As much as I enjoy discussing how technology can improve and enhance legal practice, I firmly believe this technological transition has to begin before – in the law schools. Despite, or perhaps in spite of generational differences, the vast majority of legal graduates are technologically illiterate. Changes to the way that legal education itself is delivered may make the difference.

Central to this change is the realization that lawyers are no long the gatekeepers to legal information. Access to justice demands that justice be accessible and comprehensible to the public. This may lead to further development of legal education . . . [more]

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:
Discharge of juror / Time already served / Causation in negligence:

R. v. Titchener (R.G.) 2013 BCCA 64
Criminal Law – Procedure – Jury – General – Discharge of juror
The accused was charged that on March 22, 2009, he uttered a threat to cause death or bodily harm to Ms. L. and he . . . [more]

The plain English movement has been going on for a long time. The first law reports in England, The Year Books (1260 to 1535), were all in the French language. Legal texts were published in England in the French language in the 16th century. But French was not the language of the people and it took a long time to get the courts to use English rather than French or Latin.

“After 1704 all reports are in English” – see The Language of the Law by David Mellinkoff, page 130.

David Mellinkoff’s book, published in 1963, is credited with starting . . . [more]

One of my favourite quips fell from the misanthropic mouth of Brother Theodore (“philosopher, metaphysician, and podiatrist”): “I have gazed into the abyss, and the abyss has gazed into me . . . and neither of us liked what we saw.”

This turn on Nietzsche’s apothegm 146 — “He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.” — is, amusingly, a bathetic comment on the Depth, as it caps that awesome void with a plastic lid of “not liking.” But . . . [more]

Legal researchers and law librarians have long worried about the lack of a coherent strategy in Canada to ensure the digital preservation and archiving of legal and governmental information. A case in point is Louis Mirando’s Slaw.ca post of Feb. 15th , 2013 on Library Budgets and Priorities: A New Year and a New Normal:

(…) when will we begin an organized, comprehensive preservation/digitization project for our historical law collections? Preservation must procede hand-in-hand with digital access. The Internet Archive and Hathi Trust (for monographs), and JSTOR and Ontario’s Scholars Portal (for journals – unfortunately not open-access) are a start,

. . . [more]

Last month, the world was transfixed by the selection of a new pope for the Catholic church. Prior to the selection of Pope Francis, there was a great deal of discussion about what type of pope would the best choice as the church is running through some fairly turbulent times.

There were those who believed that a “no-nonsense CEO” or “tough-guy governor” as the Globe and Mail suggested on March 9, 2013 would be the best pope. The chief argument for such an individual was that the Curia, and other aspects of the church, needed to be reformed to deal . . . [more]

On December 4, 2012, the Saskatchewan government tabled Bill No. 85, An Act respecting Employment Standards, Occupational Health and Safety, Labour Relations and Related Matters and making consequential amendments to certain Acts (hereinafter referred to as the Saskatchewan Employment Act) in the hope of consolidating 12 employment and labour-related laws, restructuring existing provisions, eliminating inconsistencies, and more accurately reflect contemporary employment relationships.

Lawyers rely on an invisible infrastructure to power their law firms. Once those wires leave your computer and hit the wall, you cede control to others. Even if you haven’t shifted any part of your practice to the cloud, you may have file or e-mail servers inside your firm that are managed by others. We can use status dashboards and related information to warn us when things have gone awry in our digital world.

Your Apps Status

A tremor runs through cyberspace when Google Mail goes offline and social networks light up with virtual handwringing. Your first awareness may be . . . [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.

IFC Performance Standards on Environmental & Social Sustainability: A Guidebook
Michael Torrance
Toronto: LexisNexis Canada, 2012

Excerpts from the Preface (selected by the publisher and the author)

[Footnotes converted to endnotes]

This Guidebook is intended to provide an introduction and guidance to the International Finance Corporation (IFC) Performance Standards on Environmental and Social . . . [more]

Prof. Larry Lessig gave a superb talk, “Free Culture,” this evening at Harvard Law School. The talk is one of a series of special events Harvard Law professor and Berkman Center for Internet & Society director Terry Fisher organized for his 2013 Copyright course, in which I’m lucky enough to be participating. Like all the special events, Prof. Lessig’s talk was presented in person to Prof. Fisher’s Copyright law school class, via webinar to online course participants (including me), and to the public via archived webcast.

I took a few notes during Prof. Lessig’s engaging and stimulating talk, and . . . [more]

I hope you don’t mind as I continue gradually to post notes from the CCCA National Spring Conference earlier this week. We now jump ahead to yesterday’s closing keynote.

These are notes from a panel discussion by Joe Bradford, Vice-President, Joint Venture and Legal, CNOOC Canada Inc., Riccardo Trecroce, Vice President and General Counsel, North America, Magna International, Inc., and moderator Gary Graham, Partner, Gowlings, Hamilton on April 16, 2013 at the Canadian Corporate Counsel Association National Spring Conference 2013 in Toronto. Note: these are my selected notes from this session; any inaccuracies or omissions are . . . [more]

Each year the ABA Techshow offers a fun feature that has the audience bombarded by the URLs of dozens and dozens of interesting sites delivered at a relentless rapid pace by a tag team of IT experts. You can access the YouTube video used in that presentation. But in case you find it hard to keep up, I’m offering below a simple list of all of the URLs mentioned this year. You’ll discover, when you explore them, that they’re a mix of the useful and the amusing, which is no bad thing.

My thanks to this year’s four presenters, Britt . . . [more]