Well, the wait is over. Just in case you haven’t been watching, Maritime Law Book is now Compass and Compass introduced vLex Canada. There are some interesting and useful delighters with vLex Canada Open.

Delighter #1 – No barriers to entry
It is easy to sign up with no cost via two clicks by selecting your Google or Facebook credentials. Some content, like the ability to search using the MLB topic number, is available for paid subscriptions only. This makes sense. It highlights that there is value to adding information.

Delighter #2 – Look and feel
A clean screen . . . [more]

At Kobo last week, we had a guest-talk about machine learning by Sheldon Fernandez of Infusion.

After with a good grounding in deep learning systems, which mimic the human brain to a degree, we got to the interesting stuff: inscrutability, hidden factors and confounding variables. All of these pose problems to people trying to use AI, and illustrate reasons why others fear it.

Inscrutability in AIU is exactly what it is in people: an AI often cannot tell us how it arrived at a decision, or it’s description is so convoluted that it is almost worthless.

When we dig in . . . [more]

Alan Kilpatrick, a law librarian with the Law Society of Saskatchewan (LSS), wrote earlier this month on the Legal Sourcery blog about a new Primer to Legislative Research Across the Provinces and Territories published by the Vancouver Association of Law Libraries (the linked version is a reprint by the LSS).

From the text of the Primer:

“This primer to legislative research is arranged by province/territory, with each table providing answers to seven questions.

1. Do you have a centralized resource for Court Rules (either print or online)?
2. Do you have any resources that help you with Provincial Point-In-Time Research?
3. What is

We often discuss here on Slaw the future of legal publishers, especially in a digital era. Although some of them have tinkered in-house with their own technological and big data solutions, none have independently brought anything revolutionary to the market to date.

Instead, what we might expect is that these legal powerhouses will either partner up with startups, such as with Thomson Reuters and Blue J Legal last year, or will simply purchase them outright.

In some ways, these patterns are not unique. Quicklaw was first created by the late Hugh Lawford at Queen’s University in 1973. Steven McMurray . . . [more]

The website of the Québec National Assembly has created a thematic guide to the history of the Civil Code of the province from its origins in France’s Napoleonic Code of 1804 t0 today.

The guide outlines the major amendments and repeals up to and including those affecting the new Civil Code of Quebec that came into force in 1994.

For each change, the guide provides a detailed historical description with associated documents (bills, parliamentary debates, briefs or “mémoires” submitted by stakeholders in front of parliamentary committees etc.)

All the documents mentioned are available from the legislative library of the National . . . [more]

University of Alberta Copyright Librarian Amanda Wakaruk is asking people to sign the petition she started to get the Canadian government to fix Crown copyright.

Her text has been shared widely in the past few days on social media and on various librarian discussion lists:

“Canada is one of many countries stating a commitment to Open Government. It is also, conversely, one of a decreasing number of countries to retain a legal provision that gives the government the sole right to reproduce and distribute works produced for public consumption. For example, the vast majority of federal US government works

Prepared by Windsor Law Student Lois Boateng, this Table of Concordance sets out a side-by-side comparative view of Part III (Child Protection) of the Child and Family Services Act, RSO 1990, c C 11, and Part V (Child Protection) of Bill C-89, An Act to enact the Child, Youth and Family Services Act, 2016, to amend and repeal the Child and Family Services Act and to make related amendments to other Acts (41st Parl, 2nd Sess) Ontario (2017).

A very helpful tool for anyone who is interested in quickly seeing the proposed changes to this Act. . . . [more]

To a jurist or a legal draftsperson, caselaw probably looks like a reliable, elegant way to record what legislation really means, in context.

To a programmer, it looks like a collection of bugs, for a program that was badly written in the first place and isn’t being maintained by its authors any more.

The programmer then goes looking for the bug-tracker for the criminal code and there isn’t one. At this point their head explodes.

Introduction

When a statute fails to deal with an unexpected situation, the courts fix it. This is a lot like fixing bugs in programs, . . . [more]

The organizers of the 2017 Law via the Internet conference have posted a call for submissions.

The event takes place at the Rutgers Law School in Newark, New Jersey, October 19-21, 2017.

The conference brings together people from the Legal Information Institutes (LIIs) from different countries and continents that together form the Free Access to Law Movement.

The submission deadline for abstracts is July 30, 2017. Organizers are looking for papers on the following topics:

• Development and Implementation of Standards for Preserving and Presenting Legal Information
• New Initiatives in Free Access to Law
• Technical initiatives and developments in

This week is Bring a Buddy to a Section Meeting for CBA/MBA groups. For the fun of it, I attended my first meeting with the General Practitioners Section. Our resident research guru, Karen Sawatzky gave a lively and information presentation on services provided by the Law Society of Manitoba. These are free for members but the services are not widely advertised and, apparently, not widely known. Let’s fix that!

Caught in my immigration bubble, I did not expect to learn about useful services from a provincial service. I am so used to relying on our CBA Immigration listserv for . . . [more]

Google permeates everything we do. Our society could be described as a “Google generation,” for better or worse.

Some suggest that Google undermines our democracy, specifically by fostering greater inequality and eroding our notions of privacy. Others point to Google’s potential role in fighting back against “fake news,” and the crucial role that flows of information and media play in a democracy.

Google’s market share in search engines in Canada is estimated between 60% to over 90%. It’s Google’s dominance in the market that has some concerned about the centralization of power and information flows.

The broader practices of . . . [more]

Connie Crosby, President of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL), has written a letter to The Honourable Judy M. Foote, Minister of Public Services and Procurement Canada, explaining the many concerns law librarians have about the idea of discontinuing the paper publication of the annual Statutes of Canada.

The letter is in response to a CBC News report that the federal government might consider changes to legislation that requires that Canada’s annual laws be made available in print.

In her letter, Crosby calls on the government to take care before any move to a digital-only policy, in . . . [more]