I’m having a difficult time keeping up with the House of Commons and the Senate. Are they sitting or not? Last I heard, the House of Commons is again sitting, but the Senate isn’t because there are no Bills for them to deal with just yet from the House.

In my quest to determine the state of things, I had a look at the updated Parliamentary webpages. If you haven’t seen them since the Spring, I encourage you to have a look. A lot is going on there, and I like what I see:

• They have pulled some of

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I’ve been having some fun recently over at the VLLB.

Last Monday I posted ‘Legal KM Economics & Realization Rates (Some Questions…)‘. Joy London of Excited Utterances was nice enough to pick it up and re-publish my post. Then the responses started coming in, and boy did they come in!

First up, David Maister was kind enough to send me a nice written response, which you can read here. For those not familiar with David, he’s one of the most respected professional service consultants around. If it had stopped there, I would have been pretty happy. . . . [more]

Word comes that the advertisements that we’ve been seeing in the law reports for the various national incarnations of Halsbury’s Laws (Australia, Hong Kong, India, Malaysia, Singapore, South Africa, New Zealand) presage an announcement of Halsbury’s Laws of Canada.

Halsbury’s has always had an odd relationship to Canada. Students find it extraordinary that the Canadian Converter volumes track back to the third edition (the green one) which is now between forty and fifty years old.

Halsbury’s has said before that it wanted to improve this situation.

Those of us who have been doing this for a while recall that Bud . . . [more]

Check out UBC’s full press release.

“The ASRS is linked to the Library’s online catalogue. After Library staff or users request an item, the robotic cranes identify and retrieve the correct steel bin, matching the location of the bin to the requested bar code. The automated cranes deliver bins to a sorting station where staff retrieve and relay requested items to the circulation desk. The entire process takes about two minutes . “

Also:

“The ASRS stores 30 per cent of the collections previously housed in the Main Library, much of which was in locked storage. With the capacity

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Michael Geist, professor of law at University of Ottawa, and editor of the BNA’s daily Internet Law News, has today pioneered a new approach to legal publishing in Canada. He has edited a major collection of essays on the future of copyright reform in Canada. And he convinced Jeff Miller at Irwin Law to release the book, In the Public Interest, under a Creative Commons license, which means that Chapters can be downloaded for personal use, free of charge. And Michael has given the royalties to Creative Commons.

Check out this Irwin Law page for a glimpse at how . . . [more]

Marc Galanter has just published [an apparently serious] survey of the meaning of lawyer jokes, thus proving that some academics have too much time on their hands.

See this week’s TLS . . . . [more]

I’ve put a link on the right menu to a section called “By The Week.” It goes to a page where you can find “This Week’s Links” since I’ve been doing that and as well an image of the website’s front page as of Friday of any given week. This may be mere self-reflection for Slaw, but I think it will be interesting some time from now to be able to look back and actually see the posts we made in a particular week and to have access to the various links referred to in the posts and comments. . . . [more]

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There's a new player on the Web, Rollyo, aiming to become useful to the many -- and it just may succeed.

The MIT Media Laboratory expects to launch a prototype of its US$100 laptop in November, according to Nicholas Negroponte, the lab’s chairman and co-founder. The facility has been working with industry partners to develop a notebook computer for use by children in primary and secondary education around the world, particularly in developing countries. The laptops should start appearing in volume in late 2006.

A new website has been released for the new Governor General of Canada, Her Excellency the Right Honourable Michaelle Jean. The statement on her home page:

I am eagerly looking forward to meeting my fellow-Canadians very soon. I am convinced that Canada will continue to accomplish great things if we work together for a better quality of life–for our own population and for humanity. Our country is vast and it is blessed with a wealth of colours and the varied music of its tongues and accents. Many have not had the good fortune of measuring its full extent. I

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Available from the e-Laws website, the website for Ontario legislation, there is a Bilingual Lexicon of Legislative Terms (253 page, PDF). Also available in HTML format. Updated to December 31, 2004. There does not appear to be an index or finding tool for either PDF or HTML version, so the software’s “find” functions do need to be used to locate terms quickly. Still, this is an impressive collection. . . . [more]