Last week a London criminal court tackled the thorny problem of whether a witness should be required to remove her full-face veil.

Judge Peter Murphy ruled the witness must remove it when giving evidence but may wear it at other times during her trial. When she is not wearing it only the judge, jury and counsel will be permitted to see her face. Courtroom artists will not be permitted to sketch he without her veil. See the judge’s reasons here: The Queen -v- D (R) . . . [more]

On June 11, 2008, the House of Commons met in the Committee of the Whole to allow the Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, the Leader of the Opposition, Stéphane Dion, Jack Layton, the leader of the New Democratic Party, and Gilles Duceppe, leader of the Bloc Québecois to each offer apologies for the harm done to First Nations and other Aboriginal students through their residential school experiences.[1]

Two new issues, related but readily distinguishable, have arisen in the past few months, about the residential school experience, neither of which were public knowledge at the time of the apology and certainly . . . [more]

The ABS debate continues among many Canadian provinces. The Law Society of British Columbia has already made the same mistake as the American Bar Association recently made by declining to allow outside investment in law firms. One of LSBC’s reasons was that local lawyers didn’t feel a need for it; this reminds me of a comment made by a lawyer in the UK and likely echoed by some in Canada, “We’re smart people. If there was a better way to do things we would have already figured it out.” Or to more bluntly put it, LSBC’s rationale is like asking . . . [more]

Recently I spoke at lawTechcamp at the University of Toronto about the future practice of law. The session generated a great deal of discussion with the audience, some of it quite heated – particularly when I raised the question, “Why should we hire students or junior associates?” The point of my question was to force lawyers to question everything we do – not take any process or practice as a given. The players in the legal industry who are able to forget the past and re-invent how legal services are delivered will be wildly successful.

One of the questions from . . . [more]

The past couple of weeks have offered an amazing ringside view of an unusually public and acrimonious debate over software patents.

First, This American Life aired When Patents Attack, a fantastic expose of Intellectual Ventures, a patent holding company owned by Microsoft’s one-time CTO Nathan Myhrvold. The episode leads listeners to the seemingly inevitable conclusion that companies like Intellectual Ventures are at the root of all that’s wrong with the US patent system. It’s a must-listen for anyone involved in, or merely interested in, intellectual property law.

Then, last week, after losing out on a huge bidding war for . . . [more]

Taran Virtual Associates has updated its SABS chart for the changes which take effect September 1, 2010. This handy practice tool lists the important time periods relevant to the Statutory Accident Benefits Schedule – Accidents on or after November 1, 1996. Lawyers and law clerks can refer to this chart to determine at a glance how much time the regulations provide for the next step in their accident benefits case. The chart is available at http://www.virtualassociates.ca/links/home4.html . . . [more]

I’m a known advocate for the Google Labs apps, except of course when they fail. But there is a reason – it’s because the development team actually responds to the needs of their users.

This new app announced today proves my point. We have all sent e-mails we wish we hadn’t, whether it was a typo or a forgotten attachment. For some of my peers it’s because they were writing late at night while considerably inebriated.

Undo Send will let you recall this email, hopefully before they receiver reads it.

But there are critics of the new app who . . . [more]

In view of our election just past, and the one next week of our neighbours to the south, I thought it opportune to raise the topic of election laws, and more specifically, absentee voting.

Several weeks ago, I received in the mail an absentee ballot from the Board of Elections in Lorain County, Ohio. I dutifully filled it out, put it in an envelope, and mailed it in: voilà, my franchise duly exercised. No one asked how long I’d been in Canada (sixteen years), or if I intended to return to the U. S. (unlikely, at this point). As a . . . [more]

Back in June I wrote about Powerset, a start-up aiming to become an important natural language search engine. At the time I said, “I’m probably wrong, but this one feels like it might go a mile or two.”

Since then I’ve become one of the Powerset Labs volunteers, let into the alpha test phase, and if anything my sense has strengthened that these people are on to something important and useful. Along with perhaps a couple hundred other active volunteer testers — there’s growning bench strength, and I imagine more and more will move from passive to active roles . . . [more]

Okay, search freaks: there are a few more frills to try out courtesy of Google Labs. The folks with the bubbling beakers have introduced a timeline search, which disports your results along a timeline depending, it seems, on dates located within the results — though I imagine the algorithm is a tad more sophisticated than that. Here’s a search for “charter of rights and freedoms” in a timeline view. A timeline might be useful if you’re doing a quick bit of history.

Then there’s a map view of search results. This one is going to need more work. . . . [more]

I was musing on the subway this morning about our computer lab — actually we have two of them. They take up a lot of space and of course are resource-intensive, needing continual upgrades in hardware and software. Does anyone still think we will need them in say, five years time?

Most of our students now have laptops. They’re more ubiquitous than ever and getting smaller, lighter and with longer battery life. And of course our students are more IT-literate than ever before — and that will only increase. Our libraries are wireless. Printing is wireless. In the future I . . . [more]

Every week we present the summary of a decision handed down by a Québec court provided to us by SOQUIJ and considered to be of interest to our readers throughout Canada. SOQUIJ is attached to the Québec Department of Justice and collects, analyzes, enriches, and disseminates legal information in Québec.

PÉNAL (DROIT) : Après avoir relevé différentes contraventions à la Politique à l’égard de la désignation des techniciens qualifiés en éthylomètre alors en vigueur, le tribunal conclut qu’un doute raisonnable subsiste quant au fait que l’agent ayant manipulé l’éthylomètre approuvé était bien un technicien qualifié en éthylomètre au moment des . . . [more]