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 FUTURE OF NATIONAL CONSTITUTIONS IN A GLOBAL WORLD
Tom Ginsburg
in The Law of the Future and the Future of Law, S. Muller, S. Zouridis, M. Frishman & L. Kistemaker eds., Oslo: Torkel Opsahl Academic EPublisher, 2011

Excerpt: pages 148 – 151

The Future

Where will constitutions go in the next . . . [more]

I used to race our sailboat, a 35-footer (11 meters) that required a crew of about nine to be competitive. When I helmed, or steered the boat, I would sometimes drag down our performance with three common mistakes:

1. Not good enough as a sailor
2. Tried to do too much
3. Didn’t get my head out of the boat

Project managers often fall prey to the same three mistakes in the context of project management.

Insufficient Skill

I wasn’t a terribly good racing sailor. Indeed, none of our regular crew, equally busy-with-real-world-jobs colleagues, were that good. Over time, we learned to deal . . . [more]

Last week I had the good fortune to have attended the Canadian Bar Association’s Envisioning Equal Justice Summit: Building Justice for Everyone in Vancouver. Many participants live-tweeted sessions and otherwise engaged in #equaljustice discussions. The summit culminated in a compilation, by the participants, of ideas and concrete strategies for legal and justice system reform. These will be presented in a report to the full conference of the CBA with a plan for implementation. I’ll write about highlights in subsequent posts over the coming weeks. Others have written, here and elsewhere, for example, about the stimulating event as well.

The . . . [more]

Happy May Day all! A day for celebrating the labour movement, gathering community, and strengthening the search for greater workers’ rights everywhere.

On May Day, we celebrate and support vulnerable and embattled workers as if they are outside our profession. But we’d like to return yet again to the issue of retaining women in the legal profession, and ask why, as a profession, we are so bad at turning that critical gaze inwards. An April 2013 study commissioned by the Law Society of Upper Canada and authored by Fiona M. Kay, Stacey Alarie, and Jones Adjei of Queen’s University tells . . . [more]

I just heard Duncan Stewart speak about the Deloitte 2013 TMT predictions at an event held by the London Economic Development Corporation. A couple of things have been mentioned on Slaw before. Here are some more things to ponder.

As we start to rely on more data in the cloud, carrier promises for uptime guarantees will be as important as the volume of data on our plans.

The hype over voice and gesture control for PCs and TVs is overblown. A remote control has an error rate of about 2 per 10,000 uses. Voice and gesture error rates . . . [more]

CanLII is testing a new search interface! Check out beta.CanLII.org. The CanLII Blog reports:

CanLII is proud to present a new search interface designed to unify the functionalities of its search engine under a single form that is at once easier and more powerful to use. This beta site allows our users to get comfortable with this new tool, its functionalities and its organization. As this interface evolves over the coming months, we invite you to send us your comments and suggestions.

Like the single search box on the basic Google page? You will probably like the beta . . . [more]

When we come to a new fork in an old road we continue to follow the route with which we are familiar, even though wholly different, even better avenues might open up before us.

– George Manuel

Yesterday, the Canadian Bar Association invited us to join a conversation about the future of law. The CBA’s Legal Futures Initiative launched last summer and has been in a research and information gathering phase since that time, with the results trickling out now, and to be fully released next month.

In response to their invitation, a few conversations got started on Twitter yesterday . . . [more]

One of the most stimulating and pleasing roles I have, is to be involved with very small numbers of students on Kingston University’s Publishing Masters’ degree, as a supervisor of dissertations and on the advisory board for the course. There are a number of such courses in the UK, including those at City University and University College, both in London, where I have informal links to academics running the courses. I speak to them frequently about their developments.

Over the past several years, such courses have grown, drawing in students from around the world in order for them . . . [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 the week of April 16 – 23:

1. R. v. Duncan 2013 ONCJ 160
   

   5. At heart, Mr. Duncan’s case was unremarkable. A minor alleged Highway Traffic Act offence led to a police-citizen interaction in the parking lot of Mr. Duncan’s apartment building in the wee hours of the morning. A request that Mr. Duncan produce his licence led to an alleged refusal, which led to an

Yes. Most definitely, yes. The harder question is who to take on as your mentee or protégé.

Managing a Mentoring Relationship published by LawPro offers the following summary of mentoring.

Mentoring relationships can be informal and unstructured, more complex and procedure-based, or somewhere in between. But no matter what form they take, the structure of the relationship is not as important as the learning that occurs. We all thrive when we learn in the presence and with the help of others who have gone before us.

Mentors do more than simply pass on knowledge and information. They impart lessons on

Back in 2009, I did a quick check on link rot in Canadian decisions on CanLII. Today I repeated my quick investigation of link rot in Canadian judicial decisions. To gather decisions with URLs I simply searched for the text “http://” in CanLII. I limited my results for 2012 decisions, and sorted by date.

There were 156 court decisions in 2012 that referenced websites by specific URL. I looked at 10 decisions – all of which were decided between December 19 and 31, 2012. There were 4 broken hyperlinks. One reference was missing the colon in “http://”, and once that . . . [more]

These are notes from a panel discussion by George Waggott, Partner, McMillan LLP, Toronto, Nina Barakzai, Sky Media, UK, Lyndsey Wasser, Partner, McMillan LLP, Toronto, and Lewis Gottheil, Counsel, CAW Canada, Toronto, 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 my own and not the speakers’. This session included a review of case law which was largely not included here.

The Social Network: What Should Employers Do?

Panelists:

George Waggott, Partner, McMillan
Nina . . . [more]