Today’s New York Times has reports that “activist… internet gadfly… self-styled Robin Hood” Carl Malmud has begun a direct challenge to the big online publishers by copying and placing online 1000 pages of court decisions from the 1880’s that he acknowledges getting from a Thomson microfiche. He says he aims to make freely available up to ten million pages of caselaw.

The judgments Malmud has published are available on his site, public.resource.org. At the moment there is a hyper-compressed tiff file of all of the thousand pages — nearly 4G in size, itself a formidable barrier to access I . . . [more]

According to a list of laughable laws, fit for the summer silly season, it’s treasonable in Britain to place a postage stamp bearing the image of the monarch upside down. And in England, all men over the age of 14 must carry out two hours of longbow practice a day. And… there are 25 of these odd survivors for you to enjoy on the Times Online. There are also over a hundred comments to enjoy, most, however, being aimed at the poor American lawyer who didn’t read carefully enough and thought the item about York was about New York. . . . [more]

More music today — because there’s less music available lately. At least online. The internet radio folks have been having their problems with the DRM and copyright people in the U.S. And the differences between U.S. copyright laws and those of other jurisdictions has led to a number of streaming music sites being unable to reach outside the republic’s borders. About a year ago I mentioned Pandora in the course of a Friday Fillip on Etta Baker; this was the website I used to listen to popular music, blues, jazz and other non-classical ditties. But no more.

So it was . . . [more]

On 26 and 27 October, 2007 there’s to be a conference at the Faculty of Law, University of Western Ontario, on The Charter of Rights and Freedoms and Canadian Labour Law. Chief Justice Beverly McLachlin is scheduled to speak. The conference schedule [PDF] and the registration form [PDF] are available online.

[hat tip: Colin Galinski] . . . [more]

This is obviously a day for new blogs. Connie posted just now about All About Information, and I am glad to have discovered the University of Alberta Faculty of Law’s Faculty Blog. Posting seems regular since it launched a couple of months ago, so this is clearly one to bookmark. And from the Faculty Blog I learn about Bouck’s Law Blog, a brand new blawg by John C. Bouck, a retired B.C. Supreme Court judge. His is the only judicial blawg I know of in Canada. . . . [more]

Dan Michaluk of Hicks Morley LLP has started a new blog about the legal aspects of information called, appropriately enough, All About Information. He is covering subjects such as freedom of information, privacy, e-discovery, e-mail, records management, and many other subjects. Some good, substantial discussion here, which he hopes to expand upon as he goes along.

Welcome to the blawgosphere, Dan!

Posted 7:30 a.m. from home. . . . [more]

A recent New York Times article focuses on how blogging can boost your career. What’s really cool about this article is that librarian Ellyssa Kroski is mentioned. The article describes how Kroski decided to start blogging about her professional interests to build connections that could lead to a job. Not only did her blog lead to a job, but she is now being invited to speak at national conferences and has even completed her first book Web 2.0 for Librarians and Information Professionals. . . . [more]

We talk a fair bit on Slaw about translation between French and English, as befits a blog on law in Canada. See, e.g.:

• Return to Sender
• Legal Translation
• Google Translate
• Translate a Word, Phrase or Document

I’ve recently been introduced to a pair of translation tools that I ought to have known about but that for some reason I didn’t. Just in case you aren’t aware of them, let me briefly describe them.

First, and most obvious, I suppose, is Quebec’s Grand dictionnaire terminologique, a clear upside to the Office québécois de la langue française. Here you’ll find . . . [more]

Public hearings into what is referred to as reasonable accommodation of minorities are to begin in September in the province of Quebec.

Internationally famous philosopher and McGill University scholar Charles Taylor and sociologist Gérard Bouchard will co-chair the consultations that will take place in some 17 cities of the province.

The Consultation Commission on Accommodation Practices Related to Cultural Differences was created by the provincial government last spring after a number of incidents involving clashes or controversies between members of minority groups, in particular religious minorities, and the members of the highly secularized French-speaking majority that overthrew the restraints of . . . [more]

I’d like to share a bit of research I put together over at my new blog. Last week I re-assembled The Lawyer’s 2006 global 100 law firm websites, and then re-ranked the list by the number of pages indexed within the search engines. I then posted some commentary on law firm content strategy, and what we might read into a list like this.

In the future, I’d like do more demographic lists. I’d also like to look further into why a firm like DLA Piper has 10 times more pages than any other global 100 law firm, or . . . [more]

Reading online is not a perfect experience. Many folks won’t tackle long documents at all and print whatever needs to be read. Whether or not new paper-like paper-thin monitors will change text readability in the future, there are a few things we can do now to improve online readability of text — and one new technique that may or may not prove useful.

Old hat first:

• Increase the type size to suit your vision (all modern browsers let you do this easily).

  Take a look at this page if you’re uncertain how to make a font larger, either on the

Yesterday I had one of those “What did we do in the old (i.e. pre-web) days?” experiences, as, I suspect, did many others who were similarly trying to access information from some particular government web sites. The Ontario ministry site from which I was seeking some information was down and had been for a while. I thought I’d make some phone calls instead, but where to find a phone number? Of course, the online government directory – but it was down as well. Then I remembered the blue pages in an “old-fashoned” phone book – but of course no phone . . . [more]