Thanks to a tweet by @richards1000 I was reminded about Cornell University Library’s digitization project, which has resulted in over 2000 law books’ becoming freely available online at the Internet Archive. Slawyer Michael Lines spent some time at Cornell in 2008 and reported on the digitization project then current. As with most texts in the Internet Archive, you are able to read these materials online in an interactive version of the actual books, see or download them in plain text or PDF, or obtain them in, among others, a format suitable for Kindle or EPUB.

I’ve done a fairly . . . [more]

I have made the following enhancements to my Custom Google Search of Canadian Law Firms available at http://tinyurl.com/canadianlawfirms:

– Renamed the site to “Search Canadian Law Firm Websites, Blogs & Journals”

– added 28 more law firms to include boutiques and regional (smaller) firms for a total of 79 Canadian law firms (and I broadened URLs to include subdomains of law firms [e.g., lawfirm.ca instead of http://lawfirm.ca/*]).

– added 205 Canadian law-related blogs

– added 20 Canadian law journal websites, the BC Courthouse Library and the CBA and CBAO

– added refinement tags to refine search results to publications . . . [more]

The American Bar Association’s Technology Resource Center has launched a search engine that enables you to search the “free full-text of over 300 online law reviews and law journals” as well as some additional material. There is a list of sources searched on the page where you’ll find the search box.

Because the search facility was constructed using Google Custom Search, it only searches those resources made available online by the journals and indexed by Google. The historical depth of such material will vary greatly, of course, from journal to journal.

Sensibly, perhaps, the sources look to be all from . . . [more]

The Canadian Government stunned the telecom sector last Friday when it overturned the CRTC’s October 2009 ruling that Globalive Wireless Management Corp. was not Canadian-owned and controlled as required by section 16 of the Telecommunications Act. The variance is effective immediately which means that it’s now clear sailing for Globalive’s entry into the Canadian wireless telecommunications market. . . . [more]

Lawyers Rights Watch Canada (LRWC), an organization that assists lawyers around the world who themselves defend human rights, has published a “Protesters’ Guide to the Law of Civil Disobedience in British Columbia – Olympic Edition” [PDF].

The forty-three-page guide is anything but a sketchy pamphlet for marchers on the front line; it’s a serious, accessible, and well-written handbook. Produced by Leo McGrady originally in 1970 in connection with protests against the Vietnam war, according to a story in the Globe and Mail, and updated a number of times since then, it aims to

. . . inform

Lawrence Lessig has put out a call to make a donation to support Creative Commons. From his request:

About 8 years ago, a bunch of us started thinking about how we might make the current system of copyright work better. We wanted a voluntary system that would give people a simple way to signal the freedom they wanted their creative work to carry, so their work would say legally what most took the Net to say implicitly — share this. The result was Creative Commons, born December 16, 2002.

None of us imagined then just how quickly the idea

Dominic Jaar has an interesting article in the droit-inc blog (en français) suggesting that a printed document may have less legal impact than the electronic original, because the printout does not reproduce all the information in the original, notably not the metadata. And these days, pretty well all documents start in electronic form, in a word processing program of some sort. Who has a typewriter any more?

This is a particular issue in Quebec because of the terms of the Act to provide a legal framework for information technologies — Loi concernant le cadre juridique des technologies de l’information, . . . [more]

I hate not knowing everything. I am fairly certain that this is not a unique position among law librarians. Fortunately, people in my firm share their knowledge with me. Thanks to Field Law partner Janice Jong, I learned about Lawday.ca.

Lawday is a newsletter that has been in circulation by email for over three years. The site offers legal news from North America as well as directories of leading lawyers, arbitrators and legal experts. The site also offers aggregation of law firm newsletters every Thursday – called Law Bulletins on their site.

From the About page:

LawDay reaches

Back in October I reported that the Special Libraries Association was gearing up for a vote to change its name. The vote was closed yesterday, and the results have just been released. Members voted 3225 to 2071 to keep the SLA Name.

Today’s full SLA press release is reprinted below the fold: . . . [more]

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has just released a report on Academic Law Library Statistics 2007-2008.

Among the highlights (all dollars are in US currency):

• Out of 113 ARL university libraries, 74 responded to this survey
• Law libraries reported median values of 345,935 volumes held and 8,033 gross volumes added. Also, these libraries employed the full-time equivalent of 2,129 staff members in the fiscal year 2007–2008
• Responding libraries reported total expenditures of $215,630,657 … materials expenditures made up the largest portion of the total, with 47% of aggregated expenses falling under a materials-related category
• Law libraries reported a

Is law important?

Clearly the print media don’t think so. Look at the way in which they carve up our world — and you’ll look in vain for a category or a main topic-head, let alone a section, for law or for its fuzzy cousin, justice.

The home page menus for the big newspapers offer you a collection of stories on politics, the economy, sports, style, arts, science, cars, weather, and sometimes education and health. But never law. To look at how six highly respected English language newspapers (the Globe and Mail, the National Post, the New York Times, the . . . [more]

When I closed an old Google account over the weekend, it appears that I inadvertently deleted the Custom Google Search of Canadian law firms that I had created (and that I understand is used a fair bit by researchers).

I have created a new Custom Google Search of Canadian Law Firms, now at a new URL of:

http://www.tinyurl.com/canadianlawfirms

Click here to see a sample search result on the phrase “fiduciary duties.”

The new site is free of ads and has more Canadian law firms included (now there are 51 or the larger law firms from across the country). I also . . . [more]