Sensibly, everyone’s presumed to know the law: to have it otherwise would encourage willful ignorance or claims of ignorance as means of evading legal consequences. And with equal sense, laws have to be promulgated for their application to be fundamentally fair or even instrumentally useful. So much for theory. Practice, as always, is rather more of a messy struggle, as you’ll know.

There’s the basic matter of getting the text of laws out to the people. We’re doing a decent job of that in Canada as our various jurisdictions make their legislation and judicial opinions increasingly available in digitized formats . . . [more]

The most recent Humble Bundle DRM-free distribution offer, the Humble eBook Bundle, closed a day or so after a two-week run. Here is some background:

What is the Humble Bundle? It is our take on digital distribution, where anyone can pay any amount of money they like for great DRM-free cross-platform products. (Previous Humble Bundles distributed music and video games.)

The result of the two-week ebook bundle distribution: 84,219 downloads of a DRM-free cross-platform bundle of ebooks, worth $1,202,871.71, with an average contribution of $14.28. Some of the proceeds will go to the authors, some will be directed to . . . [more]

Apple announced a new iPad mini yesterday as expected, along with upgrades to several other products. Surprisingly, an iPad 4 is now available, just a few short months after the iPad 3 was introduced. Apple is a master of innovation and marketing, and somehow manages to make evolutionary changes to its products seem revolutionary.

But they are not the only game in town. 

Microsoft has an event on Oct 25 to launch its Surface tablet, on Oct 26 to launch Windows 8, and on Oct 29 to launch Windows Phone 8. Early reviews show they are solid products. I find . . . [more]

This year’s Open Access Week (Oct 22-28, 2012) offers much to celebrate, whether with Directory of Open Access Journals, surpassing 8,000 journals or ROARMAP now listing close to 250 open access mandates among universities, departments and institutes. The mega-journals, from Public Library of Science, with PLoS One, the Nature Publishing Group, with Scientific Reports, or the Royal Society, with Open Biology, link open access to the first new principle of digital scholarly communication, namely, that there is room in any given journal for all of its peer-reviewed-and-approved articles, and the world is richer by the appearance . . . [more]

The Charter of the French Language (“French Charter“) has been making headlines these past few weeks, with proposals to extend it to Quebec’s daycare services and recently made campaign promises. This, however, will not be the last we hear of it.

Indeed, six large retailers (Best Buy Canada, Gap Canada, Costco Wholesale Canada, Old Navy, Guess Canada and Wal-mart Canada), the majority of which are represented by the Quebec division of the Retail Council of Canada, will be asking the Superior Court of Quebec to declare whether or not the Office de la langue française (“Office”) has the . . . [more]

The American Federal Trade Commission has published a staff report entitled Best Practices for Common Uses of Facial Recognition Technologies [PDF]. The FTC has the jurisdiction under 15 USC § 45 (m) to make rules “respecting unfair or deceptive acts or practices” in commerce. As I’m sure you’ll know, facial recognition technology is fast advancing and has already found its way into software such as that used to organize photographs by the identity of the people in them (and, presumably, into the various operations of the authorities concerned with security — something left untouched by the report, of course).

The . . . [more]

“Having spent the better part of my life trying either to relive the past or experience the future before it arrives, I have come to believe that in between these two extremes is peace.” – Author Unknown.

If your legal practice or life are anything like mine, you have too many things you need to do and too little time to get them done. I often wake in the morning and think of what I need to get done at work that day. Frequently, at the end of the day I realize that I only accomplished a portion of what . . . [more]

In September I wrote a post about a case in which Justice Brown voiced the need for Superior Court Judges to respond to the challenges and stresses confronting our civil litigation system. The major challenge being, according to Justice Brown, that demand for judicial time exceeds available supply.

In a decision released this month, Justice Brown decided to lead by example.

Justice Brown had scheduled a refusals motion for one hour. Once he received two factums totaling 56 pages, he emailed counsel and told them that if he determined that the materials were more reflective of a 3 hour . . . [more]

♫ Change
Now it’s time for change
Nothing stays the same
No it’s time for change… ♫

Lyrics and Music by Nikki Sixx, Donna McDaniel, recorded by Mötley Crüe.

On Oct 24-25, the second Canadian Forum on Court Technology will be held in Montreal. The challenge that this forum will be facing is how to bring about meaningful change to a dispute resolution process that has been resistant to change. Of course, the voices demanding increased access to justice and responsiveness to the needs of society are only getting louder. The factors for the courts to consider are . . . [more]

The Law Society of Upper Canada just released the final report of the Articling Task Force, Pathways to the Profession: A Roadmap for the Reform of Lawyer Licensing in Ontario. This Task Force was formed to address concerns about the articling program, and in particular relating to the growing number of unplaced licensing candidates. The report outlines a various options for adapting or changing the articling process, including ending the articling requirement as we otherwise know it today. Needless to say, this report and the future of articling have generated a lot of discussion and debate.
On October 25, . . . [more]

It was a year ago that I wrote the Slaw.ca post “Law Firm Merger Mania“, talking about the trend of law firms merging. Notably, we were seeing international firms merging to build a Canadian presence. It is interesting to check in again to see how/whether this trend is developing.

Canada’s Fasken Martineau expands into South Africa
Today we have news of a Canadian firm merging to build a larger international presence: I noticed the announcement on Twitter this morning that Fasken Martineau DuMoulin LLP has merged with 76 lawyer South African law firm Bell Dewar Inc. based in . . . [more]

In his 8 October speech entitled ‘Dissenting Judgments – Self Indulgence or Self Sacrifice’, Lord justice Kerr of the UK Supreme Court poses this interesting question: “Should the possible future utility of a dissent encourage, or should the apparent futility of a dissent deter an expression of disagreement with the majority? And should the circumstance that the dissent is to be expressed in a final court of appeal make a difference?”

Are dissents in courts of final appeal “poignant judicial tragedies” offensive to conventions of certainty and unanimity, as some commentators have said?

Do they weaken the effect of the . . . [more]