The CBC is reporting that Justice Lederer today declared the 2011 federal election results in the riding of Etobicoke Centre to be null and void. The Conservatives won that seat by 26 votes, but, at the instance of Liberal candidate Borys Wrzesnewskyj that result will not stand. A variety of voting irregularities were noted by the court.

The judgment is available on the CBC website, included along with the report (a development I’ve long wanted; congratulations CBC).

The CBC notes that if the judgment is appealed, the matter goes straight to the Supreme Court. . . . [more]

Because two new Supreme Court judges were recently appointed, the Court has released an updated brochure [PDF] containing information about, and photographs of, the building and the judges. Little if any of what’s in here will be news to most lawyers, but you might find it useful to pass on to anyone you’d like to educate about the top court, its jurisdiction and its history.

Some of the historical photographs are interesting, but all of the images could be improved: the PDF renditions are not sharp, and they lack captions. I particularly like the skeletal view of the building as . . . [more]

New, in reference to time, could be one day, one week, or a couple of years. In law librarian terms, I still feel new to my job because it is contantly changing. If like me, you are a librarian who didn’t go to law school, the Canadian Association of Law Libraries can help you cope with the burden of ‘new’.

We have written before about CALL/ACBD’s New Law Librarians’ Institute. The institute is an intensive, week-long program aimed at developing librarians’ skills in the key competencies of law librarianship. The program is an excellent mix of substantive legal topices . . . [more]

I’m not a big gamer. I had a blast with Angry Birds for a bit and then lost the lust for launching the anti-pig petards. So when I’m trying to kill time in the absence of wifi, I’ll turn to good old solitaire — Klondike by threes, if it’s of any interest. I’ve noticed something odd about the game, whether on my desktop, smart phone or tablet. At least, I think I have. The cards the computer serves up don’t seem to be random. I’ll have a four face up at the bottom of one of the columns and . . . [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.

. . . [more]

The scholarly journal is a form of publishing valued for being tradition-bound rather than path-breaking. The Philosophical Transactions of the 1665, which saw the very launch of this genre in England, is not all that far removed from the Philosophical Transactions A and B today (volumes 370 and 367 respectively). Certainly, in the early years, editor Oldenburg may have handled peer review with less formality, the references in an article may have amounted to referring to a letter from a friend, and the cover may have immodestly referred to its content as that of the ingenious. Yet for all of . . . [more]

Since it’s not sponsored by the regular legal conference outfits, a conference in Toronto next month may have flown under the radar for the Slaw community. The first Symposium on Criminality in the Art and Cultural Property World will be held at Osgoode Hall, 130 Queen Street West, Toronto, on June 15-16, 2012. Next month, Toronto will be the centre of the art-legal world.

The conference is co-chaired by Bonnie Czegledi and Mr. Justice Patrick Healy, Court of Quebec, Criminal and Penal Division, Montréal, formerly Professor Healy from McGill, and the speakers are quite literally, the world’s experts: Lawrence . . . [more]

For those using Google’s Custom Search Engine service, a recent post from Google announcing new features will be of interest. By utilizing these instructions, and making a small change to your on-page web code, you can now enable both date and relevancy sorting for your collections.

If you’re using any kind of structured data or rich markup — extra classification on “site search” functionality, for example — you can also engage filtering by attribute to restrict the search results even further.

It’s great to see that Google hasn’t been forgotten their CSE web service. It’s easy to use and . . . [more]

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the need for firms to take a stronger look at risk management – in other words, to see risk management as much more than simply compliance with law society and other regulations. I suspect that many firms do not have a formal risk management role within the firm because they don’t believe there is much risk beyond compliance issues or that the role is not robust enough to warrant a special position within the firm.

Both of these viewpoints are incorrect, so let me bulk-up the risk manager’s role to include innovation to . . . [more]

The International Labour Organization (ILO), the agency of the United Nations that deals with labour issues, is seeking ratification of its eight conventions covering fundamental labour standards by 2015. The ILO Core Conventions are as follows:

Law books tend to lack pictures. As do legal memos, factums . . . and judgments. Though a picture is said to sub for a thousand words, it’s not traditional for legal workers to speed things along that way. And neither is it easy, or possible, perhaps, to come up with images that capture the sort of conceptual thinking that law involves. Yet every now and then the image tells the tale, or, at least, an important part of the story, finding its way into judgments.

Some time ago we featured one such judgment, that by U.S. Justice Posner, . . . [more]

One thing that became obvious at ABA TECHSHOW in Chicago this year was that lawyers are embracing tablet devices like the iPad in great numbers. Some people claimed that iPads even outnumbered laptops at the event. I’m not sure if that claim would have stood up to a head count but it was certainly plausible. The little tablets were everywhere.

So, fine, if you’re thinking about bringing a tablet device into your practice I have some advice for you.

Connectivity

There’s no getting around it – most tablet devices are barely useful without some kind of Internet connectivity. You can’t . . . [more]