This morning’s Globe reminds us of a significant anniversary, that of the 75th Anniversary of theStatute of Westminster

By some unseemly joke of constitutional myopia, the Justice Canada website suggests that the Statute has been repealed:

Notice to the reader: This document is no longer in effect. It remains on the site for reference purposesIf one checks the Canada Act, 1982 it states: In so far as they apply to Canada, (a) section 4 is repealed; and (b) subsection 7(1) is repealed. .

Which is hilarious, since it is the third most important statute in terms of defining Canada’s . . . [more]

When Larry Lessig’s book Code 1.0 was published back in 1999 it was an eye-opener. I still think of it as a wonderful tool to stimulate alternative thinking – certainly, I think the fact that it was read by policy-makers prevented knee-jerk regulation as a response to innovation. I recommended it to my daughter to get her thinking about privacy and regulation for a Dalhousie course, and she declared herself entranced by Lessig’s brain and clarity.

Today, after a lengthy period of collaboration and gestation the new edition of the book is released, and it’s also downloadable under a . . . [more]

Tomorrow’s Australian IT has an interesting column about where the LII is going.

AsianLII, the latest LII to be spun off lets you search national databases containing legislation, case-law, law reform reports and legal journals from 27 countries. The website gives unprecedented access to resources from the Philippines, Indonesia, Japan, Pakistan, Mongolia and East Timor through partner institutions.

While the linguistic challenge is a formidable one, the interface is in English only currently.

The Mowbray-Chung team is currently in Johannesburg to help transform the four-year-old South African LII into a regional site covering 16 English-speaking countries in southern and eastern . . . [more]

In my post from last week about Halsbury’s Laws of Canada on Quicklaw, I had outlined a far too ambitious release schedule for the material I’m afraid. Pat McNeill kindly corrected me, and I have now updated that post to better reflect reality (I hope!). . . . [more]

This last week our comment spam catcher, Akismet, nodded for a moment and a small horde of unsavoury material got in. As it happens, I was away the same week and unable to shovel it out, so those of you subscribing to the comments will have had to do a bit of tsk-ing and deleting. My apologies.

It is truly a never-ending struggle against the forces of sleaze and greed: Akismet has blocked something like 20,000 bits of spam since I installed it just over a month ago. But clearly that stalwart shield isn’t able to do the job alone, . . . [more]

Good afternoon all, I have a few ‘Friday’ questions on the subject of law firm leadership collections. Hopefully a few of you can contribute…

1. Does your Library have a dedicated subject collection to support the cultivation of leadership skills?
2. Do you brand this collection in a unique fashion? If so, how?
3. Can you estimate the size of your collection? An area of growth? Are you constantly culling or it easily maintained?
4. Outside the major legal vendors and consultants, are there low profile authors or niche publishers that you’d recommend?
5. Do you know of a substantial pathfinder or annotated bibliography on

Friday marks the scheduled release of a beta version of Live Search Books, which, like Google Book Search, will index and make searchable the full text of books in the public domain or subject to licensing deals.

“With this initial release we’ve focused on making the reading experience as natural as possible,” project director Cliff Guren blogged on the Microsoft website.

“The US beta launch of Live Search Books is a big step forward in advancing the way people discover information through the integration of content that has been off-limits to the traditional search experience, until now.”

What is . . . [more]

Duncan W. Glaholt of Glaholt LLP has published a review of Kirsh’s Index to Canadian Construction Law Literature by Harvey J. Kirsh (Construction Law Letter, Volume 23, No.2, page 11). The book is scheduled to be available from Carswell at the end of this month.

Some excerpts:

There is no other national construction law bibliography at this point, here or elsewhere.

Not only is the Kirsh index devoted to our practice area, but has the rarest of all attributes in books of its type: it is something that you can actually use in your day-to-day practice.

Casey Bisson, information architect for Plymouth State University’s Lamson Library, has recently received the Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration for his new open source application known as WPopac.
WPopac is basically a library catalogue based on WordPress that allows library users to add information to the holding records online. It represents the bibliographic collection of a library in an easily searchable web-based format. Just by viewing a record display, you can see the huge potential of WPopac in encouraging users to actively engage with the library and with other users who have similar interests. Check out these . . . [more]

Apparently, Reed Elsevier, maker of LexisNexis, Butterworths, etc., spent $1,480,000 on six months of lobbying activities in the U.S.

Hmm. That’s more than I make in a year.

Think they’d spare .5% of that to fund Slaw? . . . [more]

The Balkinization blog has a post entitled If Supreme Court Justices Were Rock Stars that matches judges from the United States’ top court with the musicians who have the same basic “style” in their opinion writing.

The following results emerged in what are described as “dinner table discussions” (glug, glug, glug):

• Sandra Day O’Connor– Britney Spears. (The early Britney, pre-K-Fed, not the later, trashy Britney.) Artistically incoherent but enormously successful attempts to appeal to the exact center of popular taste.
• William Rehnquist– David Byrne of Talking Heads, Blondie, Devo. Unsentimental, terse, and cleverly ironic 80’s New Wave post-punk. (Psycho-Killer could

This week’s Legal Week contains an interesting account by a judicial assistant to Lord Justice Thorpe on what it’s like to clerk in the English courts – not surprisingly a fair amount of the work involves legal research.

Lots to contrast with the Canadian systemThere is a great wiki on this at the UWO website. and the work of law clerks elsewhere.

For more on the larger issues of law clerks and their role in the development of the law see my earlier post. . . . [more]