For those of you who are interested in copyright and intellectual property (and I know that there are a lot of you), you will doubtless be familiar with the recent battles surrounding the shifting landscape of Canadian copyright law between Access Copyright and pretty much everybody else. For those of you unfamiliar with the drama […]
All posts by Craig Butosi
Exam Stress - Going to the dogs?
It's that time of year - the end-of-term paper-writing and exam crunch. And for many of you who are graduating this spring, you'll barely have time to catch your breath before launching headlong into your bar ads. In a nutshell, it's a crazy, busy, stressful whirlwind of all-nighters, bleary eyes, summary writing, coffee consumption, and […]
Sticks and stones?
Everybody knows the old schoolyard chant of "sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me". However, lately there seems to have been a spate of high-profile cases of (alleged) defamation and libel, with varying degrees of success. While the idea of defending one's honour typically conjures up visions of duels […]
Halsbury's Laws of Canada Now Complete
LexisNexis Canada recently celebrated the completion of the first edition of Halsbury’s Laws of Canada with the publication of the 77th and final volume this past February. Halsbury's Canada began publication in 2006 with the volume on Conflict of Laws by Osgoode's own Janet Walker. Now complete,Halsbury's covers 117 legal subjects from all 14 Canadian […]
New on HeinOnline - State Statutes: A Historical Archive
Hein has just announced the release of State Statutes: A Historical Archive in HeinOnline. This new collection includes more than 1,600 volumes and nearly 2,000,000 pages of historical, superseded state statutes and offers a valuable source of information for legal researchers and scholars to understand the thinking and conditions behind the creation of the historical […]
Legal writing... with style?
Today there is an interesting article on Slaw about the need for a greater degree of style in legal writing. Not in the stylistic sense of flair (although that would certainly be nice - there is a reason we still love to read Lord Denning), but rather in the formalistic sense, where the writing is […]
Go on a BibliOdyssey...
While having breakfast this morning, my eye fell upon a book that I had purchased a few years ago and has since been residing in the dusty chambers of my memory. It is titled BibliOdyssey: Archival Images from the Internet, and it is an interesting, contradictory item - it is a book of images from […]
Read me like a hurricane
Having had a recent question regarding the use of RSS feeds to keep abreast of legal news (particularly new cases in CanLII), it occurred to me that this would be a great idea for practical blog post (cue the proverbial "eureka!" lightbulb above my head). RSS (or "Rich Site Summary"), is essentially a summary of […]
Courtroom Movies in a nutshell
It's safe to say that we've all seen many, many movies and television shows that represent the well-worn tropes of the courtroom drama (or comedy) - dramatic tension, the quest for the truth, the judge furiously banging his or her gavel, celebrations over the delivery of justice, and so on. They've become so ingrained into […]
Canon law
It's been an odd few weeks in the realm of ancient traditions, what with the discovery of Richard III and now the first papal resignation in six hundred years (and the first voluntary one since the thirteenth century, when Celestine V stepped down in 1294). As of 8pm (2pm EST) on Thursday, the Pope will […]