Turning British and American – Updates to My LRW Site
Although I have the benefit of a number of internal online research guides where I work, I occasionally find myself resorting to my free legal research and writing site.
However, in so doing, I realized my site inadvertently emphasized Canadian law to the exclusion of most other foreign law. As such, I have updated the case law, legislation and government pages to include links to more British, American (and other common law) sites. I hope this will be more useful for researchers and I welcome suggestions for improving the site.
I have also added the 3 law-related movies suggested in a recent SLAW post on that topic, resulting in a list of 97 law-related movies on the site (now to get the list to a round 100 . . . .).
Finally, with the permission of Simon Fodden, I have borrowed his coding for the custom Google search on SLAW to my existing Custom Google search of Canadian law firm websites, blogs and journal sites so that my version also allows filtering by date (e.g., “the last month”, as shown in the screenshot below) and to allow up to 100 results per page (with the screenshot below showing “50 results” in the search on the phrase “fiduciary duty”):
The only advantage, I think, of my version of the custom search engine – available on the home page of my free legal research and writing website – is that my search results page is free of advertisements. Also, my search purports to refine on the format of results (publications, blogs or journals) but I don’t think I have done these refinements properly (choosing a refinement produces different results, but the differences are not always obvious or even correct or intended). In addition, I suspect Simon may have better indexed the underlying sites. Regardless, Simon and I have agreed to coordinate and work on improving either or both versions and we will keep SLAW readers up-to-date as we make changes.
Argh. My hard work on adding the Google custom search coding on the home page of my LRW site seemed to work last night from home but I see this morning it has resulted in an usuable mish-mash on my site and I won’t be able to fix that until this evening. The rest of the site is otherwise fine.
Go figure. My site is actually fine in Firefox (which is how I viewed it when testing). I forgot to test it in Microsoft Internet Explorer where it of course doesn’t work . . . .
So if you want to see the “pretty” version on my site, use FireFox. Otherwise, I will try to fix it this evening to work regardless of browser.
Ted, you may not be aware of this, but at Courthouse Libraries BC we have a rather large (19,000+), database of unreported decisions, the majority of which cannot be found anywhere else. They cover an interesting range of proceedings. You might consider linking or including this as another resource for caselaw. Perhaps other law libraries or departments have similar collections? I would be interested to see what else is out there.
Our unreported decisions are indexed and searchable through the CLBC website by party name, date or action/docket number.
Thanks Nate. Good to know. I will update my site this evening. I appreciate you taking the time to comment. The Courthouse Libraries BC site is an great site.
Update:
I think I fixed the Custom Google search on my website (the problem was a table-width coding issue).
One colleague made a request for Simon and I to consider adding more date range options, such as 3 years, 5 years and so on. We will discuss that and deploy, although I am dependent on Simon’s skills in that regard.
I also added a link on my Caselaw page to the BC Unreported Decisions Index.
As an addendum to Ted’s comment above: I’ve done as asked and added more date ranges to the dropdown list on the custom blogs search widget. You can now extend (i.e. limit) your search not only to a day, a week, a month and a year, but also to 2 weeks, 6 weeks, 2 months and 2 years. Happy hunting.