We wish everyone a happy and peaceful holiday. Slaw takes a bit of a break at this time of year, so posting will be slow and not at all on December 25 and 26 and January 1. Otherwise, the regular Today features and our columns will be published as usual. This is a good occasion to thank all of you on behalf of our bloggers and columnists for reading Slaw. Our entries are our gifts, and to find you like them pleases us greatly.

The start of a new year is a time for self-reflection and self-improvement. Many of you will think about making changes in your personal and work lives. But while you all have good intentions, it can be difficult to break old habits, especially when you are running hard on the treadmill of a busy life and practice. So, to harness the good intentions you all have at this time of year we are going to post an excerpt every couple of days from our list of “New Year’s resolutions for a healthier practice and a new you” that . . . [more]

Each Monday we present brief excerpts of recent posts from five of Canada's award-winning legal blogs chosen at random* from thirty-five 2010 & 2011 CLawBie winners. In this way we hope to promote their work, with their permission, to as wide an audience as possible.

This week the randomly selected blogs are 1. Official Clio Blog   2. leeakazi.com  3. Canadian Legal History Blog   4.  Slater Vecchio Connected  5. Entertainment & Medial Law Signal

Canada is a high latititude country. Even those who live in Ontario’s “Southwest” are awfully far north compared to our American friends who live south of the Mason-Dixon line. Being a Nordic country has many charms but it also means that for many weeks of the year on either side of the winter solstice (December 21) it’s cold and dark everywhere in Canada. In the morning, kids go to school and parents go to work in the dark. In the late afternoon or early evening when everyone returns home it’s dark again. During this period, from November until January, the . . . [more]

Mark Twain wrote in Mark Twain, “Chapters from My Autobiography”, 598 North American Review (Sept. 7, 1906):

I wrote the rest of “The Innocents Abroad” in sixty days, and I could have added a fortnight’s labor with the pen and gotten along without the letters altogether. I was very young in those days, exceedingly young, marvellously young, younger than I am now, younger than I shall ever be again, by hundreds of years. I worked every night from eleven or twelve until broad day in the morning, and as I did two hundred thousand words in the sixty days,

. . . [more]

Last Friday the Supreme Court of Iowa upheld a summary judgement decision by the Iowa District Court which found that a dentist who terminated his assistant for being too attractive had not engaged in gender discrimination.

The plaintiff was hired in 1999 when she was only 20 years old, and the defendant conceded she was an excellent employee. The relationship was generally without incident, with exception to a few occasions when the dentist commented that he was distracted by her tight fitting uniform. The defendant acknowledged he made inappropriate comments of a sexual nature towards the plaintiff, who was also . . . [more]

A couple of days ago Edward Adams of Bloomberg Law’s Behind the Headlines interviewed one-time Slaw columnist Jordan Furlong on the topic of recent mergers between Canadian and U.S. law firms. Most of Bloomberg Law is behind a subscription paywall, but there’s a lot of Bloomberg video goodness on YouTube, and in this case Slaw has been given permission to show you the twelve-minute video of this interview here in the website.

Even though he’s piped in via Skype (would Google Hangout produce better quality?), Jordan is as thoughtful and informative as ever.

. . . [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 are in Deportation, Sentencing, Collective bargaining, & Debtor's relief

This is the text of an email fraud alert sent by LAWPRO to our insureds on December 21, 2012.

Just this week LAWPRO has dealt with two firms that were the victims of major frauds on their trust accounts. The time just before the holidays should not be a time for bad thoughts and frauds targeting lawyers, but unfortunately the fraudsters aren’t cooperating. We frequently see an increase in fraud attempts around the holidays as the crooks behind these frauds will actually use the distractions of the holidays to help them dupe lawyers and law office staff.

In one case . . . [more]

Recently the Law Society of Upper Canada announced a dramatic change in the admission requirements for law students.

The current 10 month articling requirement remains an option. But for students unable to find an articling position they will be able to qualify for admission by taking an eight month program composed of four months of classroom study plus four months of unpaid “co-op work” at a law firm or sole practitioner – see The Globe and Mail article, November 30, 2012, by Kirk Makin.

From the Law Society Gazette:

On November 22, 2012, Convocation approved a three-year pilot project

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Mais où sont les neiges d'antan? That white stuff from yesteryear is in your memory, of course. And only there. There could hardly be a better metaphor for all things ephemeral and fleeting than former snow. The interesting question, though, is how we feel about such impermanence. On the one hand, "les neiges" are now water under the bridge, done and dusted, yesterday's news, or, to return to our metaphor, Schnee von gestern (yesterday's snow) as the Germans might say. We screw up the lunch bag, toss it into the bin, and move on.

The Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL) is accepting nominations for the 2013 Hugh Lawford Award for Excellence in Legal Publishing.

It honours a publisher (whether for-profit or not-for profit, corporate or non-corporate) that has demonstrated excellence by publishing a work, series, website or e-product that makes a significant contribution to legal research and scholarship.

Members as well as non-members of CALL can make nominations. Criteria are explained on the Award website (see link in first sentence).

The deadline for sending in nominations is February 15, 2013.

Members of the Award Selection Committee are:

• Justice Eric (Rick) Libman, Ontario

. . . [more]