A couple of posts ago Thomas R. Bruce reminded me of the work that he, and a team of others, had done for Cornell’s Legal Information Institute on modelling American legislation. This is an extremely useful project that anyone working on modelling data of any kind would benefit from reviewing.

On the project website you will find project documentation, visual documentation and documentation on data model versions. I returned to the project documentation myself this past weekend and found myself having some difficulty conceptualizing the written report as a whole.

This is partly due to the lack of an . . . [more]

Slaw readers might like to know that Stephen Mason’s journal, Digital Evidence and Electronic Signature Law Review, is now open source, under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 license.

Readers will remember that Mason’s book Electronic Signatures in Law was reviewed on Slaw not long ago and an excerpt from that book was one of our recent Thursday Thinkpieces.

The Digital Evidence and Electronic Signature Law Review is published by Mason “with the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (IALS), School of Advanced Study, University of London on the SAS Open Journals System.” The journal welcomes submissions for its peer-review . . . [more]

We were recently made aware of a September 2013 news release from the FBI, stating that a lawyer-targetting fraudster had pleaded guilty and received hefty fines and a prison sentence. Nice to see a victory in the struggle against online scams. The number of law enforcement agencies involved shows how international these scams are, and how much cooperation is required to bring the fraudsters to justice.

Here is the text of the release:

The United States Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Pennsylvania announced that a Nigerian national charged in connection with a multi-national scheme that bilked more than

. . . [more]

One of the ideas that surfaced in the lively discussions at the OBA’s Civil Litigation program which I co-chaired last week, was the importance of “face time” between counsel, as a means of improving communication, reducing hostility and keeping lawyers focused on the efficient and economical resolution of disputes.

The view was expressed that counsel sometimes adopt a tone in emails that they would not use in person. Someone has described this as “courage from a distance”.

At the break I was introduced to a California practitioner in the audience who informed me that the rules of procedure in that . . . [more]

It always makes me happy when I see law library folk reaching out to other communities to explain the work we do. Law library technicians and librarians work in a wide range of settings and take on a lot of different responsibilities depending on the setting and their roles. The library community in Ontario know that January is “SuperConference” month since the Ontario Library Association puts on its annual conference in Toronto at the end of January. Brenda Wong and Karen Sawatzy of Library Technician Dialog blog fame (among other great accomplishments!) made the trek from Saskatchewan and Manitoba to . . . [more]

This week the randomly selected blogs are 1. Legal Feeds   2. IP Osgoode   3. Canadian Appeals Monitor   4. Canadian Legal Research Blog    5. Official Clio Blog

The Supreme Court recently addressed the approach to assessment of copyright infringement in the case of Cinar Corporation v. Robinson, 2013 SCC 73 (CanLII) and thereby provided some important guidance to courts facing similar difficult determinations. 

As a basic principle the public domain provides the rich soil from which new works can be created. The Court reaffirmed that the role of copyright provides “a balance between promoting the public interest in the encouragement and dissemination of works of the arts and intellect and obtaining a just reward for the creator” and that copyright does not provide a monopoly over . . . [more]

 In 2011, Borys Wrzesnewskyj, the former Liberal Member of Parliament for Etobicoke Centre, lost his seat to Conservative candidate Ted Opitz by a mere 26 votes. Convinced that procedural irregularities on Election Day had robbed him of victory, Wreznewskyj challenged the result in court.[1]

The case reached the Supreme Court of Canada.[2] Wrzesnewskyj lost.

“The right of every citizen to vote, guaranteed by [Section Three] of the Charter, lies at the heart of Canadian democracy,” wrote Mr. Justice Marshall Rothstein and Mr. Justice Michael Moldaver, for a majority of the Court.[3] As a consequence, the . . . [more]

I suspect we will all be talking about Heenan Blaikie for a while, on Slaw and elsewhere.

Both Mitch and Gabriel have weighed in on this some more already, so I’d like to add here to my previous post on the subject and my brief interview with Drew Hasselback in the Legal Post.

Much of the commentary has tried to figure out what went “wrong.” Hasselback’s most recent article suggests that it was not strictly financial,

Just a month ago, things were looking good. Billings had hit a near-record $35-million for the month of December. And the full-year financial

. . . [more]

It seems to me that we’ve been in something of lull so far as IT development is concerned. Perhaps I’m just imagining it because I welcome the break from continual novelty and the learning it invites. However, I’ve recently made note of four developments of possible interest to Slaw readers, and I thought I’d pass them on now. None, I think, is begging to be incorporated into your firm’s canon of essential apps. Indeed, none is likely of direct application to your work. But it’s from such trial efforts that tomorrow’s killer app may emerge, and, more important perhaps, one . . . [more]

À la lumière du test de Wigmore, il y a lieu de reconnaître le privilège de confidentialité existant entre le chercheur et le participant à la recherche en ce qui a trait à une entrevue de l'accusé réalisée dans le cours d'un projet de recherche quelques années avant l'inculpation de ce dernier pour meurtre au premier degré.

This week's summaries concern: Warrantless search and seizure / Class actions and standing :