Librarians often debate the prices of law books, wondering why pricing soars beyond normal trade publishing prices. The suspicion is that editorial and marketing costs are not higher than trade costs. Of course one factor is the small size of print runs. Canadian publishers faced with demand for an out of print book (like Bill Estey’s Legal Opinions in Commercial Transactions) will often print just a couple of hundred copies.

Now we’ve actual evidence of a major legal publisher going for print on demand. The costs are, of course, high in relation to page count.

OUP have recently re-issued, . . . [more]

Perhaps many of you have already received your complementary copy of the most recent Academic Matters, a product of the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations. What you may not have noticed is the excellent, illuminating, accessible, and far-sighted article in it by McGill’s Jean-Claude Guédon: Digitizing and the Meaning of Knowledge. I cannot recommend this too highly to anyone who would like to understand, in 2000 words or less, what is happening with scholarship, the web, universities, and libraries.

The comments he devotes to the position of libraries are very insightful, and they apply to law . . . [more]

The recent announcement by Carswell that its multi-volume print work “Words and Phrases Judicially Defined in Canadian Courts and Tribunals” is available online means that both Westlawecarswell and LexisNexis Quicklaw now offer access to edited extracts of of the meaning of words and phrases as discussed in judicial decisions.

“Plugged in” legal researchers should note however that this does not mean that the same information is now available on both services. Each database is a unique compilation of words and phrases, with different operating guidelines and scope, and different sources of content. Depending upon your need, both services may have . . . [more]

I stumbled across part of the Philip C. Jessup International Law Moot Court Competition website, where I found a good swathe of the 6th edition of the Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation available online in PDF. The parts that are up are, of course, those that deal with “international materials.” Still, you’ll find nearly 75 pages, all in all. . . . [more]

Two law professors are offering a book for sale at: http://www.semaphorepress.com/about.html, on a pay what you want basis. It is a casebook on intellectual property law. An interesting business model — will they succeed? Time will tell for these and other entrepreneurs. A comment from their Web site: “Be a part of the solution to $130 casebooks, by fostering the creation of $30 casebooks: Please pay the suggested price. If you can’t pay it, please at least pay something to help Semaphore Press succeed.” . . . [more]

For a price-tag of $125 million ((Which must be small change for Google)) Google, the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild resolved a challenge to the Google Books project.

The settlement agreement resolves a class-action suit filed on Sept. 20, 2005, by the Authors Guild and certain authors, and a suit filed three years ago, by five major publisher-members of the Association of American Publishers: McGraw-Hill, Pearson Education, Penguin Group, John Wiley & Sons and Simon & Schuster. It is subject to approval by the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.

For . . . [more]

The significance of the offer by Maritime Law Book of free access to its collection of over 215,000 cases under the name “Raw Judgments” has not yet been given the attention it deserves in the world of Canadian legal information as a portent of things to come.

Eric Appleby, the founder of Maritime Law Book, has long been a leading innovator in Canadian legal publishing, from the launch of the New Brunswick Reports, to the creation of a national jurisdictional law reporter system in print and online, to the introduction of the MLB Key Number System. Based on his track . . . [more]

From the earliest days of online legal research, the death of the traditional law report in print was predicted. Online access to cases would make print unnecessary. In the paperless world that was imminent, there would be no need for the traditional law report. Storage problems for sets of law report series would be eliminated and the cost of searching cases would be greatly reduced.

That was the vision for online legal research in 1973 when Lexis Nexis and Quicklaw pioneered in offering commercial online access to case law. It was going to be just a matter of time before . . . [more]

Alan M. Dershowitz, that prolific (some would say prolix) law prof, publicity hound and sometime proponent of torture, has published his third book this year: Is There A Right To Remain Silent? Coercive Interrogation and the Fifth Amendment After 9/11. It gets a good review in the New York Times from Johnathon Mahler, who finds the book for the mostpart accessible by lay readers and, where it becomes dense with constitutional law, worth pushing ahead even so.

The description on the Oxford University Press page says this of the book:

…Dershowitz puts forward a bold reinterpretation of the