GPO Access, the online disseminator of official U.S. government publications, is shutting down permanently tomorrow, March 16th. It has gradually been replaced over the past two years by the new FDsys or Federal Digital System.

FDsys offers authentic, digitally signed PDF documents from dozens of different collections of U.S. Federal Government information (Congressional, Presidential, judicial and federal agency materials)

Some of the new system’s highlights:

• Information is preserved for permanent public access
• Search multiple publications at once
• Conduct complex searches
• Narrow, sort, and filter search results
• Access documents in multiple file formats
• Access metadata in standard XML formats

Documents are at the heart of any legal system—writing’s the thing, ever since Hammurabi. And though legal documents do change in form and character, there’s a strong impulse for things to remain “the same” or at least sufficiently similar that past experience and rulings can limn the future. That’s on the surface.

The relatively recent introduction of digital documents has, perhaps paradoxically, brought about considerable and continuing change underneath. As the duck seems serene but paddles furiously below the waterline, so it is with legal “duckuments”: it’s all text above the waterline, but underneath there’s much churning as HTML, DOC, . . . [more]

On Friday the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner, Ontario released the paper Embedding Privacy into the Design of EHRs to Enable Multiple Functionalities – Win/Win authored by the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario Dr. Ann Cavoukian and Richard C. Alvarez, President and CEO of Canada Health Infoway.

From the March 2, 2012 news release:

Research indicates that Canadians have a degree of comfort with using EHR information for such purposes, as long as privacy and security protections are in place. The paper underscores the need for transparency in the way EHR information is managed and safeguarded.

This week the Supreme Court of Canada released the decision in Richard v. Time Inc., considering an appeal of prohibited business practices in marketing under Quebec’s Consumer Protection Act. John Gregory summarized the case on Slaw previously here.

The plaintiff received $1,000 in compensatory damages and $15,000 in punitive damages after he received a direct mailing from the defendant that appeared to indicate that he had won a Cash Prize of $833,337.00. The Quebec Court of Appeal reversed the trial judge’s decision in favour of the plaintiff, indicating that the campaign did not explicitly make any promises and . . . [more]

AALL Spectrum was kind enough to publish in their March 2012 edition my article called “Legal Project Management for Law Librarians” (PDF, 4 pages).

Legal project management (LPM) has already been a popular topic on SLAW for some time now (click here for past stories).

Although the foregoing article is a shortened version of my longer paper from last year entitled “Project Management in Law Firms: A New Role for Librarians?” available on my website, in the 10 months or so between articles I have seen a steady and growing interest in LPM in Canadian . . . [more]

The Department of Justice’s Terminology Standardization Directorate has published the latest in the National Program for the Integration of Both Official Languages in the Administration of Justice (POLAJ) glossaries. The “Family Law Glossary (Common Law) Fascicle 3” [PDF] replaces the two earlier glossaries (Fascicles 1 & 2) respecting family law. (Gotta love that word “fascicle.”).

The idea is to assist those working in an area to make effective use of the fact that at many levels Canada has a bijural and bilingual legal system. Terms used in one system may not easily (or at all) correspond to terms . . . [more]

A Broad and Ambitious Justice Review

BC Premier Christy Clark along with her newly-titled Minister of Justice and Attorney General Shirley Bond announced a broad-ranging review of the BC justice system last week. In conrast to many previous reviews in other jurisdictions, this review is not lacking in ambition or scope. The review includes a Green Paper on Modernizing British Columbia’s Justice System and an internal audit review of the province’s justice system. It also includes a review of BC’s criminal charge assessment process, a Legal Aid Services review and a new plan to post justice system data on . . . [more]

I have a tendency to want to keep my gravy out of my peas — control issues, I know. This makes me work to keep my social media in silos as much as possible, fearing, I suppose, the further loss of privacy if Facebook gossips to Twitter about me and vice versa. The devil — or the deity, if you prefer — is in the intersections, the linkages, the relationships.

This desire for some crafted anonymity or at least a tad of privacy is a forlorn hope, I realize, if I’m online and tweeting, blogging, “plus”-ing and the like, whether . . . [more]

Fair use (s. 107) is an intentionally drafted ambiguous provision in the U.S. Copyright Act for the purpose of defending users of copyright works from a variety of otherwise infringing acts. Although often compared to the Canadian fair dealing, the two defenses are quite different. Two interesting documents on the analysis of fair use and its interpretation were recently released.

General Counsel from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office released a memorandum on 19 January 2012 on: USPTO Position on Fair Use of Copies of NPL Made in Patent Examination. The memorandum looks at three issues: . . . [more]

The Supreme Court of Canada announced today that judgment in the National Securities Regulator Reference will be delivered at 9:45 a.m. EDT on Thursday, December 22, 2011. That’s In the Matter of Section 53 of the Supreme Court Act, R.S.C. 1985, C. S-26 and in the Matter of a Reference by the Governor General in Council concerning the proposed Canadian Securities Act, as set out in Order in Council P.C. 2010-667, dated May 26, 2010 (33718)

We’ll link to it and commentary when it comes down.

Perhaps the word “Judgment” implies that it will be the decision of the Court, . . . [more]

Words have meaning. The context, tone, and interplay give rise to nuances that is the basis for statutory and case law interpretation. But sometimes the iteration of words have meaning too. The frequency and repetitiveness of certain words can at times given insight into a culture or society.

At Jurix: The 24th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems in Vienna, Austria earlier this week, Daniel Martin Katz, Michael J. Bommarito II, Julie Seaman, Adam Candeub & Eugene Agichtei proposed the idea of Legal N-Grams in conjunction with a beta pre-release of Legal Language Explorer, a new web . . . [more]