I remember when I was a kid there were a couple of things (at least) that could take me to the dizzying edge of imagination, where I’d stall in frustration and wonder.

One was lying in bed at night doing the expanding address thing: Simon Fodden, Walton Drive, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, the world, the universe… and? What was on the other side of the universe, beyond it? Try as I might, I couldn’t imagine.

The other was found in the barbershop — you remember those, don’t you? the smell of bay rum, the combs in the jar of blue . . . [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.

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We talk about connecting to the Internet, a pipe through which travels all of the information flowing into or out of the law practice. It is not that simple, though, and that oversimplification can mean that you overlook possible holes that might make your client or law practice information vulnerable to access by others.

Any Port in a Storm

The reason the pipe analogy works is that, while in transit, your information really is flowing amid lots of other information. But the place that it ends up – or starts from – is determined in part by what the request . . . [more]

For those who read Slaw only via RSS or email: Interesting comments / SlawTips / Selected case summaries

Of the eight Canadian provinces and territories that have passed laws calling for fixed-date elections, five call for general elections to be held in October every four years. Those five jurisdictions will all hold general elections this October, as follows:

Michael S. Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg and inventor of the idea for the eBook way way way back in 1971 in the pre-WWW, pre-smart phone, pre-Kindle, pre-commercialization of everything on the Internet era, died earlier this week. He was 64. Librarians (and computer geeks) thought the world of him.

The Project Gutenberg website has published an obituary:

Hart was best known for his 1971 invention of electronic books, or eBooks. He founded Project Gutenberg, which is recognized as one of the earliest and longest-lasting online literary projects. He often told this story of how he had the idea

. . . [more]

Paul Venezia of InfoWorld asks why the fax machine refuses to die. In what is a bit of a rant rather than a reasoned analysis, Venezia advises:

Consider what a fax machine actually is: a little device with a sheet feeder, a terrible scanning element, and an ancient modem. Most faxes run at 14,400bps. That’s just over 1KB per second — and people are still using faxes to send 52 poorly scanned pages of some contract to one another. Over analog phone lines. Sometimes while paying long-distance charges! The mind boggles.

A few reasons come to mind as to . . . [more]

Canada – either the Government or the Parliament of the day – has issued public apologies for its treatment of various groups, primarily ethnic communities for the mistreatment they endured in the hands of previous Governments: Japanese Canadians during WWII; Italian and Ukrainian Canadians during WWI.

Certainly the most dramatic apology was the one offered to the Aboriginal peoples of Canada for the mistreatment of their children over many decades through the residential schools run by various churches under contract with the federal government. Some other time I would like to argue that Parliament needs also to apologize for the . . . [more]

Symantec, the makers of Norton antivirus and anti-spyware software, released a report today containing a plethora of statistics on cybercrime.

As with any report containing statistics and poll results, we should take some of it with a grain of salt, but the stats make interesting reading. The report is set out in infographic style, so its easy to skim through it. It points out the types of online behaviour that tends to be the riskiest.

The most common – and most preventable – type of cybercrime is computer viruses.

After that comes online scams and phishing.

What is surprising is . . . [more]

The European Court of Justice has issued a ruling in Case C‑442/09 Bablok et al v. Freistaat Bayern (Monsanto intervening) that might well cause difficulty for food producers and for Monsanto, the owner of patents to many genetically modified organisms used or sold in the food chain. The plaintiff, a beekeeper, sued the Bavarian state for compensation because pollen from a government owned test field of Monsanto’s GM corn (maize) found its way into his honey, polluting it.

The court agreed that the trace amounts of pollen from the Monsanto corn, even though the pollen was no longer alive or . . . [more]

Is the practice of law predominantly a business or a profession? The debate is an old one. When Governor General David Johnston spoke of the practice of law at the recent Canadian Legal Conference in Halifax, he described it as much more than a profit-driven business. He portrayed a noble profession with duties to the client, to justice and to the public interest. He saw a social contract as existing between lawyers and society:

“There are three principal elements to any profession’s social contract. First, the profession is characterized by specialized knowledge that is taught formally and obtained by experience . . . [more]

I would like to draw the attention of all Slawyers to an important conference being held at UWO next year. It is being organized by Jason Neyers and Stephen Pitel. From my past experience with conferences organized by UWO, I expect this one to provide very useful papers and discussion.

Sixth Biennial Conference on the Law of Obligations: Challenging Orthodoxy
Hosted by The Faculty of Law at the University of Western Ontario
London, Ontario, Canada
July 17-20, 2012

The Faculty of Law at the University of Western Ontario is pleased to be hosting the Sixth Biennial Conference on the Law . . . [more]