Toronto media lawyer Melissa Kluger (who was a student when I was at the University of Toronto Law School and who founded Ultra Vires, the law student newspaper) has started a blog called Precedent: The New Rules of Law and Style.

She describes the site in these terms:

I’ve been a lawyer in Toronto now for four years. Over this time, a lot of law magazines, newspapers and newsletters have crossed my desk. Even though these are publications for lawyers, I never feel like they are really talking to me. They always feel a little old, a little

. . . [more]

The Privacy Commissioner of Canada has just published a discussion paper as part of the five-year parliamentary review of the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act.

The issues it focusses on are:

Privacy Commissioner’s Powers

Consent

Disclosure of Personal Information before Transfer of Businesses

Work Product

Duty to Notify

Transborder Flows of Personal Information

Sharing Information with Other Data Protection Authorities

. . . [more]

An English site has a useful summary of the global legal initiatives that are being used in the fight against AIDS. It consists of an interview with Dr Matthew Weait, lecturer in law at Keele University, who recently organized a series of seminars entitled, HIV/AIDS and Law: Theory, Practice and Policy.

You can also listen to webcasts of Dr. Weait’s seminars. . . . [more]

Today’s edition of the British newspaper The Telegraph has an item about Lord Phillips, the Lord Chief Justice, the top judge in England the Wales.

In the article entitled We’re in touch with everyday life, says the cycling judge, Lord Philips, who bikes to work [there’s a lovely photo of him on his bicycle, helmet and all], explains that many of his colleagues “travel on buses and Tubes and bicycles; we push trolleys around supermarkets; we have normal family concerns and commitments and neither are judges immune from the impact of crime”.

At the Lord Mayor’s annual dinner for . . . [more]

The Indian government, acting under a:

federal government notification of July 2003 says it can ban websites in the interest of:

• sovereignty or integrity of India
• security of the state
• friendly relations with foreign states and public order
• preventing incitement to commissioning of any cognisable offences.BBC News | South Asia

has ordered Indian ISPs to block a number of websites, principally blogs. Some ISPs seem to have responded by blocking whole blogging domains, thus cutting Indians off from potentially thousands of sites along with those the Indian government deems dangerous in some way.

The situation is unclear, but it . . . [more]

With permission, this from John D. Gregory [Ministry of the Attorney General (Ontario)], with assistance from David Loukedelis, via John’s email list:

In the past month or so, three privacy commissions in Canada have published reports on radio-frequency identification methods (RFIDs):

• Canada: Fact sheet on RFIDS
• Ontario: “Privacy Guidelines for RFID Information Systems”
• Quebec: “La technologie d’identification par radiofréquence (RFID): doit-on s’en méfier?”
  also available in English: “Radiofrequency identification technology (RFID): is there reason to mistrust it?”

BC did some preliminary work but then decided to defer to its colleagues in the jurisdictions named above.

Has the Alberta commission had

. . . [more]

Check out the Law Librarians included on CLA’s Info*Nation!

Liisa Tella & Christina Tribe – Law Librarian and Library Technician at Harper Grey LLP, Vancouver

Why we love our jobs
We are a two person library in one of the largest litigation law firms in BC. Our library users are the firm’s lawyers, articling students, paralegals, and secretaries. We help them with their research questions, order articles, assemble case law for legal briefs. We train them to use commercial electronic resources and in-house databases that we build and maintain. In a law library, speed and accuracy of service are

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OCLC's WorldCat is coming along nicely. A recent initiative, Open WorldCat, seeks to make the records of member libraries available to web users via popular bookseller and search engine sites.

With the recent flare up of violence in the Middle East I thought it worth posting this wonderful description of Axis of Evil ‘also rans’ that first circulated a few years ago. It can be found on numerous Web-sites and has been attributed to John Cleese, among others. Nice to see that Canada and Australia rate mentions:

Bitter after being snubbed for membership in the “Axis of Evil”, Libya, China and Syria today announced that they had formed the “Axis of Just as Evil”, which they said would be more evil than that stupid Iran-Iraq-North Korea axis President Bush warned

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I’ve finally made the time for training on Summation, software used by our Litigation Support group. It’s extremely useful for document management of large litigation files, but I’ve had all of my facta and briefs of argument, leave to appeal applications, etc. into Summation and the search abilities are great. I can search fields of my choosing, by boolean or otherwise. For my precedent facta and briefs, I’ve chosen Author, Document Type (brief, facta,etc), Court Level, Plaintiff, Defendant, Issues and Category. I can’t wait to showcase it to one of the litigation practice groups.

I don’t know if anyone else . . . [more]

Two links that will assure our listeners that truth is curiouser and that the law continues to move in wonderfully strange ways:

The first is an ICANN arbitration brought by Morgan Stanley (“Complainant”), represented by Baila H. CeledoniaA name that is almost worthy of the Huntingdonshire Cabpersons, of Cowan, Liebowitz & Latman, P.C., 1133 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10036-6799. But the respondent is Meow, Baroness Penelope Cat of Nash DCB, Ashbed Barn, Boraston Track, Tenbury Wells, Worcestershire WR15 8LQ, GB.

It’s a dispute over a domain name, in which the panel comments:

Registration and Use . . . [more]

An interesting announcement about western law (and other) resources becoming more available in the Middle East:

Edutech Middle East, a leading learning solutions provider worldwide, and The Berkeley Electronic Press (bepress), a leading publisher of peer-reviewed electronic journals in economics, business, political science, law, and science, announced a partnership to market and promote the roster of bepress electronic journals to academic, government, and corporate libraries in the GCC and Levant regions.
[…] as well as subject-matter repository materials from the bepress Legal Repository…

. . . [more]