I think the new name of Westlaw Canada will be easier for a lot of users (particularly American users) compared to the old name of WestlaweCARSWELL.

The new logo is here:

The change in name is also accompanied by some improved content. I like the fact that they have “chunked together” individual paragraphs from the Canadian Encyclopedic Digest (CED) into a series of paragraphs in a single view (this avoids having to click on “next” or “previous” as much). Their commitment to update all of the CED titles in the next year or so is also very welcome (and overdue). . . . [more]

Available as of today on SSRN, “Dissents from the Bench: A Compilation of Oral Dissents Issued by U.S. Supreme Court Justices“, by Jill Duffy and Elizabeth Lambert, identifies 117 instances where justices of the the United States Supreme Court issued oral dissenting judgments. Duffy is a research librarian at the Court and Lambert is a staff attorney at the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York. The authors examined all decisions from 1969 to the present day. Curiously perhaps, oral dissents are not officially recorded as a matter of course, and some were only . . . [more]

Last week I came across the news story on the YorkRegion.com News website: Libraries fight proposed Internet Blocking (June 10, 2009). It talks about a private member’s bill in Ontario that proposes the use of Internet filters to block pornographic websites from children, and how Ontario libraries are standing up against it. Considering the Bill has been sitting at First Reading since November 19, 2008, I tried to find out why it was making the local news once again. My research did not turn up satisfactory results. . . . [more]

I’ve been attending classes this week at the University of Victoria’s DHSI. From the website:

The Digital Humanities Summer Institute provides an environment ideal to discuss, to learn about, and to advance skills in new computing technologies influencing the work of those in the Arts, Humanities and Library communities.

Perhaps the only institute of its kind, attendees come from all over the world (in my class there are people from Europe, the US, and Thailand as well as Canadians from all parts). We have grad students, professors and librarians.

To get an idea of the content, have a look . . . [more]

Slate ran a story yesterday on what research says about how gender — or sex — influences judging, “In a ‘Different’ Voice” by Deborah Rhode. This interest was sparked, of course, by the fuss over Judge Sotomayor’s remark in a speech eight years ago about how a “wise Latina woman” might judge. If the effort is to see whether a judge’s nature affects how that person would decide certain issues, it’s surely wasted effort: you don’t have to be of the “what the judge had for breakfast” school to know that judges are not fungible automatons. But drawing . . . [more]

Simon Fodden posted here last Fall about Obiter2, the wonderful Quebec-legal-research-focused website by lawyer Marco Rivard.

A colleague in Montreal pointed out to me yesterday that his site has since added a Custom Google search engine that targets Quebec/French civil law doctrine and legal information (Moteur de recherche Google ciblant la doctrine et l’information juridique).

For example, a search on “valeurs mobilieres” produced French language results here from a number of law firms and other organizations. . . . [more]

The impetus for the upcoming project on electronic medical records, to be carried out by Professor Pina D’Agostino, in assocation with the Law Commission of Ontario, was not all the notoriety around consulting contracts at eHealth Ontario, but all the talk in the news and Ontario legislature about the agency has motivated me to talk about the medical e-records project. . . . [more]

Bill Heil and Mikolaj Piskorski, a graduate student and an assistant professor, respectively, at the Harvard Business School, studied 300,000 plus Twitter users to see… well, to see what use it is. They presented their results last week in a catchily titled piece, “New Twitter Research: Men Follow Men and Nobody Tweets” on one of the HBS blogs, which has subsequently been picked up by various news media. (See today’s BBC story, for example.)

Here are some of their findings, presented in point form:

• People understand how Twitter works: 80% of users had at least one follower

The 2009 Hugh Lawford Award for Excellence in Legal Publishing awarded to Slaw.ca is well deserved recognition of the innovative and substantive contribution that Slaw is making to Canadian legal literature. Wendy Reynold’s comment that “A Blog winning a legal publishing award shows that this model is mainstream now” is very telling.

Online legal research was pioneered by Hugh Lawford who not only launched one of the first online legal research services anywhere, but also built a commercial enterprise from a university research project that dominated the Canadian online market for two decades. Through his genius, drive and determination, Hugh . . . [more]

Peg Duncan on Twitter points to an article on Law.com by an English academic, Adam Wyner, “Legal Ontologies Spin a Semantic Web.” (By the way, if you’re not following Peg on Twitter, you should be.) I was curious because of my interest in legal research and because of the the flirtation with the semantic web that Google Squared and Wolfram/Alpha seem to represent.

Obviously — to me, at least — if computers are going to be able to respond in a sophisticated, i.e. more helpful, way to our queries about law, there needs to be an agreed-upon set . . . [more]

Are you sick of us talking about Twitter yet? It seems the possibilities are only just starting to be explored. Lawyers Weekly reporter Luigi Benetton recently interviewed a few of us (including Michael Geist and Darryl Cruz of McCarthy Tétrault LLP in Toronto) for his article “Twitter in the courtroom: a fad, or here to stay?” (June 12, 2009 edition).

Some of the points discussed:

• this area is evolving quickly
• reporters “tweeting” from a trial is akin to reporters taking notes on behalf of the public
• messages on Twitter (or “tweets”) may not adequately characterize the full shape

To follow on from Carol Lynn Schafer’s post, “Do TOS Have the Final Word on our Fundamental Rights and Freedoms?“, readers might like to know that the Electronic Frontier Foundation has launched TOSBAck, a site that tracks the terms of service of 44 significant websites and notes when changes occur. Of course, there’s an RSS feed, which might be the most sensible way to keep track of what’s happening on the site. . . . [more]