John Willinsky recently gave a lively and informative talk at the UofA on the coming “sea change” in scholarly publishing. It is linked from the new OA/UofA blog. I’m looking forward to the PKP publishing conference in July. . . . [more]

As someone who works closely with our Sales and Business Development team to help them identify and research prospective clients, I was happy to come across the recent article “Courting clients: Are law school grads getting the business skills they need?” in The Lawyers Weekly. It discusses the need for law schools to incorporate client development training into the curriculum, and how various law schools are doing this. Currently, business development training has been a focus of the schools’ career services offices (the article highlights the career services programs offered at University of British Columbia and University . . . [more]

Environmental Law, a law review published by the Lewis & Clark Law School in Oregon, has introduced a blog-like online companion entitled Environmental Law Online.

The supplement provides access to the articles of the journal, as well as to case reviews of 9th Circuit court decisions and to comments.

“Environmental Law Online joins a growing list of elite law reviews with online companions, including The Yale Law Journal’s Pocket Part, Harvard Law Review’s The Forum, Michigan Law Review’s First Impressions, Northwestern University Law Review’s Colloquy, Texas Law Review’s See Also, Virginia Law Review’s

The magazine Scientific American reports that Google and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum have launched an online mapping project to provide evidence of atrocities in the Darfur region of Sudan. Many human rights groups have called the mass killings at the hands of Sudan government-sponsored militia a form of “genocide”.

“Using high-resolution imagery [from Google Earth], users can zoom into Darfur to view more than 1,600 damaged or destroyed villages, providing what the Holocaust Museum says is evidence of the genocide”.

The BBC News service reports today in an article entitled Google Earth turns spotlight on Darfur that the project . . . [more]

It’s a bit past April 1, but OHLS has now announced its new admission policy. Alumni will have received (or will be receiving) the Osgoode Brief e-mail from OHLS announcing this.

Part of Osgoode’s new admission policies is what I read as the effective elimination of the window that allowed some people in without an undergraduate degree immediately after 2 years of undergraduate work. The notice of motion that lead to the adoption states “that ordinarily the minimum number of years of university study that an applicant must complete prior to admission be increased from two years (60 credits) to . . . [more]

Those of you who like words — discreet pause while 2.36 readers sigh and leave their machines — will be interested in WebCorp, a lingustic tool of the University of Central England that treats the web as a corpus:

However large and up-to-date the electronic text corpora available are, there will always be aspects of the language which are too rare or too new to be evidenced in them. WebCorp is a suite of tools which allows access to the World Wide Web as a corpus – a large collection of texts from which facts about the language can

To date, I think most would describe the web as a medium dominated by written discourse. If we measured the most addicting activities online, from communication media like IM and email, to discussion forums and chat, to the popularity of blogs, written dialogue really has been the star of the show.

Recently though, as in the past 2 years, we’ve seen audio and video content make huge strides. Most of us have watched the inroads made by podcasting, vodcasting & the youtube generation, each given the media moniker of the next ‘great one’ set to dominate the web. And technology . . . [more]

So the Globe/CTV commissioned a poll in which a majority of the thousand people in the sample said BOTH that they trusted judges (who aren’t elected) more than members of Canada’s parliament (who are elected) AND that they’re in favour of electing judges.

Did it strike any of the thousand in both majorities that perhaps, just perhaps, the reason they trust judges more than politicians is precisely because that judges ARE NOT elected?

Did it strike the pollsters to point out that inconsistency? (I assume they didn’t because it would skew the results. In fact, it might even cause the . . . [more]

Over at the Berkman Centre for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School in partnership with LexisNexis, at the Harvard Law School a major study by Gene Koo on what law students aren’t prepared for.From a US perspective, not much has changed since the MacCrate Report on Legal Education and Professional Development
Much of the study won’t exactly be news to the readers of Slaw.
Let’s start with the provocation at the outset:

A large majority of lawyers perceive critical gaps between what they are taught in law schools and the skills they need in the workplace, and appropriate technologies

Archive-It is part of the Internet Archive’s effort to preserve our digital documents. It aims at organizations, offering them a chance to construct curated collections of their web documents and sites, collections that can then be searched later. One of the main partner institutions is the University of Toronto.

Of the collections that already exist, Slawyers might be most interested in the following:

• Canadian Political Interest Groups

  “Canadian Political Parties and Political Interest Groups will archive the websites of all of the national Canadian political parties, and a number of special interest groups across the political spectrum.” [30 sites]

• National

Slaw contributor Agnese Caruso has just started a personal blog called Slice of Life. (Once blogging gets under your skin, it’s hard to resist the impulse.) Looks like it’s going to be enjoyable.

Of interest, too, is that she’s chosen a blogging platform that’s new to me: Blogsome. Like the others — and Blogger in particular — it’s free and seems easy to use. What is different from Blogger is the ability to choose from among a wide variety of themes originally created for WordPress installations and to modify those to suit your sense of style. Worth considering . . . [more]

“Could you repeat the question?” 

No, this isn’t about that sort of lap-dancing, as distracting as it might be.

There’s an article, in today’s online Washington Post, from a Georgetown law professor explaining why he has banned computer laptops from his classroom. It’s worth reading. (It would be worth reading even if the author’s first name weren’t one I’m attached to.)

I’ll quote his conclusion.

I am sure that the Internet can be a useful pedagogical tool in some settings and for some subjects. But for most classes, it is little more than an attractive nuisance. Technology has outstripped