Today’s Globe and Mail carried an announcement of the death of Gaylen Duncan, whom many Slaw readers will recall as the dynamic Executive Director of the Canadian Law Information Council.

He was a witty, passionate, charming, brilliant pioneer, schooled by Michael Kirby (still in Halifax then) in the dark arts of making things happen. CLIC brought together lawyers, librarians, publishers and government – Gaylen was skilled in making us all share in his vision of what might be possible in a world where legal practice was empowered by technology and universal access to legal information. . . . [more]

As has been discussed multiple times on SLAW and based on two emails over the past few days, it appears the first phase of adding of older Supreme Court of Canada decisions to the court’s website has been completed. This is great news. I like the fact that the PDFs are of the actual Supreme Court Reports version (i.e., a PDF of the print version). See, for example:

Trust and Loan Co. v. Ruttan (1877), 1 S.C.R. 564
PDF file (40 pages): http://scc.lexum.umontreal.ca/en/1877/0rcs1-564/0rcs1-564.pdf

The message from colleague Rosalie Fox (Director of the SCC Library) to the CALL listserv was as . . . [more]

Gutenberg Canada, our local wing of the internet publisher of public domain texts, has just published its 100th e-book. For the honour, it’s chosen a 1904 publication, Osgoode Hall – Reminiscences of the Bench and Bar by lawyer James Cleland Hamilton (1836-1907).

For reasons of efficiency and ease of preservation, the Gutenberg folks often provide materials in the simplest of forms, which can make reading them — online or off — something of a chore rather than a pleasure. But I’m happy to say that for this work they’ve confined the html column of text to a readable width (but, . . . [more]

Riffing on the collaboration note in Simon’s post on Shirkey’s new book, the Library of NYU has just announced a new partnership with the Institute for the Future of the Book

The partnership will support, as their first project, new tools to advance the potential of the MediaCommons, which is an ongoing experiment in the potential of the internet to facilitate better scholarship.

One of the Institute’s most accessible inventions is the CommentPress, a WordPress extention that allows for paragraph-level comments on blog posts, reviving for the internet the traditional practice of creating marginalia. . . . [more]

For all you law and IT lovers, I am pleased to announce that Leg@l.IT is back this year! With Canada’s Privacy Commissionner, Jennifer Stoddart, and Prof. Pierre Trudel as co-presidents, three tracks with the most interesting and en vogue subjects (here is the agenda) and an impressive group of speakers, including fellow Slawers (Simon Chester, Jordan Furlong and Vincent Gautrais) and blogger (David Bilinsky), it is THE event you don’t want to miss!

Leg@l.IT is an accessible and spearheading conference, the most important of this kind in Canada, about the potential and . . . [more]

A study from the Columbia Science and Technology Law Review reportedly finds that the question of whether an exchange is a sale or a licensing agreement is not entirely a matter of contract. According to Gizmodo, Boing Boing, and Sivacracy,

…just because Sony or Amazon call it a license, that doesn’t make it so. “That’s a factual question determined by courts,”…

From the summary:

The (Potential) Legal Validity of E-book Reader Restrictions By Rajiv Batra, John Padro, Seung-Ju Paik and Sarah Calvert

Many users are unhappy that e-book readers, such as the Sony Reader and the Amazon

The latest issue of the Virginia Law Weekly contains a look back at the law school from 1958 to 1967, a period so far back in history that even I was back in school.

But I was surprised to read one sentence about the firm library:

In 1962 the head law librarian attended a meeting to assess the workability of a “computer-like” machine designed to index and retrieve whole bodies of legal information

Okay Slaw, what was this about? . . . [more]

Very neat idea:

HP BookPrep, a new offering from HP’s IdeaLab, is a print-on-demand service where you can order a book (current or out-of-print or rare or damaged) and have it produced for you as a print-ready PDF file. . . . [more]

The most recent issue of The Lawyers Weekly features an article entitled Animal law: from the classroom to the real world? that describes the emergence of animal law as a serious field of study and perhaps legal practice:

“If the law schools are any indication, animal law is a growth area. University of Toronto has just become the seventh law school to offer animal law on its curriculum, after McGill, Dalhousie, University of Alberta, University of Ottawa, University of Victoria and Université du Québec à Montréal(…)”

“Just as actually practising environmental law was seen as a pipe dream of law

A tip of the SLAW hat to SLAW’s own Steve Matthews for his article called “Who Do You Think You Are?” in this month’s edition of the CBA National magazine. Among other things, Steve writes on protecting your online brand and developing an online network. Nice work Steve. . . . [more]

We’ve blogged a couple of times about Carl Malmud’s efforts to provide free access to U.S. cases and other important documents (see: Case Law Just Wants To Be Free and Carl Malmud Publishes Cases). Now Boing Boing reports that Malmud’s efforts to gain access to U.S. federal legislative histories has run into a block in the form of Thomson West. Complied by law librarians at the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the histories have been scanned by Thomson West pursuant to a deal they made with the GAO; and now Thomson West claims an exclusive right to the documents.

Malmud . . . [more]

I earlier commented on SLAW on the problem of link rot on the web.

I am updating my “Doing Legal Research in Canada” guide on LLRX.com since I believe I last updated it in 2004 and it is out-of-date (my similar guide on NYU’s Globalex site is more current for now than the guide on LLRX.com).

As part of updating the LLRX.com guide, I was struck by the fact that easily more than 50% of the links were broken (and for some topics, it was as high as 90%). All within 3 years or so! And the existing links were . . . [more]