♫ We-eee-eeel….
You know you make me wanna (Shout!)
Kick my heels up and (Shout!)
Throw my hands up and (Shout!)
Throw my head back and (Shout!)
Come on now (Shout!)
Don’t forget to say you will.. ♫

Lyrics and music by: O’Kelly Isley, Ronald Isley, Rudolph Isley, recorded by The Isley Brothers.

The Pacific Legal Technology Conference is scheduled for Friday Oct. 2, 2009 at the Vancouver Trade & Convention Centre. This conference is unique in that attendees – past and present – have the opportunity to select the sessions they most wish to see presented at the . . . [more]

It is Day 1 of the Edmonton Law Libraries Association Head Start Program and I am writing this post as I assist with timekeeping and travel for the students hands on legislative research sessions in the Alberta Law Society Library in Edmonton.

Every year we bring the attendee articling students into the library and work through hands on research sessions with them using print resources. This year, like those in the past, we “old” librarian types tell war stories about how crappy it was to update regulations before the Internet existed, and especially before the new electronic official copies that . . . [more]

Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario, switched from an internal email system to Google Mail. The Faculty Association objected on the grounds that this breached terms in the collective agreement giving faculty the right to privacy in their personal and professional communications. ((Article 16.01.03 of the Collective Agreement provides: The Board agrees that members have the right to privacy in their personal and professional communications and files, whether on paper or in electronic form. )) The argument was that because Google and the relevant servers are based in the United States, authorities from that country would have legitimate and other . . . [more]

Hat tip to the Law Librarian Blog for the note that all the sessions at the CALI Conference for Law School Computing, June 18 to 20, will be webcast live. The webcasts will use the open source web meeting software Dimdim and each session will have a live video feed and chat room.

The conference program looks great, and the webcasts are free. . . . [more]

In California, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is calling for an end to print textbooks in schools. Thanks to Josette McEachern for posting about this Quill & Quire article on the Edmonton Law Libraries Association blog. There are various spins to this attempt at budget efficiency activism.

A couple of items from the various articles caught my eye:

On average, California schools have just one computer for every four children — a situation that prompted Education Week to give the state a D-minus this year for its use of education technology compared with other states.

From Associated Press

‘A world of

Perhaps it’s Jordan Furlong’s articulate insistence, or maybe it’s my own distance from active academe, but I’ve been increasingly “of the devil’s party” when it comes to the need for the reform of legal education. I’m not yet prepared to say that all the action is with the “profane” and none of it in the “sacred,” but the practical is a vital source of learning that is still held at too great an arm’s length at law school. It’s not a matter, of course, of the simple opposition of theory and practice, nor even a productive dialectic . . . [more]

The 2009 Hugh Lawford Award for Excellence in Legal Publishing awarded to Slaw.ca is well deserved recognition of the innovative and substantive contribution that Slaw is making to Canadian legal literature. Wendy Reynold’s comment that “A Blog winning a legal publishing award shows that this model is mainstream now” is very telling.

Online legal research was pioneered by Hugh Lawford who not only launched one of the first online legal research services anywhere, but also built a commercial enterprise from a university research project that dominated the Canadian online market for two decades. Through his genius, drive and determination, Hugh . . . [more]

Peg Duncan on Twitter points to an article on Law.com by an English academic, Adam Wyner, “Legal Ontologies Spin a Semantic Web.” (By the way, if you’re not following Peg on Twitter, you should be.) I was curious because of my interest in legal research and because of the the flirtation with the semantic web that Google Squared and Wolfram/Alpha seem to represent.

Obviously — to me, at least — if computers are going to be able to respond in a sophisticated, i.e. more helpful, way to our queries about law, there needs to be an agreed-upon set . . . [more]

The University of Toronto’s David Asper Centre for Constitutional Rights has a new website. Within U of T’s Faculty of Law, the Centre is “devoted to advocacy, research and education in the areas of constitutional rights in Canada.”

At the moment the resources available via the site seem to be those culled from the normal operation of the Faculty of Law, i.e. relevant journal articles and books. There’s an interesting section on “Cross-Canada Appellate Cases,” which lists some recent cases from across the country and offers brief summaries of the issues involved. I’d recommend that they have an . . . [more]

Last September, Melanie Bueckert, Legal Research Counsel at the Manitoba Court of Appeal, (and occasional Slaw contributor), saw a reference to the Head-Start Program offered by the Edmonton Law Libraries Association (ELLA). As a law librarian in a small market, I was both aware and envious of the program and the association that presented it. While I fantasized about the possibility of offering a similar program here in Winnipeg, Melanie took a bolder step and asked if it were possible to put on a similar program here, by collaborating with law librarians. Since Melanie was also co-chair of . . . [more]

Take the opportunity to read Dennis Kennedy’s May piece in the ABA’s Law Practice Today, Legal Technology Trends for 2009, this year’s version of his annual predictions and advice. I’m stealing none of his thunder if I tell you that his eight trends are:

1. Technology budgets get decimated
2. Making do with what you have or doing more with less
3. The mobile phone as platform
4. Looking to the cloud
5. Using tech to get the word out and the money in
6. Focus on client-focused technology
7. E-Discovery in still waters
8. The perfect storm for collaboration

For one thing you’re going to want . . . [more]

Israeli entrepreneur Shai Reshef has launched the University of the People. Under the auspices of the U.N.’s Global Alliance for Information and Communication Technology and Development (GAID), the University of the People offers tuition-free education to anyone able to connect via the internet in two programs, Business Administration and Computer Science. At the moment the institution does not grant degrees, although it is seeking accreditation.

The somewhat tenuous connection to law — and thus to Slaw — lies in the fact that a number of the University’s advisors are lawyers: Jack M. Balkin is Knight Professor of Constitutional Law . . . [more]