“Psychotic kindergartens.” According to this piece from guardian.co.uk, Robert Martin, professor of law, emeritus, at the University of Western Ontario used this term and the term “feminist seminary” to describe Canadian law faculties. Martin’s article, in the October 2009 edition of the scholarly journal Interchange, is behind a paywall. I have not read it, but thought it worth pointing to nonetheless. . . . [more]

This is a bit of a global pot-pourri drawn from what I’ve been reading from elsewhere.

Access to Justice in Australia
Another Thomson/West acquisition – this time a Brazilian publisher was acquired
Harvard Law Library joins the Chesapeake Project
The Guardian picks up on Rob Martin’s hyperbolic rant against Canadian Legal Education
An English law firm outsources all of its non-billable activities, including its law library, IT and knowledge management.

. . . [more]

I am in the midst of attending 5 conferences in 3 weeks, for the legal, library, publishing and business industries. The conferences are for varied audiences, and yet I am seeing some good synergies between the discussions.

I therefore found David Whelan’s blog post “A Perspective on Professional Education” to be of interest. In it he compares the Canadian Association of Law Libraries conference–held last week in Windsor in conjunction with the Michigan Association of Law Libraries–to the 5th Annual Solo and Small Firm Conference put on by the Law Society of Upper Canada on Friday. As one . . . [more]

One of the unique requirements that we have in North America to be called to the bar is the articling process, the merits of which have been discussed here. And we have seen law students try to use social media to get these positions.

But I still know an astonishing number of students from the class of 2010 that do not have any articling position at all. Not just from my school, but across Ontario and the country. So here’s my attempt to try and do something about it. . . . [more]

Last week was National Library Week in the U.S., sponsored by the American Library Association as a way to promote libraries. In Friday’s Law Librarian Conversations podcast (formerly the Law Librarian podcast) we talked about the up-take of this week by academic law libraries, especially considering that the focus tends to be on public libraries. One library in particular stood out: Harvard Law School Library.

According to the Et Seq. – Harvard Law School Library Blog post by Meg Kribble, the following “fun and games” were used to promote the library during National Library Week:

• Foursquare: awarding a

Educause is an interesting organization, with relevance for anyone working in or near a law school:

EDUCAUSE is a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology. EDUCAUSE helps those who lead, manage, and use information resources to shape strategic decisions at every level.

Educause Review always contains interesting articles, and the new edition is no exception. Richard N. Katz’s Scholars, Scholarship, and the Scholarly Enterprise in the Digital Age looks informative. Also in this issue: Lawrence Lessig on Copyright (I thought he quit that beat), and Larry Sanger on knowledge . . . [more]

That’s the motto (or slogan for those who prefer the Gaelic) of the University of Texas at Austin, which today announced a new three-year joint degree programme combining a Master of Science and Information Studies and Doctor of Jurisprudence (MSIS/JD).

The new programme “responds to an increased need for specialist trained to help address legal issues arising from the increasingly complex and changing world of information use, retrieval and storage in the 21st century.”

For those interested, eligibility is set out here.

For all the hype, the sample course selection here is fairly ho-hum, just plain vanilla . . . [more]

♫ I’m scared to touch
Too tense to be undone
I walk the streets
Not expecting morning sun
Against the voice of doom
Failures fall all over town

I guess I should
I feel I should
Get real Get real…♫

Lyrics and Music by David Bowie and Brian Eno.

Irene Plagianos, for The American Lawyer and posted on Law.com today, wrote an article entitled: The Future of Legal Education: Get Real.

She reported on how Dean Richard Matasar of the New York Law School (partnered with Harvard Law School) introduced a different discussion topic to a crowded classroom . . . [more]

In the Chronicle of Higher Education, an article about a law professor who outsources her grading work to India. She feels that detailed feedback is key to improving writing skills, but at some 5,000,000 words each year,

Her seven teaching assistants, some of whom did not have much experience, couldn’t deliver. Their workload was staggering: About 1,000 juniors and seniors enroll in the course each year. “Our graders were great,” she says, “but they were not experts in providing feedback.”

That shortcoming led Ms. Whisenant, director of business law and ethics studies at Houston, to a novel solution last

Last night I had the pleasure of speaking to the INF 2133 Legal Literature and Librarianship class at the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto on the topic of knowledge management (KM) in law firms.

The course is taught by law librarians John Papadopoulos and Sooin Kim. There was, I think, some interest in the topic of KM since many of the students were aware of the importance of KM and some had taken Professor Choo’s courses, some of which discuss KM.

Two things arose that I thought I would mention here:

Records management

In basing my talk on . . . [more]

A law library is central to a law school.

Pretty unarguable proposition I would have thought.

Students have to have a library to learn. Faculty to teach and write.

That’s why I can’t understand the story told in the Queen’s Journal this week under the headline Future uncertain for law library.

Like many universities, Queen’s has had to make regular operational budget cuts. But Queen’s isn’t a tiny school and serving the needs of 30 full-time law faculty and about 500 law students, can’t be easily done with the six and a half full-time staff at the Lederman Law . . . [more]

Hot off the presses from Rich McCue, sysadmin at UVic Law: UVic Law Student Technology Survey 2010. There were new questions on this year’s survey concerning the mobile technology that UVic students arrive at law school with. Here’s the executive summary:

• 30% of students own “Smart Phones” that can browse the internet.
• 97% of students own laptops, and over 60% own both a laptop and a desktop computer.
• 39% of student laptops are Macs.
• The average laptop price dropped to $1,200 from $1400 in 2007, and from $2,100 in 2004.
• 82% of students bring their laptops to