Along? Judicial Ideology, Collegiality, and Appointments to the Supreme Court of Canada:

“Over the past 25 years, the justices of the Supreme Court of Canada have not exhibited the divergent policy views along party lines that have been characteristic of the justices of the United States Supreme Court. This apparent lack of partisan polarization in Canada may at first give rise to smugness about the appointments process in Canada; after all, our

LinkBunch is a site that lets you put in a list of links and hands you back a single, small URL, which goes to a page where you’ll find your hotlinks. Handy, perhaps, for making a temporary web page with a collection of resources or targets. Would be better if it permitted link text rather than, or as well as, the actual URLs.

[via law.librarians — you do subscribe to law.librarians, don’t you?

— in turn via Emily Chang’s eHub] . . . [more]