The Woodruff Library at Morehouse College in Atlanta has just made their collection of M.L.K. papers, books and other items available to the public. Via the website you can find the archival descriptions and other study aides. They purchased the collection in 2006 with the help of the Atlanta Mayor just before it was to go to auction, a coup for the city and an end to the controversy surrounding the estate.

From the website:

The Morehouse King Collection includes approximately 1,000 books from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s personal library with his handwritten notes throughout. In addition, there

IT World Canada has an interesting article today by Grant Gross. Last week, there was buzz about how the National Archives is concerned that the volume of e-mail may overload its servers. Now we hear that 5 million e-mails concerning the invasion of Iraq and Hurricane Katrina have disappeared.

We’re working on strategies at my office to ensure that business related e-mail gets migrated into appropriate repositories. It’ll be interesting to see over the coming months how successful we’ve been in convincing people to move e-mail into those shared repositories, and out of pst folders or other silos.

Outlook is . . . [more]

Project Gutenberg has released Pleasantries of English Courts and Lawyers: A Book about Lawyers, by John Cordy Jeaffreson, originally published in London in 1875. (The book has been variously available over the years, last published by Hein in 1974.) Gutenberg makes the book available for downloading in HTML and plain text formats, in addition to Plucker format, which is new to me but makes texts suitable for reading on smart phones and the like.

This is a quaint, not to say arch, look at life at the English bar that can be amusing and may provoke thoughts about . . . [more]

According to the Law Librarian Blog there is a message from Westlaw circulating outlining a new restrictive browser policy:

Westlaw access will be blocked when using Web browsers that are no longer supported by the companies that created them. The lack of support can create problems during Westlaw development which may result in a security risk. Users attempting to access Westlaw using one of these browsers will receive an explanatory message that offers alternatives.

Westlaw access using the following browsers will be blocked:

• Netscape (all versions)
• Mozilla Firefox versions lower than 1.5
• Safari versions lower than 2.0
• Internet Explorer versions

In a rare immersion into a point of family law for something I was researching last week, I stumbled across – by accident because I wasn’t researching it – the phrase “jactitation of marriage” as a potential cause of action and recall having stumbled across the phrase in the past, having looked up its meaning in the past, and (of course) subsequently forgetting what it meant every time I came across it.

I assume that perhaps only two of our SLAW readers know the meaning, being the two Simons, one of whom wrote a book on family law and the . . . [more]

There have been numerous blog posts in the blogosphere on Richard Susskind’s new book, The End of Lawyers? Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services, including a recent post from Adam Smith, Esq. and several SLAW posts.

I finally read the book last night and enjoyed it, although it is largely a continuation of many of the same trends in the legal profession that Susskind has previously identified, essentially being “a market pull towards commoditization and [a] pervasive development and uptake of information technology” (p. 1). However, the book remains essential reading for anyone connected to the legal . . . [more]

Traditionally, a key indicator of the quality and the utility of any case citator is the breadth and depth of its coverage. The better citators purport to cover all of the cases reported in print. Law reports published by a competitor are included as a matter of course, both as an original reference and as a correlative or parallel citation.

Online databases and “electronic citations” have not been treated in the same manner. Initially electronic citations were not seen as “legitimate” citations and were considered to be unworthy of the same attention as print citations. Case citators ignored them. There . . . [more]

“We’ve decided that it will be better for his later development if we speak to him only in legalese.”

. . . [more]

Just posted to the CanLII blog:

CanLII invites you to a user meeting in Toronto

CanLII is pleased to invite you to a user meeting in Toronto on February 11 2009. On the agenda:

• demo of SATAL – the point-in-time legislative system soon to be launched on CanLII;
• creation of a CanLII users group;
• demo of APIs developed to streamline use of CanLII content by institutional users.

The presentation will be followed by a cocktail. They ask you inform them if you plan to be present.

For more info, check their blog post for time, location and RSVP contact . . . [more]

I hadn’t seen before today the Master of Laws Guide which assembles in a single site comparative information for foreign graduate students contemplating the choice of schools where to study.

Back in the last century, when I had to face the same question, one was reduced to talking to law school teachers and colleagues about what they knew of a particular school. The amount of sheer misinformation that this generated was extraordinary. A law school’s reputation (for good or ill) lingers long after any facts may have changed.

My own advice (when asked by students) is to pick people not . . . [more]

As Simon Fodden pointed out earlier, one of the greatest limitations of Twitter is the amount of unwanted “noise” it produces,

What has to happen for Twitter to become useful and enjoyable for me is the introduction of filters or channels or folders… I need to be able to group them by my own taxonomy and then, depending on what I”m up to, screen out the noise and leave the signal.

A new service by LexBlog might help legal professionals accomplish this.

LexTweet gathers tweets from legal professionals on Twitter, which effectively creates a legal channel. The service has . . . [more]

Here’s a third in the series of short posts about Google, appropriately enough about a short form of searching, this time. A Norwegian with the screen name of Mr. Calzone has created a site that makes short work of the otherwise long Google search string: no need to go to his website first, no need to download an app: simply put your search term at the end of the string http://gog.is/ Thus, for example, a search for “slaw” would be http://gog.is/slaw. You can use more than one search term if you separate them with commas or + signs, so avoiding . . . [more]