I recently posted about hyperlink being legally defined and that got me ta thinkin’, in terms of Internet innovations has the hyperlink been topped? In many respects one could assert that the hyperlink is the Internet as we know it today. Yes, I know that the ‘Net is an interconnected web of computers etc. etc. but in terms of modern usage of the ‘Net, absent the hyperlink most would not recognize the Internet, and we would all know far more command prompts.

In doing a bit of research it seems that the term “hyperlink” has been around since the . . . [more]

Well today is Friday, and if our friends at CanLII have predicted correctly, they will soon be delivering more than one million search results!

Congratulations to everyone involved in making CanLII happen. It’s quite a milestone! . . . [more]

There’s a new source of stimulating sound this month: Audiofile.es. “Great radio,” says part of its tagline, and they want you to be a programmer as well as a listener.

The idea is simple crowdsourcing: If you come across an interesting audio file while you’re browsing the web, tweet the link with the tag #audiofiles and Audiofil.es will automatically add it to their database. Not only can you feed your finds into the mix, but you can also easily create playlists for yourself when you’re on the Audiofil.es site.

What sort of things are already there? The topmost “producer . . . [more]

This is a post in a series that is by now regular, 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 Incorporated Council of Law Reporting is an interesting publisher, established in 1865 by the legal profession in Great Britain, to bring some order to the then somewhat chaotic world of law reporting. Before this time, English law reports, now known as Nominate Reports, were produced on an individual basis by barristers, with a series lasting from one or two volumes, to the working life of the author barrister. Series varied in standard, layout and structure.

The ICLR oversaw the introduction of an orderly reporting system with the creation of The Law Reports, as the series that would report judicial . . . [more]

In a report released this week, a Royal Society of Canada Expert Panel proposes that assisted suicide and voluntary euthanasia should be decriminalized for competent individuals who make a free and informed decision that their life is no longer worth living.

The panel concludes:

1. That there is a moral right, grounded in autonomy, for competent and informed individuals who have decided after careful consideration of the relevant facts, that their continuing life is not worth living, to non-interference with requests for assistance with suicide or voluntary euthanasia.
2. That none of the grounds for denying individuals the enjoyment of their moral

. . . [more]

Site news for those who read Slaw only via RSS or email

1. Comment Watch:

In the last week there were 56 comments. You might be particularly interested in these:

• the 15 comments on Yosie Saint-Cyr’s post “Should the Government Make Remembrance Day a Public (Statutory) Holiday?”, which surface concerns about militarization and whether the point is to have a holiday.
• the extended exchange between David Cheifetz and guest blogger Erik Magraken on his post, “Tort Reform For The Better: Adding Liquidity to Dry Judgements.”
• the debate following Gabriel Granatstein’s post, “Mandatory Union Awareness Training at Apple”

You can subscribe . . . [more]

On November 8, 2011, the High Court of England and Wales ruled that a Catholic priest qualified as an employee of his diocese, thus exposing the diocese to vicarious liability for clergy sex abuse.

On ReadWriteWeb there’s an interesting map of the metadata that accompanies every one of your 140 character messages on Twitter, which I’ve reproduced below. (The map is the work of Raffi Krikorian. Click on the image to enlarge it.) There’s nothing terribly shocking here, perhaps: much of this metadata can be learned from visiting the Twitter page of the person sending the message. Even so, it’s sensible for those of us who are privacy conscious to be reminded from time to time that what seems to us to be a very minimal exposure to the unblinking glare of the . . . [more]

It could be argued that from the time that students first enter law school they are being trained as de facto risk managers. Students are typically asked in their exams to “spot the issue” and spend hours learning the various legal pitfalls (ie: risks) that may face future clients. In practice lawyers continue to play the role of risk managers as they are called upon to manage and minimize the risks that clients face in their daily business operations. Despite this considerable grounding in working with risk and counseling clients on methods to minimize and avoid risk, seemingly very few . . . [more]

The Trial Lawyers Association of British Columbia is coordinating a withdrawal of legal aid duty counsel services in support of the campaign to restore Legal Aid funding in the Province of British Columbia.

We’ve talked a bit before on Slaw about Matthew Butterick’s great book, Typography for Lawyers, copies of which should be found wherever lawyers’ thoughts are committed to print (digital or otherwise). Now Butterick’s created Equity, a typeface specifically for lawyers. He says, in an article in Co. Design, that he designed Equity:

to be every bit as space-efficient as TNR [Times New Roman], but eminently more readable—and a tad sexy. “I wanted Equity to be like a navy-blue Armani suit: a classic updated with contemporary virtues.”

The typeface includes 24 fonts—a face is a design and a . . . [more]