“What’s New on the Legal Web” (June 18, 2007) highlights some new sites that are handy when doing legal research. Some good ones:

Constitution Finder
From the University of Richmond School of Law, this database contains worldwide constitutions, charters, amendments and other related documents.

Litilaw
Contains hundreds of articles written by lawyers for CLE programs or for publication in legal journals.

Actual Innocence Awareness Database
Created by the Tarlton Law Library at the University of Texas School of Law, it tracks developments related to wrongful convictions. . . . [more]

Terrific, informative article from globeandmail.com,:

Media stardom is pricey: Part of the attraction of blogs is that they seemed to live outside the law. That turns out to be not quite true
by Mathew Ingram (June 16, 2007)

This article has some interesting points that help to really highlight how blogging in Canada differs from blogging in the U.S.:

Earlier this week, Steelback Brewery president Frank D’Angelo filed a $2-million libel suit against Ottawa-based blogger Neate Sager for making what he says are disparaging comments about him.

In another recent case, Montreal art-gallery owner Chris (Zeke) Hand has found

I came across this article on the BBC site a couple of weeks ago (but am blogging about it now because my head is only now above water). I found the story interesting on a few points, including both the size and the rapidity of growth of the mobile market in India, as well as the volume of unsolicited calls/texts to those subscribers:

India has the fastest growing mobile phone market in the world, with more than 170 million subscribers.

Every month around seven million new subscribers are added to the list.

The telecom regulator estimates that about 10 billion

The May 2007 issue of the Global Legal Monitor is available on the site of the Law Library of Congress.

It is a publication of the Law Library of Congress that provides regular updates on legal developments from around the world. The current issue covers topics ranging from abortion to women.

Cross-posted to Library Boy. . . . [more]

A few weeks ago I mentioned that some of the SLA Legal Division 2007 presentations were available on its web site. A few more are up, and I think some are worth highlighting. I found the presentations from the emerging technologies breakfast interesting, particularly Nathan Rosen’s presentation, which highlights and links to many legal wikis which either I wasn’t aware of or are on sites I hadn’t used in a long time. Thomas Fleming’s Legal Research for the Google Generation contains some points that may be useful for those of us designing training for incoming students. A good . . . [more]

There’s a small database (n=142) of selected articles published by law librarians in legal journals on an AALL site. Note that the database is generated and housed by Baseportal, a free way of making your data available and useful to others. . . . [more]

THOSE PERSONS WHO Are Not To Be Tried While They Hold a Magistracy or the Imperium. A dictator, consul, praetor, master of the horse, censor, aedile, plebeian tribune, quaestor, triumvir capitalis, triumvir for granting and assigning lands, or military tribune in any of the first four legions shall not be summoned to court as long as he holds a magistracy or the imperium … It is not the intent of this law that anyone of those who retires from such magistracy or command shall not be summoned to court.

Interesting to see that the Romans, too, had issues with the . . . [more]

A very interesting event on the microcontent front, technology publisher O’Reilly will start selling their books by the chapter in PDF format. From the press release:

Sebastopol, CA–In today’s Web 2.0 driven publishing marketplace, it takes new and creative strategies to get authors and their work noticed by web savvy readers. But even when it is noticed, today’s readers increasingly want content in new and convenient ways that suit their digital lifestyles. Along with traditional print formats, they want content they can read on computers, PDAs, and cell phones. For this reason O’Reilly Media–the pioneering publishing company that coined the

Tired of getting your news in the same old way. For a break, try the Fontself Newsmaker. You get to choose from 11 traditional news sources — BBC, Le Monde, El Pais etc. — and from five hand-drawn fonts in which to read the news. You can also read a feed of your choice in the Newsmaker, as you can see below in the excerpt from the prior post on Slaw.

. . . [more]

There’s a handy legislation table that’s newly posted on the Queen’s University law library site. It gives you links to the statutes and regulations, bills, gazettes, Hansard, orders in council, government and legislative assembly, and courts for each of Canada’s jurisdictions.

Where you see the cockeyed spider in the chart, they’re missing a link, so let law librarian Nancy McCormack know if you can fill the gap.

  . . . [more]

Web 3.0 — sorry about that: not my coinageDon’t know where it originated, but this page contains a good discussion of it.: but you’re going to hear the term a lot so get used to it — means to describe the movement to turn websites into web services which make their information available for developers to play with. Amazon got there a long time ago (in web time) and the snowball, getting exponentially bigger, is about to loom large enough to blot out the horizon. One factor that’s pushing the thing is the popularity of widgets, those mini programs that . . . [more]

Just a short post (since I’m on the road) but the O’Quinn Law Library has launched a site called The Anglo-American Legal Tradition which reproduces images of legal documents from Medieval and Early Modern England from the Public Records Office in London.

The site includes a useful overview essay on Legal Tradition and Legal System by Professor Robert C. Palmer.

But the site now means that we can do serious work with original documents, even if one has to learn how to read legal texts that look like this:

. . . [more]