At Slaw we’ve referred from time to time to the practice in some US courts of declining any precedential value to cases.

This week’s Minnesota Lawyer brings the debate into sharp focus with discussions of a recent case that appears to have been buried, despite its value. The case involved whether punitive damages could be awarded in defamation cases.

In Canada, the proliferation of electronically accessible case law of dubious value makes one nostalgic for the days when a stroke of the DLR editor’s pen could consign such case law to non-existence. . . . [more]

On Friday, Google launched its “SearchWiki,” a way of customizing your own search results. I gather that they’re rolling it out according to some pattern, which means you may not see this feature in your results for a few days yet.

What you will see is illustrated below:

If, for example, Slaw hadn’t come up top in my results in a search for “slaw,” I could have moved it up there with the arrow, and ever after it would be first. For me. Which is what I don’t quite get: why exactly would I want to fix the results of . . . [more]

Everything I know about social media I learned from PR professionals in my brief career in that field prior to law.

Neville Hobson (a social media guru in the U.K. who hosts one of my first podcast subscriptions, For Immediate Release) launched an RSS feed yesterday that combined over 60 of the best PR blogs around the world.

He based the selection on a PR Network previously created by David Jones, a local PR guru based in Toronto (he also hosts one of my other first podcasts, InsidePR).

I thought it was a great idea, so I . . . [more]

Back in September I posted about the imminent launch of Europeana, the digital library, museum and archive that will share Europe’s cultural objects online with Europe and the world. Well, it launched on November 20, as scheduled, got 10,000,000 hits an hour and crashed. The site is now down until some time in December, we’re told, when it will return in a more robust form and ready for the huge digital crowds that clearly want in. Ah, the tribulations of success.

[via ::CultureLibre.ca::] . . . [more]

Perhaps many of you have already received your complementary copy of the most recent Academic Matters, a product of the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations. What you may not have noticed is the excellent, illuminating, accessible, and far-sighted article in it by McGill’s Jean-Claude Guédon: Digitizing and the Meaning of Knowledge. I cannot recommend this too highly to anyone who would like to understand, in 2000 words or less, what is happening with scholarship, the web, universities, and libraries.

The comments he devotes to the position of libraries are very insightful, and they apply to law . . . [more]

I’ve noticed that librarians, like lawyers, have a language of their own.

When I get together with another library person and we are talking about textbooks, we never say textbooks, we always say secondary sources. Secondary sources?

The Collections Canada Learning Centre provides a great definition of primary and secondary sources in the context of archival research. Wikipedia also has a well worded definition:

secondary source is a document or recording that relates or discusses information originally presented elsewhere

Secondary sources involve generalization, analysis, synthesis, interpretation, or evaluation of the original information

Since a systhesis of a topic that we . . . [more]

Slaw is pleased to announce that the Toronto Opinions Group (TOROG) has agreed to make public on Slaw memos and precedents that may prove to be helpful to others. The Toronto Opinions Group consists of a group of lawyers, primarily practising with the Toronto offices of the larger Canadian law firms, with an interest in third party (or transaction) opinion practice. TOROG meets regularly to review current opinion issues with a view, where appropriate, to discussing problems, assessing best practices and developing common approaches to opinion issues and opinion language. It does not involve itself in specific transactions or opinion . . . [more]

Yesterday I attended and spoke at Day 2 of the Canadian Law & Technology Forum in Toronto. There were several new products I learned about in addition to taking away a few new ideas, and I will try to post to SLAW some of my thoughts on the conference over the next few days on topics discussed (including outsourcing of legal services, both domestically and abroad; e-discovery; litigation case management software, really cool stuff from Adobe 9.0, and records management).

My paper and presentation was entitled “Effective Litigation Knowledge Management” in which I first discussed the explicit knowledge that litigators . . . [more]

Statistics Canada has released data on divorces in Canada for 2005. . . . [more]

The University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre has put its archive of Colonial Despatches (The colonial despatches of Vancouver Island and British Columbia 1846-1871) online:

This project aims to digitize and publish online a complete archive of the correspondence covering the period from 1846 leading to the founding of Vancouver Island in 1849, the founding of British Columbia in 1858, the annexation of Vancouver Island by British Columbia in 1866, and up to the incorporation of B.C. into the Canadian Federation in 1871.

The online archive consists of three parts, a collection of photographed original documents, a collection . . . [more]

Add this one to our long list of scams: some Canadians have received letters (both by email and Canada Post) supposedly from the Canada Revenue Agency indicating they are owed money, but that the government does not have sufficient information on file for them to forward the outstanding amount. A form is included with the letter. Fill in the form, return it and voila, your personal information is handed over to a stranger for the purpose of stealing your identity. Although the letter and T2 form look like photocopies, they look quite legitimate. The RCMP and CRA are warning . . . [more]

Links to a lengthy interview with Richard Susskind (parts 1 and 2) who continues to provoke with his explanations of how the English market for legal services is dramatically different from that in the United States, and how the Legal Services Act presages the future on this side of the Atlantic too.

One of the unplanned advantages of federal systems appears to be the way in which they militate against reforms of professional monopolies.

Good plugs for The End of Lawyers? Rethinking the nature of legal services , Richard’s book which will be imminently published by OUP.

The most . . . [more]