The Canada Gazette is dead. Long live the Canada Gazette! Although long-expected as part of the 2012 Federal budget, the May 8th publication of a regulation made it official - the Canada Gazette will cease to be published in hard copy starting on April 1st, 2014, saving the government about $300,000 annually. This is not, however, […]
From Stephen Spong
Summer viewing, pt. 2 - The Wire
Last week I started off what I hope will be an ongoing summer series on legal or law-related series that might be worth your attention during the summer months when people typically have a bit more time to divert their attention to less pressing issues (such as learning - and retaining! - substantive law). Although […]
Summer viewing, Part 1 - Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law
Now that exams are done and the summer has started (never mind the hail last Sunday), it is an opportunity for a collective exhale and a chance to mentally re-calibrate before starting all over again in September (or before going off to bar ads and articling). Following in the footsteps of Sandra Geddes's blog post from a […]
New Resource: Foreign Law Guide
While the summer has started for the Osgoode community (no doubt assisted by the warm weather serving as an antidote to the long, long winter), for those of you who are working as RAs over the summer or doing other foreign legal research, we have a new resource that is well worth the time to […]
Stylistic Flair - A time and place?
In a post from a few weeks ago, I lamented the lack of flair in legal writing. Although it's certainly not a "need-to-have", it's certainly a "nice-to-have". Throughout legal education and practice, you will likely have to read many, many decisions, and most of them are - to not put too fine of a point […]
High Noon at York?
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]