On the afternoon of Friday January 29, the University of Texas at Austin will host a conference on judicial biography, as a tribute to Roy Mersky, who was the subject of an earlier Slaw post.

At 2 PM Texas time the discussion will turn to International Jurists, featuring Philip Ayers on Chief Justice Owen Dixon of Australia’s High Court, Philip Girard on Chief Justice Bora Laskin of Canada, and Pnina LaHav on Shimon Agranat of Israel.

We seem to be in golden age of judicial biography. Any recommendations from the readership? . . . [more]

Two completely different spheres have my thoughts overlapping like a Venn diagram. A recent interview with Arianna Huffington in the Financial Post and links from the Law Librarian Blog (among many other sources) showing an Inside Look at the WestlawNext and “New Lexis” Platforms.

Both these articles touch on monetization of web delivered services and how content producers may reap the rewards of their labours.

The Huffington Post model:

The Huffington Post is committed to the link economy and our business model is advertising-supported. The Greek philosopher Herodotus … said you cannot enter into the same river twice, and

Yesterday, two members of Slaw were given an in-depth look at the most profound re-engineering of a legal research system since the migration to the Web. In Thomson Reuters’ impressive Eagan facility we had a briefing on the new Westlaw – to be launched at New York LegalTech next Monday under the name WestlawNext.

WestlawNext is the culmination of five years of research and development and a massive amount of customer research into how legal research is actually carried out. . . . [more]

Are there any concerns from a risk management / liability perspective over the following warning/error message on the e-Laws website I noticed just now:

NOTICE OF ERROR
From December 18, 2009 to December 29, 2009, the e-Laws currency date should have been December 14, 2009.

See the screenshot here:

Do you review all of your legislative research from December 2009 within this time period?

Part of me says “no” since the Legislative Assembly adjourned on December 10, 2009, (to resume on February 16, 2010) and there appears to have been only 2 proclamations gazetted during the time period in question. . . . [more]

I learned recently that the University of Alberta has been digitizing microfilm or microfiche from the collection of Canadiana.org and placing the scans on the Internet Archive. (There’s a PowerPoint presentation online that will give you some sense of U of A’s digitization projects.) At present a search for [contributor:(canadiana.org)] turns up over 22,000 items. Of these, just under 800 are tagged “law” in some respect.

There is no attempt to catalog these items in any useful way, which means a researcher must rely on searching — not the easiest thing on the Internet Archive. (For example, . . . [more]

The most recent issue of The Lawyers Weekly provides a snapshot of the quantative output of the justices of the Supreme Court of Canada in 2009:

“Looking at the opinions the individual judges wrote last year (as distinct from judgments they simply signed on to without comment) Chief Justice McLachlin and Justice Charron were the most solid majoritarians in the sense that they did the least concurring and dissenting, both wrote a total of nine majority or unanimous opinions, and Justice Charron wrote more unanimous judgments than anyone else — five.”

“Justice Charron and Justice Morris Fish spoke most

John Morden and I have been discussing the extent to which Canadian courts look at cases from other courts, and I referred him to the excellent work of Professor Peter McCormick on the Supreme Court of Canada in a series of articles and a book Supreme at Last. . . . [more]

There has been much discussion on SLAW on the state of print case law reporters in the age of online judgments (click here for some of these posts).

For other research I am conducting, I obtained a photocopy of an article by Paul Perell (now a judge) from 1991 in the Legal Research Update quarterly newsletter (circa 1986 to 1996, RIP) called “Selecting Cases for the Ontario Reports.” In that article, (the now Mr. Justice) Perell lists out the six criteria for case selection as suggested by a Butterworths editor in England:

A case will be reported if:

–

.♫ Copycat, copycat, copycat
copy copy copy everyone else….♫

Lyrics by Dolores O’Riordan and music by Noel Hogan and Dolores O’Riordan, recorded by The Cranberries.

Anyone who places content on the web should be concerned with detecting the unauthorized copying of their content. Certainly anyone with a blog would not want others taking their original content without their permission. This actually happened to my own blog just recently: www.thoughtfullaw.com. In my case it was simply someone who was unaware of the rules around copyright.

But there was a case in Victoria British Columbia where a law firm . . . [more]

The Supreme Court announced this morning that it would release Prime Minister of Canada et al. v. Omar Ahmed Khadr on Friday morning. . . . [more]

From Pingdom, the Internet 2009 in numbers:

With such kernels as:

• 1.73 billion Internet users (as of Sept 2009)
• 252,908,000 – Internet users in North America.
• 234 million – The number of websites as of December 2009.

and much more. . . . [more]

I believe that the oldest use of media other than print to teach legal research was a videotape with voice-over by Stephen Borins back in the academic year, 1970-1971 in which he ran through a legal research problem which touched on Priestman v. Colangelo and the liability of police officers. It stressed the reliability of the Canadian Encyclopedic Digest and touched briefly on Butterworths Ontario Digest and the Canadian Abridgement.

The tape required a technician from York’s AV division to run it, and was very much talking head with some close-ups of book pages. It might be in a dusty . . . [more]