I happened to be looking at currency dates for a section of the Criminal Code today and saw a big bold New heading. To my glee the New heading prefaced a note about shading on the Department of Justice Laws website. The site has a new feature showing provisions that are not yet in force as shaded. Well done DOJ!

The frequently asked questions page describes it like so:

What does the shading of provisions mean?
A new feature has been added to the consolidated Laws on the Justice Laws Web site: provisions in original enactments that are not

Here’s a turn-up for the books: there’s a new entry in the Canadian legal search engine market. CanLII notwithstanding, Kent Mewhort, a McGill law student and experienced software engineer, has launched Nomus, a free search engine for Canadian legal decisions.

This is no Google-based amateur effort, but rather a serious tool running with at least one interesting algorithm and one valuable additional feature. I’ve had a small exchange of emails with Mr. Mewhort, and some of the material in this post comes from that.

First the scope: the database is drawn from publicly available, i.e. governmental, sites . . . [more]

Before we leap to the assumption that advanced analytic programmes can really help suggest what we should be reading, I reproduce without sarcastic comment an email I got this morning:

“Dear Amazon.ca Customer,

As someone who has purchased or rated Knowledge Management and the Smarter Lawyer by Esq., Gretta Rusanow or other books in the Law Practice General category, you might like to know that Set-Off Law and Practice: An International Handbook will be released on April 11, 2010. You can pre-order yours at a savings of 16% by following the link below.

Set-Off Law and Practice: An International Handbook . . . [more]

A recent notice from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency indicates that the deadline to make a claim for compensation under the class action lawsuit on behalf of freelancers and other contributors to online databases launched by Heather Robertson has now passed.

According to the notice, the class action alleged that the creators were not properly compensated for the electronic reproduction of their works in online databases. The notice advised that Thomson Reuters, CTVglobemedia, and The Gale Group, agreed to pay $11 million to settle the lawsuit, while making no admission of wrongdoing. No reference was made to any other legal . . . [more]

The post below may be offensive to some who believe in the majestic integrity of the law, that law is central to our civilisation and that we should not poke fun at its divine origin. . . . [more]

The Toronto Association of Law Libraries (TALL) hosted a Publishers’ Forum at the University of Toronto Law School last week entitled “Free Access to Legislation: How Do They Do It?”

The meeting was well attended by TALL members.

Publishers making presentations to the forum included representatives for the Department of Justice Laws website, CanLII, the Legislative Assembly of Ontario website, and Ontario e-Laws.

All four of these sites and their developers are to be applauded. Although not necessarily the intent of the session, I came away with a better sense of appreciation for their hard work . . . [more]

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]

For all the tax researchers out there:

The Tax Court of Canada’s Current Appeals Docket is now online. Finally. . . . [more]

Well it may have been a quarter century or so since our friend the late Hugh Lawford put the ORs on what was then known as QL Systems, but an announcement from Lexis this morning (curiously absent from its website) reveals that:

After more than a century in print, the Ontario Reports is going digital.

Beginning in April, members will enjoy:

* Immediate access to the full content of the latest Ontario Reports

* The convenience of a digital report that looks identical to the printed version

* An innovative format that is easy to read, navigate and

So far as I can tell, we’ve not talked about the (U.S.) Supreme Court Database on Slaw, even though it’s about twenty years old. The current version offers the researcher:

247 pieces of information for each case, roughly broken down into six categories: (1) identification variables (e.g., citations and docket numbers); (2) background variables (e.g., how the Court took jurisdiction, origin and source of the case, the reason the Court agreed to decide it); (3) chronological variables (e.g., the date of decision, term of Court, natural court); (4) substantive variables (e.g., legal provisions, issues, direction of decision); (5) outcome variables

In university history classes the textbooks provided shots of cuneiform for our wonderment. It was hard to imagine reading the stuff, though, and I recall being told that the ancient Messopotamian tablets were mostly accounting documents. Well, no more. According to Knowlegde and Power:

The Neo-Assyrian capital of Nineveh in northern Iraq, from the mid-7th century BC, is the earliest attested site of courtly scientific patronage in world history. This website presents the scholars’ letters, queries, and reports to their kings and provides resources to support their use in undergraduate teaching. Since the summer of 2008 it also gives

StatsCan has released the data from the Civil Court Survey for 2008/2009 of Nova Scotia, Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia, Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut. The data are available upon request from Statistics Canada’s Centre for Justice Statistics.

Slaw has made that request and has placed the data file we received online for you to download [PDF]. The data are in ten tables for each of the years of the survey, i.e. the years 2005/2006 to 2008/2009. The tables respecting 2008/2009 begin on page 33 of the file. They (and those for the other years) are as follows:

1. Civil court