♫ Innovate and stimulate minds
Travel the world and penetrate the times
Innovate and stimulate minds
For now I appreciate this moment in time…♫

Lyrics, music and recorded by Hard Driver.

The 2013 edition of The Pacific Legal Technology Conference, Canada’s first and foremost conference on all aspects of legal technology, will feature two major new developments this year!

First: This year’s conference will be webcast….all three concurrent tracks in the morning and in the afternoon…making this conference fully available across Canada and the web (all except for the lunchtime presentations -we are still seeing if we can make . . . [more]

Like most Canadians I have been watching the news of flooding in Alberta. The images of downtown Calgary and other communities under water have been shocking. Our thoughts go out to colleagues, friends and family affected by the floods–we wish you a safe return to home and work.

Here are a few key websites with more information:

• Donations to the Alberta Floods support – Canadian Red Cross
• Flooding information (emergency information, advisories, community updates, disaster recovery) – Government of Alberta
• How you can help – (donations and volunteering) – Government of Alberta
• Court-related closures – (emergency information) – Alberta

Summaries of selected recent cases are provided each week to Slaw by Maritime Law Book. Every Sunday we present a precis of the latest summaries, a fuller version of which can be found on MLB-Slaw Selected Case Summaries at cases.slaw.ca.

This week’s summaries concern:
Public housing termination / Mens rea / Mistake of fact:

New Brunswick Housing Corp., Re 2013 NBQB 150
Government Programs – Housing – Rental accommodation – Termination, forfeiture and reentry
On November 22, 2012, the New Brunswick Housing Corp. (NB Housing) received Community Safety Warnings from an employee of the New Brunswick Department of . . . [more]

If I were to start to discuss politicians and expense scandals your mind would likely turn to events in Ottawa; however, here in Nova Scotia, we have been there, done that and so have that T-Shirt. The popular topic earlier this week was whether or not the legislature was going to be recalled in order to expel a sitting MLA. In the end that did not happen, but if it had, it would not have been the first time in Nova Scotia.

Twenty-six years ago in 1986, An Act Respecting Reasonable Limits for Membership in the House of Assembly, . . . [more]

Today’s the summer solstice. So what do you do when the sun just won’t quit shining? You go outside, of course. And what do you find outside in the summer? Bugs, that’s what, mini-critters that creep, crawl, buzz, bite, flit and fly. Now, few of us have the . . . wisdom? . . . to appreciate these minuscule machines in the flesh; but cartoon a hopper or a spinner, and we like them just fine.

Sometimes more than just fine. A French company, Futurikon, has for some time now been making charming stop-motion, short, animated films under the . . . [more]

Recently, there has been a renewed discussion about Patent Assertion Entities, also known as non-practicing entitles (NPEs), or colloquially, patent trolls. In early June, President Obama announced new initiatives to combat what he called, Patent Assertion Entities, which “don’t actually produce anything themselves,” and instead develop a business model “to essentially leverage and hijack somebody else’s idea and see if they can extort some money out of them.”

The U.S. president made a number of recommendations to congress for legislative changes and announced executive actions to address these Patent Assertion Entities. The recommendations included legislative changes to permit judges to . . . [more]

Earlier this month, a controversy erupted over a proposed deal between Library and Archives Canada (LAC) and Canadiana.org, a not-for-profit partnership of major research libraries in Canada, to digitize the LAC’s vast collections of print and photographic material and make it available to the public via a new online portal.

The so-called Héritage Project, a 10-year initiative, involves the digitization of approximately 60 million pages of primary-source documents from the 1600s to the mid-1900s and will include making digital copies of such material as: immigration records, church records, land records, family histories and papers, voters’ lists; documents relating to . . . [more]

There are many within the legal community who scoff at Twitter saying that “it’s as a useless piece of fluff”. However for those interested in learning about legal innovation and connecting with legal innovators around the globe, Twitter is indispensible. Everything that is happening globally in terms of legal transformation is shared on Twitter. Today I connected with another innovative law firm from the UK – gunnercooke.

Former general counsel Sarah Goulbourne got together over coffee with corporate lawyer Darryl Cooke in mid-2010 to chat about how a different legal model would have huge competitive advantage over existing . . . [more]

With the retirement of Mr. Justice Morris Fish the government must again decide on the appointment of a member of the Supreme Court of Canada. There is the continuing issue of how best to manage the selection process. And as well there is, of course, the matter of the new judge’s characteristics — intelligence, discernment, experience, knowledge, compassion, and so forth. Then we come to the question of the externalities, so to speak — gender and race, prime among them.

Four of the five most recent appointments to the Supreme Court by the Conservative government have been men. Does . . . [more]

Your reputation is how other people see you. What we do frames that perception so we should act professionally and positively. At the end of the day, we can’t make people think well of us. The Web expands the areas in which we need to watch for how we appear to others. It’s important for lawyers to regularly look at how they appear to the world on the Web. Just because you aren’t on the Web or in social media, doesn’t mean information about you isn’t.

This is a technology column so I’m not talking about search engine optimization, social . . . [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.

The Canadian Constitution
Adam Dodek
Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2013

Excerpt: pp. 11-12

I admit it. I love the Canadian Constitution. Sometimes I just don’t feel the love back. There was the time when I ordered the only existing Canadian Constitution book for my students and it got lost in transit (maybe it was . . . [more]

Willie Nellson is performing in Confederation Park on the summer solstice this Friday. In anticipation I’ve had my favourite Willie Nelson song stuck in my head all week: (yes this blog post is mostly an excuse to play this song).

A few years ago around the time of my call to the bar I sent my parents a video of myself doing a karaoke to this song. They were proud parents of a lawyer-to-be and thought they’d appreciate Willie’s advice to mothers that they should make their kids be “doctors and lawyers and such” (and more central to the song, . . . [more]