Today is my last day, for a while, in Yellowknife NWT. My firm has moved our northern location and I have been part of the coordinating team. It is a new experience for me, coordinating with movers, space planners, furniture vendors, landlords and contractors. Usually my contractor negotiations start with, “Hey honey, why don’t we…” With this project, everything was a phone call or email until Friday, when our Edmonton contingent arrived on site.

This project has provided some valuable lessons. First, it is much easier to buy all new furniture and just move people and paper (we didn’t do . . . [more]

Much has been written about apologies and how they can be effective in resolving conflict. However, two recent events spurred me to tackle this important topic once again and identify lessons that apply to conflict resolution.

First, I listened to a terrific of the CBC radio program “Under the Influence” with Terry O’Reilly. He is a master storyteller and devoted this episode of his terrific series to corporate apologies used by corporations strategically as part of a public relations plan to redeem themselves in the eyes of their public. He described four specific situations in which corporations (Johnson & Johnson, . . . [more]

On June 15, our friends at Eagan published a brilliant and in some ways strange book that should be in every law library, since it is (as my headline says) the most important book on statutes this millennium: Reading Law, The Interpretation of Legal Texts. Its strangeness is due to the identity of its authors – the fiercely intelligent and challenging Justice Antonin Scalia the senior justice of the US Supreme Court , and the leading legal lexicographer of our time, Bryan Garner of LawProse in Texas. . . . [more]

It’s darn near impossible to keep up with the changes Facebook makes to your privacy and configuration settings. The latest change is a big one: Facebook just removed everyone’s contact email address from their profiles and replaced it with an @facebook.com address. This was done without asking your permission.
Apparently Facebook’s internal email address – the one they use for notifications and password resets – was not changed, just the one listed on your profile in your Timeline.
Facebook has had its own email since 2010. Almost no one uses it. Presumably this is an attempt to get more people . . . [more]

Hell hath no fury like a scorned Internet, as Charles Carreon is finding out the hard way.

First, Carreon sued online comic the Oatmeal on behalf of his client FunnyJunk.com over a blog post published a year ago wherein the Oatmeal’s founder, Matt Inman, criticized FunnyJunk for hosting copies of his comic without proper attribution. Carreon and his client accused Inman of defamation and demanded $20,000 in damages.

Inman’s response was, predictably, to publicly mock Carreon and FunnyJunk in a blog post detailing the ludicrousness of Carreon’s accusations and. Furthermore, Inman responds to the demand of $20,000 in damages by . . . [more]

It’s with a heavy heart I report on the passing of Lonesome George. He was found dead by his keeper yesterday. George was the last known of the sub-species Pinta Island Tortoise from the Galápagos Islands, found on one of the Islands in 1971. He was estimated to have been over 100 years old. Attempts to mate him with similar sub-species had failed.

Lonesome George’s name and image were used to launch programs in the Galápagos Islands to protect its unique flora and fauna. The Galápagos are oceanic archipelagos, or groups of islands, with 13 large islands and more than . . . [more]

This is a short update to previous Slaw posts on Arizona’s 2010 controversial new anti-immigration measures. After examining whether the law unconstitutionally invaded the federal government’s exclusive prerogative to set immigration policy, on Monday June 25, 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down key provisions of Arizona’s immigration law as follows:

• Requiring people to carry their identification papers at all times in public places
• Making a crime of failure to apply for valid immigration papers
• Allowing police officers to arrest anyone they believe has committed a crime that would make them removable from the country
• Making it a crime for

Last week I was asked why my library wasn’t physically smaller.

“Isn’t everything online?” No. “Did we really need all these old books?” Yes. “Wouldn’t it be more convenient for lawyers to be able to access library materials regardless of their physical location?” Definitely.

Although we are moving towards the reality of a digital library, we have not arrived there yet.

What is available?
The most considerable barrier to the fully digital library is that many legal resources do not exist online. Legal publishers have digitized and made available online many Canadian primary legal resources such as case law and . . . [more]

The United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois – Eastern Division released a decision on Friday in Apple, Inc. et al v. Motorola, Inc. et al, dismissing the case with prejudice, effectively ending what has been a highly charged and contested conflict.

The two cases were consolidated for judicial economy, with each party claiming damages. Apple’s claims focuses on patents 6,493,002, 6,343,263, 7,479,949, and 5,946,647, and Motorola’s claim centers around US patent 6,359,898. The dispute began in 2011, with Apple initially claiming 16 patent violations, and Motorola claiming 6. From the . . . [more]

The most recent annual report of the Law Commission of England is now available.

The report includes highlights of the past year’s work. In particular, the Commission saw two pieces of legislation that derive from its work reach the statute book: the Estates of Deceased Persons (Forfeiture Rule and Law of Succession) Act 2011 and the Consumer Insurance (Disclosure and Representations) Act 2012.

A number of other reports are awaiting implementation in the areas of trust, marriage breakdown, conspiracy, business partnerships, renting homes, etc.

Part 4 of the report is entitled “Measuring Success” and provides interesting stats about the . . . [more]

It’s barely conceivable, but some Slaw readers may not resort to Google today, what with the fact that it’s a Saturday, summer and all. That’d be a shame, because today the Google Doodle is honouring that tragic hero of the modern age, Alan Turing. And Google’s done it right: the doodle is an animated take on the Enigma Machine, challenging you to solve the puzzle and spell out in binary the Google name letter by letter. It ain’t easy: the ground keeps shifting underneath your trials.

In case you’re of a mind to cut to the chase, it being . . . [more]

Friday, aka: The day of Firge or Venus; while Fridays are nice and all, I often find it harder to get out of bed on Friday than I do on Monday. While that is a personal observation I’ve another observation about Friday that I’ve found is shared with others; that is, weird things happen on Friday. Working in a an academic law library that is open to the public I’ve found that it is often on Friday, and more specifically, Friday afternoon that the individual who wants to challenge the constitutional validity of income tax arrives at the library looking . . . [more]