Without much in the way of overt hoopla, the Law Library of Congress today launched seven video podcasts of lectures and presentations on matters of current interest. The link to the Itunes site is here.

The topics covered are:

Legislating in Heels–An Anecdotal Journal: The Honorable Constance “Connie” Morella 1:09:03

Legal Challenges Facing NATO at 60 1:41:21

The Approach of the Halakah and Sharia’ to Contemporary Legal Issues 1:33:14

Law Day 2009: Emancipation Proclamation 1:20:10

Human Environment Challenges, Domestic and International – a Talk by Barry Hill 1:00:52

Looking Beyond Gitmo: U.S. and Foreign Approaches Toward Legal Treatment of

. . . [more]

Yesterday I happened upon the Legal History Blog, and wanted to share my find. Started in November 2006, this blog has been consistently covering the academic scene in legal history, including the publication of new treatises, for some time. It is a group blog with main contributors Mary L. Dudziak, Judge Edward J. and Ruey L. Guirado Professor of Law, History and Political Science at the University of Southern California Law School, Dan Ernst, Professor of Law, Georgetown University, and Clara Altman, a graduate student at Brandeis University who co-ordinates the Legal History Blog’s accompanying Facebook . . . [more]

A reputable legal researcher recently suggested to the chief executive officer of a legal publishing company that the day was coming soon when his company would be offering its secondary content for free on a kindle. Needless to say, the CEO’s response was “not any time soon”. As an aside, he noted that it is becoming increasingly difficult to pay authors to write secondary content even now. He was frustrated by the growing market expectation that everything, including secondary content, would soon be available for free.

There is a growing assumption in the market that “someone else”, other than the . . . [more]

Amongst the many pieces of legislation to come into force on January 1, 2010 is the Defamation Act 2009 in Ireland. The Irish Constitution at article 40.6.1 calls for blasphemy to be a crime “The publication or utterance of blasphemous, seditious, or indecent matter is an offence which shall be punishable in accordance with law.” Conveniently enough; however, until January 1, 2010 there has not been a legal definition of what constitutes blasphemy in Ireland. So blasphemers in Ireland have been gotten off until now, kind of like how I’ve never had to shovel the highways here in Nova Scotia. . . . [more]

In a Nov. blog post, Hein addressed deficiencies in Google’s indexing of their content.

We provided the metadata for and allowed Google Scholar to crawl more than 1 million documents from HeinOnline’s Law Journal Library. … Of these … they opted to only include about 50% of the content in the Google Scholar index.

[…]

While it is hard to pinpoint exactly what Google Scholar’s methodology is for adding documents to their index, we do know that they have left out some key documents from HeinOnline’s Law Journal Library.

Then in Dec., Hein addressed improvements to the indexing . . . [more]

♫ What makes you think that you are invincible
I can see it in your eyes that you’re so sure
please don’t tell me that I am the only one that’s vulnerable
impossible…♫

Lyrics, music and recorded by John Vesely, under the pseudonym Secondhand Serenade.

The State Bar of Arizona has issued one of the first Ethics Opinions on preserving client confidentiality when placing client documents for access over the Internet. Arizona stated:

“Lawyers providing an online file storage and retrieval system for client access of documents must take reasonable precautions to protect the security and confidentiality of . . . [more]

Concluding twelve years of efforts from a lot of JTAC members, Justice Fran Kiteley, from the Ontario Superior Court and a former JTAC member, rendered the first judgment using neutral citation in R. v. ANDREW DEL RICCIO, 2010 ONSC 01. Congratulations!

As everyone will know, California’s Proposition 8, passed in November of 2008, added this section to the state constitution: “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.” On January 11, the constitutionality of that law will be challenged in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California (USDCCAND) in a case styled Perry v. Schwarzenegger. The case has elicited such public interest — see, e.g., the nifty media guide [PDF] issued by the court — that the judge in the matter has ruled that it be broadcast on YouTube.

At . . . [more]

A group of Canadian authors has launched an online petition to protest the proposed settlement intended to put an end to a class action copyright lawsuit by U.S.-based author and publisher groups over Google’s plans to make and sell digital copies of millions of books.

In November 2009, the settlement was amended so that it would now apply only to books registered with the U.S. Copyright office or published in the U.K., Australia, or Canada.

The Book Rights Registry board, the entity that will be responsible for paying authors and publishers from revenues earned by the digitization project, would also . . . [more]

The Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics (Juristat), part of the Statistics Canada organization, has released “Multiple Victimization in Canada, 2004” by Samuel Perreault, Julie Sauvé, and Mike Burns. There’s a version in HTML and in PDF.

As the title suggests, the study looked at data on repeat victimization within the population, both as concerns violent crimes against the person and crimes against property (“household crimes”). In 2004, of all Canadians who reported being victims of violent crime, rather more than a third (38%) reported being victimized multiple times, accounting for almost two thirds (60%) of all violent crimes. Of . . . [more]

In a post last Fall called Finding and Updating Canadian Federal Private Acts, I provided a link to the House of Commons Procedure and Practice (Marleau and Montpetit).

With the prorogation of Parliament and the controversy over that, it may be that researchers will be investigating Parliamentary procedure. Since my post last Fall, I see there is a new 2009 second edition of House of Commons Procedure and Practice (edited by Audrey O’Brien and Marc Bosc) available here (at a different URL), tabled in the House on November 18, 2009. I assume we can no longer refer to the . . . [more]

The interesting blog, Computational Legal Studies, has a recent post on Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s posts to the Islamic forum, Gawaher. (Abdulmutallab is the person who tried to blow up a plane on Christmas day.) All of his 310 posts have been downloaded by NEFA, which has made them available online in a zip file. (I have no idea what NEFA stands for and I’ve been unable to find out. There’s a… creepy element to this “anti-terrorism” site, though, I have to say.)

Some very basic analysis of the content of the posts has been done at . . . [more]