The past week former Supreme Court Justice the Hon. Frank Iacobucci released the Issues Report on Improving First Nations’ Representation on Ontario Juries. Iacobucci was appointed by Hon. Chris Bentley, Attorney General of Ontario, on Aug. 11, 2011 to review the jury process for First Nations living on reserves. The report concludes that Ontario’s justice system is in a state of crisis, as First Nations are overrepresented in the prison population and significantly underrepresented on jury lists and those who work in the administration of justice,

If we continue the status quo we will aggravate what is already a

. . . [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: Mens rea / Criminal law forfeiture / Company windup and pensions / Direction to jury:

All Evernote users should immediately change their passwords.

The following text appeared in a post on the Evernote blog this morning (March 2, 1013) and is also being sent to all Evernote users as an email communication:

Evernote’s Operations & Security team has discovered and blocked suspicious activity on the Evernote network that appears to have been a coordinated attempt to access secure areas of the Evernote Service.

As a precaution to protect your data, we have decided to implement a password reset. Please read below for details and instructions.

In our security investigation, we have found no evidence that . . . [more]

I maintain several personalities on social media. I am a different person on Facebook than I am on Twitter than I am on Google+ than I am on LinkedIn, and I like to keep it that way. And even within particular media, I maintain multiple personas with different names and different passwords. I do this to keep my work life separate from my personal life, to be more efficient, to freely explore new technologies, and to reflect different interests. I also do this to explore the potential freedom to be anonymous on the Internet – to not be confined by . . . [more]

Human beings are sensitive to scale. Makes sense, I guess: more is better — to a degree; big is dangerous — much of the time. And when impressive size is combined with intensity, a scale of its own, the result can be awe-inspiring. Let me give you a couple of visual examples.

The first is a set of narratives cut in stone. It comes from the far north, in Russia, just about where that red dot appears on the map below.

Add to the scale of “far northness” the time scale fact that the work in question is 5,000 years . . . [more]

Cicero (106-43 BC) the great Roman politician/philosopher considered gratitude the greatest of virtues.

Modern psychology argues that there is a correlation between gratitude and wellbeing. That is, a grateful attitude can lead to increased wellbeing.

Gratitude is not the same as being indebted to someone. Gratitude can be expressed when one is thankful for things such as fair weather or good health.

Gratitude has been the focus of several world religions but here I would like to focus on the kind of gratitude that Warren Buffet speaks of when he says that he has won the ovarian lottery. Buffett says . . . [more]

The 2013 Law Via the Internet conference will take place in late September 2013 on Jersey, one of the Channel Islands (I admit, I had to look it up on a map).

The conference brings together people from the Legal Information Institutes (LIIs) from different countries and continents that together form the Free Access to Law Movement.

The conference “tracks” will be:

• E-Learning: distance, blended, open, mobile, gaming, MOOCing and more?
• Online legal information – starting from scratch
• Legal knowledge in the age of the semantic web
• Communicating our work: journals, blogs and other ways of publishing about open access

. . . [more]

We leave a trail of footprints across the Web that can seem ephemeral. Content on law firm Web sites changes, status updates to LinkedIn or Twitter fade, with new content taking the place of the old. In some cases, it’s out-of-sight-out-of-mind but it continues to live on. Twitter resells access to old posts through its Firehose, Web sites can be archived by services like the Internet Archive. That may not be the best way to keep track of your online activity. You can create a personal archive and preserve your own online footprints.

A personal archive can have a . . . [more]

I never considered the practice of law a dangerous occupation. I simply never thought of the potential dangers associated with practising law. But a blog post written by David Hyde, one of our authors on First Reference Talks, brought the whole issue to light and gave me an understanding of the nature and extent of the problem of violence and threats in the legal profession. I thought his insights into the problem would be of interest to the legal community, and decided to republish it here on Slaw.

I mentioned the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos in my previous column. Did I spot any law of the future trends there?

For one thing, I rarely if ever heard the words ‘rule of law’. There was a lot of interesting interaction about Big Challenges – economic crisis, environmental crisis, peace and security crises, development, cyber and digital challenges, Arab Spring, innovation, the need for values, and the rise of African and Asia. Rule of law is, I must suppose, assumed to be part of solving all that. But assumptions make me a little nervous. I . . . [more]

Each Thursday we present a significant excerpt 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.

FINDING AND MANAGING LEGAL INFORMATION ON THE INTERNET, 2nd Ed
David Whelan
Toronto: Canada Law Book, 2012
[© 2012 Thomson Reuters Canada Limited. Reproduced by permission of Carswell, a division of Thomson Reuters Canada Limited.]

Excerpt: pp. 64-67

General Search

The primacy of Google and Bing has not stopped other search engines from entering . . . [more]

The ABS debate continues among many Canadian provinces. The Law Society of British Columbia has already made the same mistake as the American Bar Association recently made by declining to allow outside investment in law firms. One of LSBC’s reasons was that local lawyers didn’t feel a need for it; this reminds me of a comment made by a lawyer in the UK and likely echoed by some in Canada, “We’re smart people. If there was a better way to do things we would have already figured it out.” Or to more bluntly put it, LSBC’s rationale is like asking . . . [more]