Lexum, the company that puts the opinions of the Supreme Court of Canada online, has updated the judgments page. The new page shows off Lexum's product Decisia, software to assist courts and tribunals to put their decisions online.

The new page offers you a few recent decisions and a few news releases, with the option in each case of browsing through the entire database. Judgments can be browsed by date, case name or subject. Sophisticated searching is also possible, of course.

The only suggestion I'd make (after a very few minutes of using the Decisia layout) is that . . . [more]

A must see for law librarians came across my Twitter stream yesterday. ILTA and AALL have partnered to produce a white paper called The New Librarian. The content is great with articles by some folks well known in the legal information community. One of the really cool things is that the paper was created with Uberflip.

Check it out. . . . [more]

The Cable Public Affairs Channel (CPAC) has made a significant archive of videos available online. A consortium of for-profit cable companies, CPAC provides free, not-for-profit video coverage of the daily grind of federal political and legal life in Canada, filming Parliamentary debates, commission hearings, and Supreme Court hearings.

At the moment it's not possible to know the exact scope of the archive — at least, I couldn't find much in the way of precise explanatory material about dates and coverage. The viewer can choose to enter the archive via one of a number of tabs: Latest, House, Senate, By Show, . . . [more]

According to Michael Geist today on his blog, the Ontario Public School Board Association is advising school boards in Ontario to prepare to stop using Access Copyright for copyright licensing next year. They are following a legal opinion obtained by the Counsel of Ministers of Education, Copyright, that advises any material copied in Canadian K-12 schools either already has the correct permissions or would fall under fair dealing.

This follows from five Supreme Court of Canada decisions on copyright that came down this summer which gave guidance on determining fair dealing (see Martin Kratz' coverage in his Ensuring the Balance . . . [more]

The 2012 Law Via the Internet conference took place Oct 7-9, 2012 at the Cornell University Law School in Ithaca, New York.

The conference brings together people from the Legal Information Institutes (LIIs) from different countries and continents that together form the Free Access to Law Movement.

Many of the presentations are already online.

Three Australian scholars who took part in the conference, Andrew Mowbray, Philip Chung, and Graham Greenleaf, published an interesting overview of the Free Access to Law concept. Their paper, The Meaning of 'Free Access to Legal Information': A Twenty Year Evolution, is available on . . . [more]

The U.S.-based blog Free Government Information was launched a few years ago by a group of academic librarians who wanted to raise public awareness of the importance of better access to all forms of government information.

They occasionally have guest bloggers and this month's guest will be a real treat for history buffs, archive geeks, hard core freedom of information fans and investigative reporter types: Malcolm Byrne from the National Security Archive, a non-governmental organization based at George Washington University that specializes in declassified documents.

His first post is about the Archive's work on the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis: . . . [more]

If a brilliant legal treatise is composed by an academic but nobody reads it, does it really matter?

A study last year by Mark Bauerlein looked at books and essays in English literature at several public American universities, and found the vast majority attracted very little attention from other academics. Other research suggests that up to half of university library holdings are never used. There's no reason to believe that these patterns in library use are any different in the legal field.

Of course despite my initial premise I do believe in the inherent worth of even obscure legal research that may . . . [more]

Current Cites recently ran a description of a spirited rejection of the current (broken, expensive) eBook offerings from publishers, from Sarah Houghton, Director of California's San Rafael Public Library:

As the technically-savvy library director for the San Rafael Public Library (CA), the author can be considered on the front lines of the disaster known as e-books in libraries. And this post makes it clear that she's fed up and won't take it any more. Using a brilliant metaphor of breaking up with a "bad boyfriend", Houghton skewers the e-book publishing industry.

(some NSFW language in the wall of text, but . . . [more]

CanLII has added 1,600 Supreme Court of Canada cases, bringing the total of SCC opinions to 9,000 and taking the scope of the SCC database back to 1907. As the press release (soon to be available on the CanLII blog) says:

As with all Canadian court and tribunal decisions available on CanLII (over 1M and growing at a rate of over 2,000 per week), these decisions are fully integrated and cross-linked to any subsequent case on CanLII in which they are referenced.

This is not yet true with respect to earlier Supreme Court decisions on CanLII, which are . . . [more]

It's the average number of references per year, in reported cases, to my text Apportionment of Fault in Tort, in the 32 years years since it was published: 61 in total based on Carswell and CanLII. (I didn't check on QL to see if there are some others.) On the other hand, there were only 6 in the first decade, but there's been 30 in the past 10 years so I must be on a roll. Of course, most of them are in cases quoting other cases, but a reference is a reference, is a reference.

The thing has . . . [more]

Back in July I promised to post about the results of my Summer Writing List project. I determined that there has long been a need, based on reference questions, for an annotation to the Alberta Insurance Act. Proving that all things happen when they are meant to, a recent major revamp of Part 5 of our act dealing with Insurance Contracts was finally proclaimed in force as of July 2, 2012. I say finally because these amendments were published as S.A. 2008, c.19. This post is the story of the process of creating an Annotated Alberta Insurance Act.

First, I . . . [more]

I've set up a new site to collect commentary on judicial opinions: commentary.slaw.ca

At the moment — and for the near future, certainly — it contains only commentary on Supreme Court of Canada cases, starting with 2011. (It goes only a small way into 2012 in order to give commentary time to appear and me time to collect it; generally it'll run somewhere between four and six months behind the present date.) The commentary is that which is available free online, essentially from Canadian law blogs and law firm web publications. And by "commentary" I mean material that offers some . . . [more]