From time to time I bug the good folks at Lexum about introducing paragraph level anchors into the court decisions they publish: it would be very handy indeed to be able to make a hyperlink that went right to a paragraph within a judgment. And, of course, this feature, like many others, is on the crowded Lexum/CanLII agenda, and will have to wait its turn.

But in the meanwhile, the New York Times has just released a new version of its paragraph level linking tool, Emphasis. There’s a good article, “Emphasis Update and Source,” by Michael Donohoe, that . . . [more]

The ABA Journal had a news link today titled, “Do Judges Read Online Briefs Differently? Brief Writers May Need to Be Briefer“. The post discussed a Texas Lawyer article on e-filing and what that might mean to legal writing. Interesting stuff. The idea of fewer words to convey a point may be necessary if reading moves primarily to a screen.

A colleague once asserted that there was a bunch of literature showing that reading on screen was slower than reading from paper, and he was right. Here are some examples of studies that support this premise:

• Dillon, A.,

And now a post from snowbound London.

During the bail hearing of Julian Assange, the presiding magistrate, District Judge Howard Riddle, gave permission for journalists in attendance to use live blogging technology in reporting proceedings. In doing so, in the interests of practicality, he waltzed past provisions in the Contempt of Court Act 1981, which prohibited the use of recording media in court. It spurred a debate in England about the appropriate limits.

This spurred the senior judge in England – the wonderfully named Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, Lord Judge – to issue formal guidance to the . . . [more]

Why don’t law librarians, legal IT folk and legal publishers all just get along? Do we need a Festivus airing of grievances?

This is the suggestion from Sarah Glassmeyer, Faculty Services and Outreach Librarian at the Valparaiso University School of Law in Valparaiso, Indiana, in her controversial guest blog post The Loris in the Library at the prominent VoxPopuLII blog at the Legal Information Institute, Cornell University Law School.

She says:

I wish I could say, “Librarians . . . computer scientists . . . legal publishers . . . let’s all hold hands now and sing kum-bay-yah!” However,

The Parliamentary Information and Research Service has published a brief report entitled “The Stuxnet Worm: Just Another Computer Attack or a Game Changer?” [PDF, HTML] by Holly Porteous. As most Slaw readers may know, this malicious software, spreading throughout the world, is aimed at disrupting or controlling certain industrial processes that are regulated by computers. The sophistication of the worm and the speculation that it was targeted at Iran’s nuclear facilities have raised concern and commentary about malware to a new level.

This report is a valuable overview, addressing briefly the manner in which Stuxnet was launched . . . [more]

If your researches take you into the area of human rights, you might want to avail yourself of a relatively new topical search engine, HuriSearch. One of the projects of the interesting HuriDocs, HuriSearch offers you a fairly sophisticated front end, allowing you to query any of four types of source (NGOs, national human rights institutions, academic institutions, and intergovernmental organizations), search in any of sixteen languages, and use word variations if you wish. As well, search results can be filtered by facets: source type, source organization, country, and document format.

Better yet, you’re offered a permalink to . . . [more]

Today Justice Michael Kelen of the Federal Court handed down a significant decision in DONNA JODHAN v. ATTORNEY GENERAL OF CANADA. Ms Jodhan sought a declaration under section 18.1 of the Federal Courts Act that the standards implemented by the federal government for providing visually impaired Canadians with access to government information and services on the Internet, and the way in which those standards are implemented, denied her equal access to government information and services, and thereby violated her rights under section 15(1) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. . . . [more]

We haven’t seen an update on Carl Malamud’s Law.gov project in quite a while. There is much to report. To start, here’s a reminder of what the project is about:

Law.Gov is an idea, an idea that the primary legal materials of the United States should be readily available to all, and that governmental institutions should make these materials available in bulk as distributed, authenticated, well-formatted data. To make this idea a reality, a series of workshops were held throughout the country, resulting in a consensus on 10 core principles.

In June the project completed its consultation phase, which included . . . [more]

Some new stories from around the world:

Honey – I forgot to renew the domain name

That’s the story out of a free public website in Massachusetts: The site provides the public with online copies of opinions from both the Supreme Judicial Court and the Appeals Court. C. Clifford Allen head of the SJC’s Reporter of Decisions office woke up to find that his website was gone and that a notice — “massreports.com expired on 11/08/2010 and is pending renewal or deletion” – was substituted.

If they did send a (renewal) notice, it must have been caught in

If you are a law firm starting from scratch looking to build an intranet, what would you do? Would you emulate many of the big US and Canadian firms and implement MS Sharepoint? Or look for a different solution? So often firms look over each others’ shoulder to see what the other is doing. But with intranets one size does not fit all.

I am currently in Washington, DC for KM World 2010 and was fortunate to have a good discussion with Gordon Ross, Vice President of Open Road Communications Ltd., web consultants and creators of the social intranet . . . [more]

A few days ago Google released a very interesting tool: Google Refine 2.0. For anyone who’s ever had to sort through messy data to try to turn up a meaningful treatment, and who hasn’t, this tool is a godsend. You may never need to utter another regular expression.

It offers a suite of functions that allow a person to clean up the data (detect and remove inconsistencies), to transform the data into formats suitable to the final destination (such as html), and even tools for finding and adding more data from disparate sources.

There are three 6+ minute videos . . . [more]