Forty four years ago, President Eisenhower decided to co-opt May Day, the traditional day to celebrate workers – and to honour the Rule of Law.

So was Law Day born.

Law Day in Canada was two weeks ago.

But the controversies over the administration’s policies have raised serious questions about how meaningful is the proclamation of Law Day. The Post and the New York Times both thunder over the issue.

The Times concludes:

The less committed a president is to the law, the more need there is for Law Day, which makes it a holiday whose time has come.

Footnote to an earlier posting. Here is a link to a blog posting over at PC World which may cause some of the keener users of Google to rethink how much it tracks our activity.

And by the way, litigators should remember to add this to the checklist demands for electronic discovery. The trackprints of where a user has been could be really valuable.

Of course if you think it’s cool to see everything you’ve done, there are tools for that too.

Here is Google’s own description:

With Web History, you’ll be able to:

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When CanLII changed the way it offers you search choices, it also changed the messages your query sends to its search engine, with the result that it broke the CanLII search bookmarklets that I’d constructed some time ago. (Thanks to Alisa Posesorski, VP at Irwin Law, for bringing this to my attention.) Well, as someone famous once wrote in rather differenct circumstances,Too lovely to pass up the full quote, which is from Molière’s Médecin Malgré Lui, act ii. sc. vi. (1666.)

Géronte. Il n’y a qu’ seule chose qui m’a choqué; c’est l’endroit du foie et du cœur.

Slaw readers may not have caught up yet to an interesting piece by a young Ottawa lawyer, Soulette Gray, reprinted in the Jamaica Gleaner.

Her final recommendation is for a Jamaican Legal Information Institute: . . . [more]

Our Slaw colleague Ruth Bird has recently published a stimulating paper entitled A Moveable Feast – Law Librarianship in the Noughties as part of the Oxford Legal Studies Research Paper No. 52/2006. Ruth’s deck from her moveable speech is also available.
Ruth’s introduction reads:

The purpose of this paper is to review where law librarianship finds itself six years into the new millennium, and what common challenges the profession faces in this new century.

Initially I would like to take a backward glance. When I was undertaking postgraduate studies in librarianship in 1978, lecturers Doug Down and Wes Young said

Short note from the American Lawyer drawing Slaw readers’ attention to a nice piece on finding substantive legal content in the Blogosphere. . . . [more]

Il m’est agréable de faire connaître au plus grand nombre qu’il y a 10 jours, j’ai eu le plaisir d’organiser une conférence sur certains aspects du «droit 2.0: droit et web 2.0». Une question fascinante s’il en est, qui personnellement me fait penser à certains débats, quasi-virginaux, dont on évoquait au début d’Internet, dans les années 90. Un autre siècle. Millénaire même.

– le droit d’Internet est-il différent?

– le droit d’auteur existe-t-il?

– est-il possible d’appliquer le droit «dur» dans un environnement «mou»?

– Internet est-il plus ou moins sûr que le monde réel?

– et d’autres . . . [more]

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has approved the .asia top-level domain. (CNET’s News.com has the story.) It will be managed by DotAsia Organization, located in Hong Kong.

Last month the Board of ICANN voted to reject the .xxx domain application. A transcript of that meeting is available. It actually makes interesting reading.

On a different note, when researching this I wound up on the ICANN site at the page you see in thumbnail to your left. (Click on it to see it full size.) What’s notable is that there was no way . . . [more]