[I begin this column with an aside. Because I will be discussing The Canadian Abridgment, the nonpareil of Canadian legal information, I want to give any non-Canadian readers some context. For American colleagues, The Canadian Abridgment (published by Carswell and now in its third edition) is similar to West’s digest system (General Digest, Decennial Digest), with Canadian counterparts of Shepard’s Citations and the Current Law Index included for good measure. The Abridgment’s Australian counterpart is the Australian Digest. The foregoing digest services are all published by that jurisdiction’s local Thomson Reuters law publisher. The closest . . . [more]

To add to to your summer reading list:

The 2013 Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction goes to Stanford law professor Paul Goldstein for his novel Havana Requiem:

“The novel chronicles efforts by a lawyer, recovering alcoholic Michael Seeley, to help a group of aging Cuban jazz musicians and their families reclaim copyrights to their works. When his main client, Héctor Reynoso, goes missing, Seeley begins to realize that there is more to the story than music, and that a far deeper conspiracy is involved that might include both the Cuban secret police and his former law firm.”

The . . . [more]

According to CNET, Google may be experimenting with the encryption of files stored within its Drive service. If true, Google would be following the lead of services like SpiderOak and encrypting the files they store. One possible intention here being to restore user confidence in a post-Prism environment.

It’s a nice idea — that users can encrypt files that the cloud-company cannot access; and subsequently is unable to turnover to the government (or courts?) — but this seems like an “optics” play to me. It’s also likely not possible, at least for now… The CNET article interestingly identifies the . . . [more]

Last week, Exigent graciously invited me to a small lunch gathering of Torontonians to discuss the changing legal industry. Exigent, a major LPO based in South Africa, does business predominantly in the UK and Australia and has recently landed in Canada.

First, I’m happy that a major international LPO has finally seen Canada as worthy of investment.

Second, the arrival of Exigent means that change in the Canadian legal industry will – finally – begin to accelerate. Canadian law firms and clients will view the arrival of an international LPO as further validation for using non-Canadian lawyers to do work . . . [more]

Le Service du développement et du soutien à la profession du Barreau du Québec has compiled a series of resource packages associated with different areas of law, skills, knowledge and types of practice to help lawyers thrive in the province of Quebec.

SmartChicago is a group formed with the aim of using technology to better the lives of Chicagoans. Among other things, they support centres that help citizens get access to their health records, they promote free broadband access, they work to improve citizens’ technological skills — and they try to make relevant laws easier to understand.

To assist with this last aim, they’ve done a very practical and perhaps surprising thing: they’ve opened an account on the Rap Genius site, a place to go to learn the meaning of a lot of rap lyrics — or poems, or items in the . . . [more]

[This is the second part of my two-part column pondering the relationship between access to law schools and access to justice in Canada. Part I was posted on May 15, 2013 and can be read here.]

As mentioned in Part I of this column, Canadian law schools have made significant strides in increasing their ethnic, cultural, and gender diversity profiles over the past decade. Though much remains to be done to mirror the diversity profile of Canadian society, law schools have been eager to report on their progress. They have been less eager, however, to report on the subject . . . [more]

Each Thursday we present a significant excerpt, usually from a recently published book or journal article. In every case the proper permissions have been obtained. If you are a publisher who would like to participate in this feature, please let us know via the site’s contact form.

Core Values: Professionalism and Independence Theories in Lawyer Regulation
Noel Semple
http://ssrn.com/abstract=2262518 [This paper is part of a book project with the working title Justicia’s Legions: Legal Services Regulation at the Crossroads.]

Excerpt prepared by the author.

[Footnotes have been converted to endnotes here.]

 

North America is the common law . . . [more]

One of the final sessions at this week’s American Association of Law Libraries conference offered participants a guided opportunity to work with the yet-in-beta Congress.gov. As THOMAS “himself” confirmed, the venerable THOMAS.gov — now the ripe age of 18 years — is looking to retire:

THOMAS will be retired! Tomorrow at 2:30 PDT we'll tweet about its replacement, #Congressdotgov. #aall13 http://t.co/FIOKzk6K7Q

— Congressdotgov (@congressdotgov) July 15, 2013

As we noted and discussed at the time, the Congress.gov public beta was launched several months ago. It has received several iterative updates since then: inclusion of the Congressional Record, . . . [more]

Each Wednesday we tell you which three English-language cases and which French-language case have been the most viewed on CanLII and we give you a small sense of what the cases are about.

For this last week:

1. R v Murphy 2013 CanLII 40807 (NL PC)
   

   1. The accused was charged with the offence of parking in a crosswalk, contrary to section 144(e) of the Highway Traffic Act. As a result of the events which followed the alleged parking in the crosswalk, he was also charged with offences under the Criminal Code of causing a disturbance and resisting arrest. I have

. . . [more]

Last week the Alberta Court of Appeal ruled on a 7 year long custody battle between gay parents. At issue was the constitutionality of the Alberta Family Law Act and Family Law Relations Act.

At the centre of the drawn out family law litigation was the best interests of a 10 year old girl who spent her first 3 years living with her two dads. When the men split up the biological father and the birth mom objected to the non-bio dad having custody and access to his daughter. In his quest to be declared a legal parent and . . . [more]

Some retailers are following customer movement in stores by tracking cell phone movement. From a legal perspective it raises issues around privacy and perhaps wiretapping laws. To a great extent whether or not such activities comply are dependent upon the subtleties of how it is being done, and how anonymously it is being done.

The other issue – as is often the case when dealing with privacy related issues – is the customer acceptance or “creepiness” factor. Some people would welcome getting a coupon on their phone while wandering through a store. But for others it feels like surveillance and . . . [more]