I’m currently in St. Louis for the American Association of Law Libraries conference. There are a dozen or so Canadian law librarians here, plus a handful of our vendors, amongst the 3,000 delegates.

It has been exciting to meet a number of American fans of Slaw. And last night I attended the blogger meetup and met some people whose work I have been following, Bonnie Shucha who maintains the definitive list of law librarian bloggers and lawyer bloggers Matthew Homan and Dennis Kennedy. It was a thrill to meet these people whom I’ve been reading and corresponding with.

I haven’t . . . [more]

Two bits of reading that came across my desk, each charged with pointing out, from the perspectives of practising lawyer – and law firm librarian – where so many young lawyers fall short on legal research matters.

From Scott Stolley, a piece from the Defense Research Institute on The Corruption of Legal Research;

and from two senior librarians at Cadwalader, the most establishmentThough having said that, at the LMA Your Honor Awards in February, we gave them first place for an announcement regarding the New York office move to One World Financial Center and the Real Deal . . . [more]

For those of you who followed the appointment process of Justice Rothstein to the Supreme Court of Canada, you might also be interested in reading his first Reasons for Judgment in the SCC, in Goodis v. Ontario, 2006 SCC 31. The issue was whether a judge could order disclosure of records over which solicitor-client privilege was claimed, to the counsel for the party requesting access under the Ontario provincial access to information legislation. All the lower Ontario courts had said yes; the SCC was of the view that such disclosure could only be granted if “absolutely necessary”, which was not . . . [more]

News today of an ambitious transnational legal research project, International Law in Domestic Courts, run as a global collaborative venture, out of an OUP backbone. It’s an online law reporting service focusing on the salience of international law issues before domestic courts.

It has local reporters covering over 50 countries, and yet more are being recruited all the time. The service aims to bring to light the full range of domestic jurisprudence not just from the Commonwealth, Western Europe, and the USA, but also from Africa, Eastern Europe, Asia, and Central and South America. ILDC makes it possible to . . . [more]

C’est fini! La finale de coupe du monde de soccer qui aurait été vue par plus d’un milliard de personnes, clos un mois de festivités (ou de déceptions selon le cas), un phénomène d’une ampleur telle que le cumul des matches auraient fait perdre 5 milliards US de productivité à travers le monde. La ferveur fut particulièrement vive en France, finaliste, où l’on vénère (je ne crois pas devoir parler au passé) depuis presque quinze ans un joueur nommé « Zidane ». Mais quel lien avec le droit des TI et slaw.ca?

Et bien j’ai reçu à trois reprises, . . . [more]

Having a PEI cottage in a rural setting is highly recommended. One of the few challenges we have faced so far is staying connected. For the first few years, our dial up connection worked well, but last summer (mysteriously) it suddenly seemed impossibly slow. I recalled reading that our federal government was committed to “broadband access” for all, so I started investigating other options. I quickly discovered that Aliant (PEI phone company) does not offer high speed access to my part of the island. There are some local companies using (I think) microwave towers and satellite dish receivers but I . . . [more]

Our local paper in Chennai, The Hindu is reporting from an interview in Karnataka with Aztecsoft’s Vice President for the Bangalore Delivery Centre, Ravi Bala, that Microsfoft is offering a tool to help users convert their files to the `free-and-open’ standard known as Open Document Format (ODF). On Friday, Microsoft placed in the public domain, a converter between its proprietary Office Open XML (for eXtended Markup Language) format and ODF standard adopted by all Open Source software makers including the rival OpenOffice.org suite created by Sun Microsystems.

Well there had to be a catch, and the first one is . . . [more]

This one’s a strange one. It’s an imaginary city — the city of Galvez — revealed in a slideshow. The texture of the place, the skewing of the known into a 1930’s future-city, is what makes it strange. On top of that there’s a melancholy music track behind the pictures that evokes, for me at least, a kind of nostalgia for things that never were.

Once you’ve clicked on the main picture to get things going, choose the link to the slideshow that you’ll find on the upper right of the screen. You can, of course, go through the pictures . . . [more]

This in the nature of a Phriday Phillipic since the regular Friday Fillip is in the hands of the other Simon …
But thanks to Laurel Murdoch for Smiley SmileNot that Smiley Smile litigation., a delicious bit of IP litigation, that made the NYT today.

Harvey Ball claims to have been the creator of the smiley face. The story goes that the merger of the State Mutual Life Assurance Company of Worcester, MA (now known as Allmerica Financial) with Guarantee Mutual Company of Ohio crushed employee morale.

So nobly, Harvey Ball, freelance artist, was asked to create a . . . [more]

Has anyone heard of the Canadian Justice Review Board or Canadian Justice Review Council? I happened upon their website last night. It appears to be a grass roots organization with some directors in high places. One must take out a $20 membership to see the full content of the website so it has more the feel of a private club than an organization working for citizens. . . . [more]

As a result of his Slaw postings on the issue Simon Chester's views on the phenomenon of outsourcing legal work were featured in the June issue of National [pdf].

Congratulations are also in order to Justice Marshall Rothstein who has written the majority judgment in Ministry of Correctional Services v. Goodis, a case on public access to information, and claims of solicitor-client privilege. Justice Rothstein’s first decision as a judge of the Supreme Court of Canada was for a unanimous panel of nine.

The Court’s own headnote reads as follows:

A judge of the Divisional Court, who was reviewing a decision of the Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner, granted the requester’s counsel access to records notwithstanding a claim of solicitor‑client privilege by the Ministry of Correctional Services. The

. . . [more]