It’s an astonishing thing to me at least that we human beings, who prize our consciousness, spend a third of our lives blithely unconscious. That jumped up little homunculus who sits on the tiger’s neck giving orders left and right simply . . . goes away at night, only to reappear as if by magic in the morning without so much as a “Didja miss me?” and as full of itself as ever.

There’s a lot that’s fascinating, if not astonishing, about sleep. We all do it (“birds do it, bees do it…” No, no, they really do.) every . . . [more]

Are online courses changing the teaching structures of the traditional university?

The traditional university instruction model is perhaps best represented by Cambridge and Oxford in the UK. There, the teaching involves a mixture of lectures and tutorials (or supervisions). Typically the tutorials are hour long sessions in which the students meet weekly with a member of the teaching staff. The relative importance of these methods varies according to the needs of the subject.

It is intellectually enriching for most students to be in the same room with a stimulating teacher. And it is equally important for most students to be . . . [more]

This is a post in a series appearing each Friday, setting out some articles, videos, podcasts and the like that contributors at Slaw are enjoying and that you might find interesting. The articles tend to be longer than blog posts and shorter than books, just right for that stolen half hour on the weekend. It’s also likely that most of them won’t be about law — just right for etc.

Please let us have your recommendations for what we and our readers might like.

Bob Tarantino wrote an interesting piece for the National Post recently which commented on the fact that legal fees have become so ridiculously high that even a former Attorney General of Ontario has problems paying the legal fees associated with his self-inflicted legal woes. Bob and I entered into a good-natured Twitter chat in which I pointed out that the former AG did not have my sympathy as he freely chose his legal service providers and likely could have found less expensive personnel to achieve the same result.

That access to justice is impeded by high legal fees is, like . . . [more]

Law reform commission reports can be great sources for legal research. Many of the reports provide historical background and you can often find comparative information about how other jurisdictions have responded to an issue.

And August 2012 has been a very busy month for law reform commissions, with many of them bringing out publications on a range of topics. Here are a few examples:

• English Law Commission Consultation on Scandalising the Court (part of a larger project on contempt of court)
• English Law Commission Consultation Paper on Wildlife Law
• Law Commission of Ontario Interim Report on Vulnerable Workers
• New Zealand

We have talked about TED Talks before–a series of talks that get us thinking in new directions. They are usually both informative and highly interesting. TED has released a list of 20 most-watched talks to date on its blog:

1. Sir Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity (2006): 13,409,417 views
2. Jill Bolte Taylor‘s stroke of insight (2008): 10,409,851
3. Pranav Mistry on the thrilling potential of SixthSense (2009): 9,223,263
4. David Gallo‘s underwater astonishments (2007): 7,879,541
5. Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry demo SixthSense (2009): 7,467,580
6. Tony Robbins asks Why we do what we do (2006): 6,879,488
7. Simon Sinek on how great

Has anyone had any experience with the use of the voice as a legal signature (presumably by way of a recording)? Is there any case law on the topic, one way or the other?

When we did the UECA in 1999, we had in mind that a voice mail message might be an electronic document and the association of the content with the speaker could well constitute a signature.

There is some law that a signature must be an intentional act, and whether just saying ‘Hello, it’s John, I accept your offer to sell me your house’ would constitute an . . . [more]

Part 3 of the three part test for sound prediction from AZT (“The Test”) should be added to part 1. This would better reflect the practical application of the sound prediction test and avoid unnecessary judicial scrutiny into ultimately irrelevant factual and evidential areas.

It has been 10 years since the Supreme Court of Canada (“SCC”) established The Test (in Apotex Inc. v. Wellcome Foundation Ltd., 2002 SCC 77). The Test has invalidated many pharmaceutical patents (and more recently, non-pharmaceutical patents). As we await another SCC decision on utility and sufficiency, this may be an appropriate time to . . . [more]

Via a post on the Legal Writing Prof blog, I’m reading an interesting paper, “Say Goodbye to the Books: Information Literacy as the New Legal Research Paradigm,” by Professors Ellie Margolis and Kristen Murray of Temple University. The paper is available for download in the SSRN Working Paper Series.

Purely coincidentally, a similar thought arose this morning in an internal planning meeting about our legal research and writing instruction this fall. It was expressed that to introduce online research resources by reference to or comparison with their print counterparts is likely no longer a suitable approach. The argument is not . . . [more]

A Toronto lawyer has reported to LAWPRO that almost $80,000 was removed from his trust account over the last four days by a series of 10 fake cheques. The fraud was discovered when a bank reconciliation was done this morning (Wednesday). All was fine when a bank reconciliation was done last Friday. The cheques were obvious copies of the firm’s trust cheques (cheque numbers were not in sequence and different). The cheques were used to pay off credit cards and 2 were payable to a specific individual. It is not known how the fraudster obtained information about the lawyer’s trust . . . [more]

Jordan Furlong published a good piece today about the importance of fact checking for blogging lawyers, and “…the enormous damage you could do to your reputation by producing inaccurate or insufficiently credited material.”

He says in part:

But you need to be careful about exaggerations: overstating what a case means or what a lawyer said, overemphasizing a warning or a guideline for dramatic effect, that sort of thing. If you get called out by a commenter or another blogger for exaggeration, it will make readers doubt the veracity of everything else you’ve said. The sexy headline or sound bite just . . . [more]

I’ve set up a new site to collect commentary on judicial opinions: commentary.slaw.ca

At the moment — and for the near future, certainly — it contains only commentary on Supreme Court of Canada cases, starting with 2011. (It goes only a small way into 2012 in order to give commentary time to appear and me time to collect it; generally it’ll run somewhere between four and six months behind the present date.) The commentary is that which is available free online, essentially from Canadian law blogs and law firm web publications. And by “commentary” I mean material that offers some . . . [more]