LégisQuébec, the website that contains official versions of Quebec laws and regulations, this week went totally free.

The site which offers access to current and former versions of Québec statutes and regulations used to require a subscription for many of its more advanced features.

The revised site has documents in HTML, PDF or EPUB formats.

The material includes the consolidated statutes and regulations for Quebec, historic versions of legislation and regulations, the Table of Amendments to Statutes and the Table of Amendments to Regulations. Information on what period is covered by the historical versions is available in the FAQ . . . [more]

On June 6, 2016, the Ontario government announced that changes to the Customer Service Standard under the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) will come into force on July 1, 2016, and apply to all organizations providing goods, services or facilities in the province. . . . [more]

In John Willinsky’s, Scholarly Publishing Has Its Napster Moment, it’s clear that unlimited “napster”-like copying was a challenge to academic publishing, and notably to some of the large academic publishing houses that dominate legal publishing.

The situations are similar, and worldwide legal publishing seems just as concentrated, as noted by Gary Rodrigues. It’s not, however, clear if the risks are the same in the legal-publishing world, or if they apply to (law-)books.

The Common Bits

Legal publishing starts out very similarly to academic publishing, with an author who is paid for the work he does, but not for . . . [more]

(La version française suite)

A New Legal Citation Guide for Canada on the Horizon

A group of interested individuals has come together to address the challenge of uniform legal citation in Canada.

There is currently no standard legal citation guide in Canada that has been uniformly accepted by all legal sectors and institutions. In addition to existing published citation guides, various courts, law schools, law journals and publishers have developed and are using their own guides to meet their particular needs.

The Canadian public has a right to an accessible standard of legal citation that will facilitate, not hinder their . . . [more]

Disaggregate verb. used without object. Meaning: to separate into component parts. Synonyms: ventilate, distill, itemize, breakdown, subdivide.

An April 25 press release from ICLR (The Incorporated Council of Law Reporting for England and Wales) reported:

[ICLR] has started the process of disaggregating its law reports from the online services operated by LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States. Subscribers to these services based elsewhere in the world will not be affected. The process of removing ICLR content from these providers will take effect on 1 January 2017. Thereafter, the ICLR – the publisher of

Every year, the Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL) hands out the Hugh Lawford Award for Excellence in Legal Publishing.

It honours a publisher that has demonstrated excellence by publishing a work, series, website or e-product that makes a significant contribution to legal research and scholarship.

The nominees this year are:

• BC CLE Online (Continuing Legal Education Society of British Columbia): CLE Online is the home of CLEBC’s online subscription services
• Quickscribe 2.0 (Quickscribe Services Ltd.): Quickscribe provides up-to-date consolidated legislation, point-in-time legislation, and the current status of bills, regulations and Orders in Council from British Columbia
• WestlawNext Canada

Although its use is of questionable significance in the age of the internet, many of us mark our public writing, including our public legal education materials, with a copyright statement asserting an exclusive right to control the use and distribution of our work. This is a fairly normal thing to do, and almost universal among legal aid providers; after all, when you’ve sweat blood over something, you want to keep it for yourself and you don’t want to discover someone else claiming it as their own or using it for their own purposes.

I certainly felt that way and my . . . [more]

Former slaw.ca columnist and online legal publisher Sean Hocking has just launched his new Cannabis Law Report. From his base in Hong Kong, Sean has created Your Global Resource on Cannabis Law, Regulation and Cases . He describes it as the first service to document legal information about cannabis worldwide.

While I am sceptical about “global legal publishing initiatives” in general, this one may take hold. Sean has got both the timing and the content right.

None of this is rocket science but it’s all moving at a rapid pace as you know today in Canada and the states . . . [more]

The Canadian Bar Association and the Law Society of the United Kingdom have recently published a selection of guides to common legal issues. The legal help guide model deserves close attention from government and the bar as a means of improving access to justice by improving public legal literacy, a concept I’ve written about elsewhere.

Some of the existing materials

The Law Society has published twelve guides in the Common Legal Issues section of its website, covering topics like buying a home, making a will, getting a divorce, probating an estate and setting up a . . . [more]

Pretty much every organization that serves the public and sees itself as having a mandate to educate is starving for new content, and if not new content then new content providers. Libraries, drop-in and community centres and social service groups usually welcome anyone prepared to provide a seminar and, best of all, they’ll do the advertising for you.

Providing public lectures, seminars and workshops is an easy and fun way (I was going to say something more bookish like “stimulating” here, but it really is fun) to improve access to justice that will take a minimum amount of time . . . [more]

In most urban centres, you can’t swing a stick without hitting a social service or social service connected agency. Most of these agencies are glad to have any legal materials they can get their hands on, and most are willing to share the materials they have. Most importantly, each of these agencies serves a specific target population with specific legal needs.

Groups like SUCCESS Settlement Services in British Columbia, for example, help newcomers to Canada overcome language and cultural barriers; groups like the Atira Women’s Resource Centre help women dealing with abuse through advocacy and education. Various other social service . . . [more]