The search is on for a new judicial appointment to the Supreme Court of Canada. For the first time ever, suggestions are being taken from the public.

See Supreme Court of Canada August 30, 2005 press release . Notices are being run in this week’s national and regional newspapers. Suggestions from the public are due September 20, 2005 and will be combined with names that arise from more traditional selection methods.

Reforms to the Supreme Court judicial selection process were announced this past spring – see April 7, 2005 press release and Proposal to Reform the Supreme Court of . . . [more]

Yikes, outed by Connie as a guest blogger!

Now that my cover’s blown, I’m going to cross-post something that I’ve just put on Out Of The Jungle, because it relates to Slaw and, unsurprisingly, to the kind of things we talk about here.

Situational Tags

I was going to post only once a day, but I’m afraid I had an idea. Sorry about that. It likely won’t happen again.

I’m putting together a bunch of digital documents, a dossier, if you like, on the Charkaoui case. (Charkaoui is one of five people, all citzens of Arab countries, who have

Our very own Slaw founder Simon Fodden is waxing philosophic as this week’s special guest blogger at Out of the Jungle. His first post went up today–do take a look! . . . [more]

Thanks to Bill Pierce’s blog for pointing out that the motherlode of Cyberlaw research has now been opened up to the great unwashed (like you and I).

The Franklin Pierce Law Center IP Mall now offers the full text of intellectual property, cyberlaw, and electronic commerce publications of the Congressional Research Service (CRS), the 741-person, $68 million-per-year “think tank” that works exclusively for Members and committees of the United States Congress. CRS is a department of the Library of Congress works exclusively as a nonpartisan analytical, research, and reference arm for Congress. Its reports have previously been unobtainable.

The reports . . . [more]

Interesting to read the account of some legal support services being outsourced to India, including legal research.
http://www.legalaffairs.org/printerfriendly.msp?id=808

The account of drafting a factum with North American trained LLMs doing a draft for review by the North American lawyers is fascinating, and a bit scary.

With the electronic sources being as available in Bangalore as here, it may make no difference where the researcher is, and then it’s down to the insight, skill, knowledge and experience of the researcher. . . . [more]

Simon Chester has pointed me to the Université de Sherbrooke Bibliothèque de droit table of contents service for Canadian journals — a local version of the much more ambitious service at the University of Texas’s Tarlton Law Library.

Unfortunately there are no RSS feeds associated with the service. I’ve pointed this site out to John Doyle at Washington & Lee,See the prior post on Slaw’s new Resources page in the hope that he can scrape a feed for the five or six Canadian journals that don’t currently have one in his service. Simon Chester suggests that the service at . . . [more]

I’ve added a Resources page to Slaw: https://www.slaw.ca/resources, because it seems sensible to me to provide research tools that might not be otherwise available. I don’t expect it to be simply a list of links.

At the moment it contains a pair of pages about Canadian law journals, providing:

• a linked list of all the ones I know about,
• an [a?] RSS feed for each providing updates to their tables of contents,
• a similar feed for all Canadian law journals reporting updates to their tables of contents within the last 30 days,
• and a display of the same thing,

The American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) has recently posted materials from its 2005 San Antonio conference held in July. PDF files of individual programme materials are available from this page. Unfortunately one has to look at each individual page for each programme to see whether materials are available. If you are impatient, it might be easier to download all 14.8 MB of materials directly by clicking here.

Whither conference materials? As with recent lawyer seminars, the materials produced from this conference are scant, primarily including PowerPoint presentations, session outlines, and bibliographies (this being a library conference after . . . [more]

Just now, and maybe only for this moment, Googling “slaw” produced our weblog as the very first hit for that word among “about 769,000” other pages. I’ve captured the moment for posterity in a screenshot. . . . [more]

Law Professor Thomas Smith (University of San Diego School of Law) has finished a law review citation study covering 385,000 law review articles, notes, comments, etc that appear in 726 law reviews and journals. The results are probably not too surprising to many of you. 43% of the articles have never never been cited. 0.898% of articles get more than 100 citations. He has also performed a similar study on 4 million US federal and state cases. Smith finds that “the distributions of cites to law review articles and to cases look the same.”

What is really interesting is how . . . [more]

As I pack up my office at Queens, shred all the evidence, and prepare to move to Osgoode Hall, I pose a question for SLAW readers. By the year 2010, does anyone think any law library will still be subscribing to print law reporters? Myself, I think not – a view I know (and hope) will provoke a few.

I think the writing is clearly on the wall. Few law libraries in Canada now subscribe to foreign print reporters – relying on a combination of free and pay online services. Canadian reporters are the last bastion. In my view it . . . [more]