Recent activity in the legal informatics world has been characterized by numerous efforts to make legal documents and technologies more openly available, and to make legal information more interoperable. Here are some examples:

• Núria Casellas, Joan-Josep Vallbé, and Tom Bruce of the Legal Information Institute discussed their recent work applying Linked Data technology to the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), in entitled , presented at the Open Government Knowledge 2011 conference. The paper described their experiments with marking up the text of the CFR as RDF Linked Data, marking up the CFR Thesaurus of Indexing

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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.

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The Statistics Canada publication Juristat has published an article about Canadians’ perceptions of personal safety and crime, 2009.

Among the highlights:

• In 2009, the vast majority (93%) of Canadians aged 15 years and older living in the provinces said they felt satisfied with their personal safety from crime. This proportion was similar to 2004, the last time this survey was conducted
• Despite higher rates of victimization, younger Canadians were more satisfied with their personal safety from crime than older Canadians. In 2009, 94% of Canadians aged 15 to 24 years said they felt very or somewhat satisfied, compared with

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The Clawbies website design is now updated, and the season opening post is up. Yes, it’s time for the (6th!) Canadian Law Blog Awards!

Whether you’re a blogger or blog reader, the month of December has become the time to shine a light on your favourite Canadian law blogs and bloggers. And if you’re new to the Clawbies tradition, please make careful note of ‘the humble Canadian rule’ — don’t toot your own horn! Your blog gets automatically nominated when you nominate and link to other bloggers! Yes, it’s a wink-wink, nudge-nudge concept, but take a look around at . . . [more]

The Ontario provincial government’s decision to terminate all of the permanent Masters’ Registrar positions, and to have other people do their jobs (with per diem registrars in Court and other government employees performing the other job functions of the Registrars) has been noted and commented upon by Sam Marr, TLA President. He has written to Lynne Wagner, Assistant Deputy Attorney General and Lynn Norris, Director, Court Operations (Acting) after learning of these developments.

Below is an excerpt from Mr. Marr’s letter:

Masters play a vital role in the administration of justice in this city. They have unparalleled and unsurpassed expertise

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The “Great Encyclopedias” of Legal Research – Part III

This is the third of a series of posts that were prepared following a request by Professor Daniel Poulin to explain the nature and purpose of “Halsburys” and the “C.E.D.” to his seminar on legal information at the University of Montreal. The views expressed are the personal opinion of the writer.

ON THE SHOULDERS OF OTHERS

The Fourth Western and Ontario Editions of the Canadian Encyclopedic Digest are the newest publications to follow the Halsburys Model in Canada. While essentially simple revisions of Titles published in previous editions, the Fourth Editions . . . [more]

This is another follow up to a previous Slaw post regarding IQT’s closure. In partnership with the Ontario Ministry of Labour (MOL), the Commission des normes du travail (CNT) and Revenu Québec (MRQ) filed a petition at the courthouse in Trois-Rivières to have IQT Ltée declared bankrupt under the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act. This measure is designed to enable 163 former employees of the call centre in Trois-Rivières, and 400 former employees of the call centre in Oshawa, to avail themselves of the federal Wage Earner Protection Program (WEPP). The petition will be heard on December 20, 2011. . . . [more]

This is a follow-up to my previous Slaw post on the obligation to register for direct deposit to receive the Solidarity Tax Credit. On November 30, 2011, the Quebec government indicated that it is refusing to end the obligation to register for direct deposit to receive the credit.

After six-and-a-half years of daily publication, it’s become time for Slaw to accept sponsorship. As our body of past posts gets ever larger—a shade under 8,000 at the moment—and as the site becomes ever more developed, expenses rise. And because continual development is the watchword on the web, keeping Slaw relevant and responsive will mean financial costs as we work to stay abreast of the changes in technology.

So shortly after this post goes up, you’ll see the banners from those businesses who have agreed to help us keep Slaw going—and improving. Click on them to explore the products they . . . [more]

What can you do with a 9 volt battery? Not much, it seems.

Whenever we switch between daylight savings and standard time, we get reminders to change the batteries in our smoke and carbon monoxide detectors. My carbon monoxide detectors take AA batteries, but the smoke detectors take the square edged 9V batteries.

It’s a pain disposing of batteries because they are household hazardous waste and need to be taken to a household hazardous waste depot. So I have a big container of batteries just waiting for me to take them to a depot. (I will get around to . . . [more]

To call a smart-phone a phone is really a misnomer. We need to think of them as computers with internet connections that we carry around in our pockets. 

Why is this an important distinction? From a legal perspective, that changes the perspective tremendously. Consider Connie Crosby’s Slaw post “Digital Wallets on Their Way” , and the comment on the post musing about privacy and the warrant-less search of cellphones that is being debated in various jurisdictions.

The privacy aspects of a phone that just makes phone calls without retaining any information, and the consideration of whether law enforcement . . . [more]

This post has its origins in a particular incident that compelled me to share some further thoughts with the firm’s managing partner.

Dear Managing Partner:

In our strategic planning committee discussions of earlier this week, we heard from one senior partner about the importance of capitalizing on an opportunity to open a new office in another State. He informed us about this lawyer he knew who could bring us a $2 million book of business. I asked how that would augment or support the firm’s core area of industry strength. We learned that it had nothing to do with the . . . [more]