While Canada has not exactly had its bottleshock moment, over the last few decades various regions of Canada, including British Columbia, Nova Scotia and Ontario have become notable for their wine producing regions. These producers have developed to such an extent that demand for their products has grown to a point where requests for their wines come from all quarters (undeniably is a good thing) except for when the wine producers have to decline certain requests, which happens on a regular basis because of the Importation of Intoxicating Liqours Act, RSC 1985 c I-3. Specifically section 3(1) of . . . [more]

Hey, you greyheads, remember back in the day? You wrote letters. Or, if you were lazy, you read letters that others wrote to you. Now, for those of you who still have a spring in your step after you go walking, let me elaborate: the national service that now brings flyers and the occasional bill to your door would once upon a time bring you news from friends and relations, a kind of Facebook on feet, if you will. Often these epistolary efforts were longer than emails, done in a personal cursive, and, as a bonus they never needed to . . . [more]

The British Columbia Supreme Court has recently given judgment for Century 21 Real Estate company against a company (affiliated with Rogers Communications) that scraped real estate listing information from the Century 21 sites and repackaged it on its own site: Century 21 v Rogers Communications 2011 BC 1196 .

The court thoroughly reviewed US and Canadian law on the topic and recited a number of factors that might support a finding that a ‘browsewrap’ contract (i.e. one that did not depend on any active assent to its terms, but that operated by mere use of the web site) would be . . . [more]

Librarians often use the rule that 20% of a library’s collection accounts for 80% of its use. However a recent OCLC study found that 80% of the circulation in a university library was driven by just 6% of the collection. Given that law libraries, whether academic, courthouse or private law firm, are constantly under space pressures, does this mean that we should be discarding the other 80-94% of the collection and using the space for something else? (Spoiler: my answer is “no”.)

Usage is not necessarily a good measure of the value of an item. There are items in my . . . [more]

This is a post in a series to appear occasionally, 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.

The library of the Supreme Court of Canada recently updated its online bibliography about the court. New material from the period 2008-2011 has been added.

The bibliography contains articles, textbooks, earlier bibliographies, rules of practice and statistics about the Court.

Speeches by Justices of the Supreme Court of Canada as well as scholarly articles about the court’s rulings are not included.

[Cross-posted to Library Boy] . . . [more]

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

1. Comment Watch:

In the last week there were 36 comments. You might be particularly interested in these:

• 8 informative comments on Connie Crosby’s post on the Person’s Day case, going deeper and deeper into the legal history of that case.
• 5 very thoughtful comments on John O’Sullivan’s post on Quantum Physics and Mediation

You can subscribe to the comments on Slaw either as a separate matter (RSS, email) or as part of a subscription combining posts and comments (RSS, email).

2.

It’s an obvious feature of practice that a lawyer’s professional interest will generally gravitate towards the big, the powerful, and the rich — there’s a business side to lawyering, after all, (though I’m not yet prepared to agree with those who say, reductively, that practice is a business), and, as a long-gone uncle used to opine, “It’s gotta be fed and it don’t eat hay.” That said, it’s good, I think, even for those in big towers and Jimmy Choo shoes, to reflect on small wrongs and rightings from time to time, the matters at the bottom of the justice . . . [more]

When you next visit the website, you’ll see a few changes on Slaw. We’ve spruced up the site a little, mostly around the top banner, and we’ve made the recent new features on Slaw a bit more prominent by giving them menu icons at the very top. TalkLaw/ParLoi, MLB-Slaw Case Summaries, and SlawTips have already been introduced here — indeed, SlawTips is already venerable by web standards and has a healthy following of its own. But Noted on Slaw is brand new.

When Delicious got sold, it broke the right-column feature called Slaw Linkblog, where a number of . . . [more]

There are three ways to approach a skillset such as project management:

1. Have a specific rule to apply for every imaginable situation.
2. Analyze every situation anew, based on what you know.
3. Have a set of core principles that you apply as you recognize situations.

Let me offer an analogy. Let’s say I want to program a computer to play tic-tac-toe. I could do so using each of the three approaches above.

1, By rule: Tic-tac-toe is a simple game. There are only nine possible moves to start the game. For each opening move, there are but 8 possible responses, and . . . [more]

Ten months ago, the two Simons sat at the back of the Supreme Court of Canada and watched the argument in Crookes v. Newton, one of a number of Internet defamation cases coming from British Columbia. The decision was handed down this morning as 2011 SCC 47, (October 19, 2011). Among the intervenors were Canadian Civil Liberties Association, Samuelson-Glushko, Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, NetCoalition, British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, Canadian Newspaper Association, Ad IDEM/Canadian Media Lawyers Association, Magazines Canada, Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, Writers’ Union of Canada, Professional Writers Association of Canada, PEN Canada and Canadian . . . [more]

Bill C-11, An Act to Amend the Copyright Act, received second reading in the House of Commons on 18 October 2011. Discussions focussed on balance, openness to listening to interest groups, and specific provisions and scenarios covered and not covered by the bill. If you want a quick catch-up on copyright reform in Canada, take a look at Hansard. . . . [more]