Or rather the value of access to Halsbury’s Laws. That’s the issue that the English courts must decide in a breach of contract claim involving a Reed-Elsevier legal author and the Anglo-Dutch legal publishing conglomerate.

English silk, David Phillips is suing the English division of the publisher, trading as LexisNexis Butterworths, for £316,730 including interest and costs.

Legal publishers aren’t used to being sued.

The claim alleges that LexisNexis breached a deal with Phillips’ father a High Court judge who edited the Income Tax volume of Halsbury’s in the 1970s. I suspect that his Lordship didn’t think it . . . [more]

We encourage you to take a look at our friend Jordan Furlong’s provocation to his legal publishing colleagues:

Stop.
Time out. Stop doing what we’ve always been doing. Put aside the deadlines and schedules for a moment. Put down the pen, those of us still using one. Push back from the keyboard, take a deep breath, and close our eyes. Make a mental list of all of our longstanding assumptions about this industry — what we produce, how we sell it, who buys it. Now, throw all these assumptions out, because it’s just about time for us to reinvent

Some time back we posted about Google’s wisdom of the crowds encyclopedia knol, the idea being that it would be useful to have experts write about what they know and authenticate the pieces by attaching their names and info to them. Google now tells us that the experimental phase is over and you, too, can contribute to the store of the world’s knowledge by either writing your own knol or by making suggestions to those of others, suggestions they’re free to accept or not, of course (a process Google has called “moderated collaboration”).

I have to say that thus . . . [more]

When a shift away from law is wanted, you might take a look at Robbins Library Notes, a blog by Jason Pannone, Librarian at Robbins Library, Department of Philosophy, Harvard University.

Incidentally, his is one of the many blogs facilitated by the Berkman Center‘s offer of a free blog to anyone with a Harvard or Radcliffe email address. I haven’t been able to find a decent listing of all such blogs, but there is a page setting out the 40 most recently updated Harvard blogs, if you want to see what Crimson is up to. . . . [more]

The ninth International Conference on Law Via the Internet will be held this year in Florence, on October 30 and 31, and is to be hosted by the Institute of Legal Information Theory and Techniques of the Italian National Research Council. The topics to be discussed are as follows:

* Free access to law: the situation in different geographic areas
* Legal aspects concerning management, creation and filing of digital information
* Legal blogs and wikis
* Open legal archives
* Quality of legal information available on the web
* Right to legal information as a fundamental right
* Semantic

CanLII has introduced a new search screen, called Database Search, that uses AJAX to let you tag all the databases you’d like to search with your terms. You can see a (somewhat edited) shot of the page below:

. . . [more]

The Texas Digital Library, a consortium of Texas universities, publishes the open access Journal of Digital Information. The contents of the curent issue (Vol 9, No 27 (2008)) will give you an idea of its scope, if you’re not already familiar with the publication:

• Developing and Sustaining the Northwest Digital Archives, by Alan Kevin Cornish and Trevor James Bond
• Tagging tagging. Analysing user keywords in scientific bibliography management systems, by Christian Wolff, Markus Heckner and Susanne Mühlbacher
• Digital (Library Services) and (Digital Library) Services, by Jeffrey Pomerantz

[via Digital Koans] . . . [more]

Al Podboy, Director of Library Services at Baker Hostetler, has some useful and provocative thoughts on Law.com about law librarians and their relationship to vendors: . . . [more]

While we have mentioned situations where important provisions have been dropped into miscellaneous statutes, the NYT, Volokh and the ZDNet blog is reporting a quite extraordinary case where the litigants and the US Supreme Court appear to have completely overlooked a relevant statutory provision¹, for a couple of reasons:

it got dropped into an elephantine budget measure for military appropriations
the major legal databases apparently scant the relevance of military law

Both sides and the Judges involved in a recent U.S. Supreme Court judgment missed the applicability of an explicitly on-topic Act of Congress: the military justice provisions

Library and Archives Canada has a new online exhibit devoted to the life and career of one of the architects of Confederation, Canada’s first Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald:

“As well as presenting an exhibition of photographs, documentary art and other unique records held at Library and Archives Canada, this Web project introduces tens of thousands of pages from Macdonald’s political papers and correspondence that will be made available online for the first time in 2008, enabling all Canadians to learn about Macdonald’s life, career and legacy.”

It is also possible to read his biography in the Dictionary . . . [more]

Law librarians dutifully tell their students that s. 11(3)(c) of the Statutory Instruments Regulation, C.R.C. 1978, c. 1509 requires that proclamations must be published in the Canada Gazette, Part II. We also them show them various alternative ways to find coming into force information, including, among other things, the Orders-in-Council website.

This week, however, I experienced “proclamation by media release” regarding the coming into force of the Wage Earner Protection Act and subsequent amendments to the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act and the Companies Creditors Arrangement Act. This Act was “proclaimed in force” by the Minister in a . . . [more]

We’ve mentioned Carall’s ((Note that the website at http://www.carallnet.org/ appears to be defunct and isn’t operating)) annual conference before but they’ve scored a coup at their Jamaica conference this year in getting both the Attorney General and Minister of Justice Senator Dorothy Lightbourne and the Chief Justice of Jamaica Zaila McCalla to speak about the importance of law librarians, as well as difficulty attracting graduates to the legal system.
. . . [more]