I had occasion recently to work with some URLs for legislation and was struck yet again by the peculiarity of fetching and “citing” statutes in this way when on or linking to the internet. I have some narrow, specific concerns, that I’ll talk about in this post; and then in Part 2 I’ll wander a bit in the land of speculation, to see how else it might be done.

Here and now I want to complain about long, illegible URLs, the kind that represent the raw output of queries to a database. This is not the first time by any . . . [more]

Simon makes a very good point. Some footnotes from this week’s internet eye:

How difficult is it to disappear, now that most routine life events require a login? Wired article:

Financially he was beyond overextended. A gadget lover whose spending always seemed to exceed his income, he had begun shifting his personal expenses to his corporate credit card — first dinner and drinks, then a washer and dryer, then family vacations. In early February, when an Eaton official emailed to inquire about his expense reports, he felt everything closing in. He began devising a plan to escape.

Even . . . [more]

This is just a quick note to say that I’ve added announcements of recent Supreme Court decisions to the roster of Twitter feeds at CanCourts (cancourts.ca). As with announcements about court of appeal judgments from Ontario, British Columbia and Quebec, these are provided by the RSS feed from CanLII, and so they are a week or more behind the actual release date.

I should mention that this link between the RSS feeds and Twitter depends upon a free service provided by RSS2Twitter.com. They depend on donations, so if you use these feeds you might feel like supporting . . . [more]

The BBC reminds us today that Microsoft’s PowerPoint (love it or loathe it) is twenty five years old.

Two Slaw contributors (Dan P and Simon C) have a sideline as the PowerPoint Twins and have illustrated the best and worst of the programme to audiences in three countries. We can dazzle you with the absolute worst slides you’ll ever see in two minutes,

Here is the handout from a presentation in Mexico and Simon F’s ambiguous relationship with the pervasive presentation tool.

Notwithstanding Edward Tufte and David Byrne, PowerPoint is here to stay.

Of course what every PowerPoint . . . [more]

New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman declared in his book that “The World is Flat,” by which he meant that globalization had levelled the playing field so that all countries might now compete on more or less the same terms. Since its first publication four years ago, technological changes have only made the world flatter yet, as anyone who has taken a look at legal outsourcing to offshore jurisdictions must realize.

Flat World Knowledge, a publisher of texts, wants us to see how technology can make books more readily and cheaply available to college and university . . . [more]

We discovered an early description of a computerized online retrieval system in the short story “How-2” by science fiction writer Clifford D. Simak. The story was published in Galaxy November, 1954.

One morning, a lawyer discovers a box with a do-it-yourself kit inside. Following the instructions for use, he builds a robot – one whose design happens to be misdelivered from the future. The lawyer is to appear in court. But his friendly robot spends the night before the trial building a new robot – a lawyer-robot.

‘”(A lawyer robot) with a far greater memory capacity than any

I had earlier asked about efforts to organize the increasing amount of legislation being digitized as a result of various efforts by academic and courthouse law libraries.

While conducting such historical legislative research online I stumbled across the Canadian Legislation Online page at the Great Library and I don’t think SLAW has yet commented on their page.

Kudos to the Great Library. They provide links to a number of the historical material, including:

– Revised Statutes of Canada, 1970

– the Canada Gazette (soon to be from 1841 to 1997) (via Library and Archives Canada) (the site works great and . . . [more]

We learned this morning of the death of Professor Hugh Lawford, a legend in Canadian legal information. He will be mourned by many students who studied with him at Queen’s University Law School, and his passing should be noted by every Canadian lawyer, because Hugh and his colleagues revolutionized how law is practiced. . . . [more]

In his regular column for Lawyers Weekly Magazine, freelance technology writer Luigi Benetton has a piece in the Aug. 21, 2009 issue on drafting and editing documents in real-time.

He discusses real-time applications like NetMeeting, and asynchronous platforms like wikis and traditional DMS. He suggests the latter are more appropriate for lawyers who don’t collaborate as smoothly together.

I point out that the efficiencies created by collaboration tools help boost lawyer productivity, which can raise billable hours and improve work/life balance. The amount of time learning new technologies is minimal compared to the returns over time.

Fostering more . . . [more]

The English legal / publishing press are taking Reed Elsevier’s current travails to speculate whether the RoI of legal publishers is sustainable.

In previous economic downturns, the London firms have not responded by making cuts to legal information budgets. This time, perhaps with the transformations that have come with with the rise of free public legal information and increased client scrutiny of disbursements, it appears to be happening.

I recall one indiscreet Canadian legal publisher tell me that their company had been profitable since inception, including the Great Depression.

Here is the English take on the issues, from the Guardian . . . [more]

One of the quotes I go back to often is a quote from a 1945 paper by the economist Hayek where he says:

The economic problem of society … is not merely a problem of how to allocate ‘given’ resources – if ‘given’ is taken to mean given to a single mind … It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society … a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality. (Friedrich Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society

The Law Commission of Ontario (LCO/CDO) has an ongoing project on the possible reform of the law of crossborder litigation, particularly the matter of judicial jurisdiction. A consultation paper has been prepared by Professor Janet Walker, a scholar in residence with the LCO/CDO, and comments were invited from members of the profession.

The Ontario Bar Association submitted its response to the consultation paper this spring, and has made its work available online in PDF. . . . [more]