The University of Virginia School of Law has launched the Gorsuch Project, a website devoted to the career of Neil Gorsuch, US President Donald Trump’s nominee to fill the vacancy left on the US Supreme Court by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016:

“Hearings on the nomination of the Honorable Neil Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court are scheduled to begin March 20 and interest in the nominee’s judicial record is high. To assist researchers, we’re proud to announce the launch of the Neil Gorsuch Project, a website that assembles all of Gorsuch’s written opinions, as well

CAIJ, the Centre d’accès à l’information juridique (the network of courthouse law libraries associated with the Québec Bar Association), has signed resource sharing agreements with many major law firms in Québec that make their legal commentary freely available on the organization’s website.

This week, CAIJ announced that it will now feature texts written by lawyers from the firm of McCarthy Tétrault. This means there are 29 law firms that share material with CAIJ in English and French.

Their material will be added to a collection that already includes full-text commentary and textbooks including the Développements récents  (annual reviews of . . . [more]

Thomas Bruce, Director of the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School, spoke before the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee specifically to the Judiciary’s Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property and the Internet who are exploring issues related to judicial transparency and ethics. Bruce mainly provides comments about PACER the “electronic public access service that allows users to obtain case and docket information online from federal appellate, district, and bankruptcy courts”.

The whole session was live streamed on February 14 and is a couple of hours long so I thought it might be useful to zoom in on . . . [more]

An inspiring event began late last week and rose to a crescendo on Saturday: the law student-driven Research-a-thon for Refugees. The 12-hour distributed pro bono legal research marathon was kickstarted in a whirlwind of spark of initiative, quick communication, outreach, collaborative effort, and perhaps a bit of collective consciousness.

The goal of #Research4Refugees was to produce a collaboratively researched document for a Canadian NGO, focusing on interpretation and application of the US-Canada safe third country agreement for arriving refugees, on a project managed by the NGO. The Canada-wide event took place on Saturday in classrooms and libraries of the . . . [more]

A couple years ago, the New Yorker ran a great, comprehensive piece on “link rot”—that scourge of dead-end links and vexing “404” errors that annoys us all and ensures the Web’s enduring reputation as an “ethereal, ephemeral, unstable, and unreliable” ravel of non-sequiturs.

The article charts the curious history of the Wayback Machine—that most indispensible weapon in the fight against link rot—and mentions the “disastrous” effects for lawyers and judges who seek to erect houses of reason on the quicksand of internet sources.

It is all quite topical given the Supreme Court of Canada’s recent move to tackle the . . . [more]

To combat link rot, the Supreme Court of Canada today launched an online archive of Internet Sources Cited in SCC Judgments (1998 – 2016).

Link rot refers to broken URLs or to URLs that direct to the original site but whose corresponding document has been removed or relocated without any information about where to find it.

From the Terms of Use:

“The Office of the Registrar of the SCC, recognizing that web pages or websites that the Court cites in its judgments may subsequently vary in content or be discontinued, has located and archived the content of most

Although legislation to legalize Cannabis is not set to be tabled until the spring, it seems as though the Canadian Senate wants to get the discussion going early.

In the Order and Notice Paper which sets out the agenda for the January 31, 2017, Senate meeting, the Honourable Senator Carignan, P.C. has laid out a number of questions on the topic of legalization that he would like discussed. Those questions include:

(a) What are the implementation costs estimated by the federal government for a system to legalize cannabis in Canada, including a breakdown of costs in the areas of hospitalization . . . [more]

There’s a new “Sponsored Subject Matter eJournal” available on the Legal Scholarship Network (LSN) called “Artificial Intelligence: Law, Policy, & Ethics.” It’s sponsored by the Vanderbilt University Law School, Program on Law & Innovation.

It’s free and you can subscribe to the current awareness alerts once you’ve set up your also free Social Science Research Network (SSRN) User HQ membership. . . . [more]

Outgoing Minister John McCallum received a standing ovation at the CBA conference for immigration lawyers in 2016. It was evident from his keynote address and from fielding questions, that he understood key issues and he had a plan for fixing some of the problems. His leadership at the department has been brief but they have managed to accomplish significant milestones. As of 10 Jan 2017, we have a new Minister, the Honourable Ahmed D. Hussen. The questions become: will this disruption in the department cause further delays to the proposed changes? And, will Minister Hussen change the focus of . . . [more]

For those of you enjoying your well-earned holiday vacation.

March 1601 wasn’t that long ago, from the sequoias and redwoods perspective; even some oaks.

From “The Workhouse: The Story of an Institution” http://www.workhouses.org.uk/Oxford/

Robert Phillis, weaver, shall be delivered unto him twenty powndes towards the settling on worcke in spynning of lynnen and in carding and sorting of wollen with the cytty and suburbes, wherein specyall regard must bee had that the idle and loytring sort be sett on workce, and yf they refuse and doe their worcke amysse, that they be punnyshed by whipping

That probably wouldn’t work under . . . [more]

The International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) has issued its “Statement on Government Provision of Public Legal Information in the Digital Age.” This Statement was prepared by members of the IFLA Law Libraries Section and endorsed by the IFLA Governing Board on December 13, 2016.

In the Statement IFLA note’s that the role of providing access to “authentic and official versions of legal materials” and ensuring that these materials are preserved in the future has changed. When dealing with print formats libraries acted as repositories and keepers of this information. In the “digital age” providing and maintaining access . . . [more]

Courthouse Libraries BC (CLBC) just launched its #CLBClawyersurvey2016. Now we’re looking for sweet, precious survey fuel to reach the moon-like destination of 350 respondents—our statistically significant sample. By “survey fuel” I mean, of course, human lawyers in BC capable of clicking through a 10-minute survey. Eligible takers can start the online survey now.

CLBC has a long history in BC. We have served lawyers and the public for over 40 years in (and beyond) dozens of branches in courthouses throughout the province. This survey is the first of its kind for us, and it should help CLBC evolve  . . . [more]