“You can’t do much without a brain. Decapitation is, in most instances, associated with a decline in IQ.” (my emphasis)

Hmmmm…..

Never mind.

On the other hand (so to speak)

Still, I’m going to assume that the emphasized phase shows that the writer-author of this bon mot has been in court recently. A tip of hat, so to speak. . . . [more]

KM Space, the excellent BLOG of Doug Cornelius, has a post today on the Microsoft purchase of a 1.6% interest in Facebook.

It’s easy to stop at the fact that this purchase values Facebook at $15 billion. Discussions with colleagues have yet to reveal the importance of Facebook in the business world (admittedly, I also thought that the internet would never last.) On what basis did Microsoft come to the conclusion that this investment makes sense?

Doug’s post suggests that an enterprise version of Facebook, delivered on the SharePoint platform, may be the goal. While SharePoint doesn’t have the name . . . [more]

The ICT Regulatory Decisions Clearinghouse (ICTDec) is an online resource that provides a one-stop access point to decisions originating from ICT [information and communication technology] decision making bodies such as telecommunications regulators, industry ombudsmen and specialized dispute resolution tribunals. Currently, ICTDec provides unified and simplified access to thousands of decisions available on the Web, as well as to selected decisions unavailable online.

…thanks to the World Bank and LexUM working together. . . . [more]

Some of us might find this handy:

The Canadian federal government just launched a website with information on unhealthy and unsafe food and child products. I haven’t used it yet, but the Globe and Mail says we can search for information by keyword, date, or product or company name. We can also browse product recalls going back 10 years. . . . [more]

I’m blogging from the LexUM conference Conférence Internet pour le droit / Law Via the Internet Conference, live. At the moment, Justice Bastarache is telling us that the Supreme Court of Canada is planning to make factums available online next year, at least in some measure. He is explaining all of the issues that the Court is currently considering, as it struggles to develop a workable policy concerning the electronic publication of these documents. The Court has not yet decided whether and how to “clean” the files of sensitive business or personal information; they are still consulting, but a . . . [more]

Following my jubilant post on Thanksgiving about all major English Canadian legal publishers now having new title RSS feeds, in her recent post Why Can’t We Be More Like Canada? UK librarian lo-fi librarian bemoaned that UK publishers are behind and have not equally taken up the call.

In response, legal publishing consultant Nick Holmes has now put together his own sample RSS feeds for Sweet & Maxwell and Jordans in an effort to urge the publishers on. He discussed the effort on his blog Binary Law in the blog post Feeding the five thousand (2) . lo-fi seems pleased . . . [more]

I earlier commented on the blog called Precedent-The New Rules of Law and Style, as did Jordan Furlong, here.

Well, that site has now been revamped as part of the launch of a new magazine under the same name published by Law and Style Media Inc. and edited by Melissa Kluger (she was key in getting Ultra Vires, the U of Toronto law student law school paper off the ground).

I unfortunately missed the magazine launch last night since I was not feeling well. I suspect, however, the magazine will do well since it fills a gap by . . . [more]

So the Hogwarts’ Headmaster was. So much for innocence. In a pre-wired, pre-web connected world, would it have mattered? Will this effect sales? Will there be be some re-enactments of Fahrenheit 451? Celsius 232.78 doesn’t quite have the same ring. Or class actions commenced by entrepreneurial legalists seeing the return of their clients’ ill-obtained shekels? Or alleging intentional or reckless or at least negligent infliction of mental suffering on the sensitive souls nurtured in the gentility of NASCAR ?

Off to more important matters. I think I can add to the discussion that Barbara Johnson has started in her Slaw . . . [more]

I’ve blogged a couple of times already about Zotero, that impressive Firefox extension that operates as a note-taker and bibliographic software. Zotero can tell when you’re viewing a book or an article or, now, a legal judgment, but until recently it had no category, if you like, for blog entry. That’s changed.

COinS (ContextObjects in Spans) is a simple way of embedding citation metadata in web pages. Zotero developed a WordPress plugin that uses the COinS specification for making basic metadata available to it. ((There seems to be a problem with the way the plugin interacts with version 2.2.2 . . . [more]

Microsoft’s Live Search has a “Books” section that lets you search for and within the books that Microsoft is scanning for those libraries with which it is partnering. Material in the public domain is 100% searchable, readable on line and, typically, capable of being downloaded in PDF.

I did a very crude search (Canada and Canada AND law) — there doesn’t seem to be an advanced search feature in Live Search Books — and came up with hundreds and hundreds of hits. There is truly a treasure trove here for legal historians and historians of law. . . . [more]

From the International Herald Tribune article, “Research libraries close their books to Google and Microsoft,” by Katie Hafner:

The Boston Library Consortium, a group of 19 New England institutions ((:The members of the BLC are Boston College, Boston Public Library, Boston University, Brandeis University, Brown University, the Marine Biological Laboratory & Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, MIT, Northeastern University, the State Library of Massachusetts, Tufts University, University of Connecticut, University of Massachusetts Amherst, University of Massachusetts Boston, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, University of Massachusetts Lowell, University of Massachusetts Medical Center, University of New Hampshire, Wellesley College, and Williams College” . . . [more]

I’ve just come across the site for a conference given at Berkeley early in the year: Law and the Emotions: New Directions in Scholarship and I have to say the topic was a new one for me. A couple of the papers may give you a sense of the thing:

• Cheshire Calhoun, Department of Philosophy, Colby College, “Hope Matters” [abstract] [full paper PDF]
• Owen Jones, Vanderbilt University Law School & Department of Biological Sciences, “Biology, Emotions, and Law” [abstract PDF] [precis PDF]
• Dan Kahan, Yale Law School, “Two Conceptions of Emotion in Risk Regulation” [