Ontario’s e-laws site has been reformatted to conform with the general provincial presentation standards – without changing the integrity of the content.

The new version of e-Laws has several improvements, including:

• Easier navigation between related documents (e.g. statutes and regulations, consolidated law and source law, current versions and previous versions)
• A cleaner look and feel
• Quick and easy search and browse functions for each law category, (e.g., current consolidated law, source law, repealed and revoked law, and law in force at particular times)
• Simplified “Help” information
• More accessible for more people, including those who

Anyone involved with clearing copyright permissions to allow for open access to digital resources on a personal website or in an institutional repository are probably familiar with the SHERPA/RoMEO database.

SHERPA/RoMEO began as a UK research project developed at the University of Loughborough and is now maintained by the Centre for Research Communications (CRC) at the University of Nottingham. It’s an excellent starting point to find summaries of “permissions that are normally given as part of each publisher’s copyright transfer agreement.” Policies can be searched for by journal titles or their ISSNs or by a publisher’s name. . . . [more]

Late last week fellow Slaw contributor John Gregory brought up some idiosyncrasies in his post about how web-sourced versions of laws stack up against more official looking books with laws printed in them. You know, the ones that only the law library has?

This brings up a pet peeve of mine—something that Ontario has solved, but which BC practitioners are technically still exposed to. The fact is that if you’re not producing photocopies of the official books with BC laws in them, you’re technically not doing your job for the court in BC. That’s ridiculous, right? Well, yeah. It is. . . . [more]

The Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL) is accepting nominations for the 2015 Hugh Lawford Award for Excellence in Legal Publishing.

It honours a publisher (whether for-profit or not-for profit, corporate or non-corporate) that has demonstrated excellence by publishing a work, series, website or e-product that makes a significant contribution to legal research and scholarship.

Members as well as non-members of CALL can make nominations.

Nominations can be submitted to Cyndi Murphy [cmurphy AT stewartmckelvey.com], past president of CALL, before February 15, 2015.

The award honours Hugh Lawford (1933-2009), Professor of Law at Queens’ University and the founder . . . [more]

In case we missed you on New Year’s Eve, the 9th annual Canadian Law Blog Awards (aka the ‘Clawbies’) were announced.

This year’s Fodden Award winner for the top overall Canadian blawg went to Double Aspect, the Canadian constitutional law blog of Leonid Sirota, a J.S.D. candidate at NYU School of Law. As usual, we chose winners and finalists for 3 practitioners, 3 practice blogs, 3 ‘new’ law blogs, and a series of topical and group awards.

You can visit Clawbies.ca to see the full list of this year’s winners & finalists.

Once again, there were many . . . [more]

“The Alberta Law Reform Institute (ALRI) will be moving to full electronic publication of its reports in 2015.” My perspective: like every other piece of born and solely digital legal information, law librarians will figure out how to make these important materials permanently available. Nothing to see here folks…unless institutional law libraries (government ministries, courts, academic law libraries) are not supported. Surely that wouldn’t be allowed to happen in a democratic country and among a group that values information and precedent as much as the legal industry.

I will stop being facetious and get to the [other] point about law . . . [more]

This December, Carswell migrated their eReference Library collection to the Thomson Reuters ProView platform. I was able to see this process purely from the content user perspective as the library team did all of the preparation, communication, and implementation for our side as the client partner in the vendor client relationship. Today, I had an opportunity to use one of the texts that my firm has access to through this new interface.

I like the clean and intuitive experience of using ProView content via a browser.

There are a couple of features that are interesting:

• the expanding chapter outline that

CAIJ, the Centre d’accès à l’information juridique (the network of courthouse law libraries associated with the Québec Bar Association), has signed resource sharing agreements with 6 major law firms in Québec that will make their legal commentary freely available on the CAIJ website.

The firms in question are:

• Cain Lamarre Casgrain Wells
• De Grandpré Chait
• Langlois Kronström Desjardins
• McMillan
• Osler
• Robic

Their guides, bulletins and commentary articles will be added to a collection that already includes full-text commentary and textbooks including the Développements récents (annual reviews of areas of law), the Collection de droit (Bar School materials), proceedings of the . . . [more]

We see a noteworthy update this week in the back-and-forth between public domain advocate Carl Malamud and representatives of The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation®.

As I understand it and as you might know, Mr Malamud has been working for some time to challenge both the appropriateness and the legality of the copyright protection claimed in The Bluebook. This week, on behalf of Mr Malamud and his foundation, Public.Resource.Org, Professor Christopher Sprigman of the Engelberg Center on Innovation and Policy wrote to counsel for the Harvard Law Review Association to outline its current position.

The letter is fascinating. . . . [more]

Congratulations to the folks at LawyerLocate.ca Inc., Natalie Waddell and Mark C. Robins, for launching their new Canadian law video distribution site LegalTube.ca.

The website is aimed at the public, giving easy video access on a wide range of law-related topics. The site is made up of video content from lawyers listed on LawyerLocate.ca, with videos originally housed on YouTube or Vimeo, pulling everything together by topic as well as by participant profiles (lawyers and law firms). I found the site very easy to navigate with major law topics across the top. There is also a category . . . [more]

This month’s Canadian Lawyer has its annual Top 25 Most Influential in the justice system and legal profession ranking, and I’m delighted to announce that three members of the Slaw community, Malcolm Mercer, Colin Lachance and Adam Dodek have been honoured. Congratulations. Here’s what the magazine says:

Adam Dodek
Vice dean, University of Ottawa
Faculty of Law, Ottawa

Dodek is emerging as a Canadian champion for legal professionalism and legal ethics. He writes and speaks widely on the subject and has been very involved in issues surrounding professional regulation and legal education. Dodek has published several legal books, with his

The legal profession has many noble archetypes: dedicated advocates pro bono publico, champions of significant (not always popular) causes, and unswerving guardians of the court whose instincts shine bright as a sword against much larger opponents.

John-Paul Boyd broke the mould he was casted in quite early on. He’s not so much a noble archetype as a force of unnatural origins who continues to drop jaws with his superhuman ability to drop knowledge.

To say he is one of a kind, is not enough. The best I can do is describe him like this: 

Hawaiian creation myth relates that