The Canadian Library Association (CLA) and the Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL/ACBD) recently wrote a joint letter to top federal government officials to uphold the fundamental right of people who are incarcerated to read, learn, and access information:

Literacy and the prison library play an important role inside institutions as well as in reintegration planning. The prison library has the opportunity to mirror the outside world and help prepare the incarcerated person for release.

People serving their sentences have not given up the right to learn and to access information, including legal information. Inmates should therefore have access

This announcement from Louis Mirando was posted via the CALL listserv earlier today:

The Osgoode Hall Law School Library is pleased to announce the official launch of the Osgoode Digital Commons (http://digitalcommons.osgoode.yorku.ca/), the Osgoode Hall Law School’s official, open-access institutional repository. The launch was part of the Osgoode Research Celebration held held today as the first official event of the Osgoode @ 125 celebrations to mark the School’s 125th anniversary.

With the launch of its Digital Commons, Osgoode has become the first law school in Canada to provide free online access to its legal scholarship. The Osgoode

The Canadian Association of Law Libraries’s 2015 conference program committee has put out a call for program submissions. The conference is to be held May 3 – 6, 2015 in Moncton, New Brunswick.

TURNING THE TIDE / RENVERSER LA MARÉE is the theme for the CALL/ACBD 2015 conference. The extended economic downturn has had wide-ranging effects on law libraries and the practice of law librarianship. We will explore ways in which libraries are confronting the new economic realities and are successfully turning the tide. We will examine ways in which we can improve all our various environments, from the micro . . . [more]

The 2014 course on International Law and Legal Information from the International Association of Law Libraries is taking place right now in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Of particular interest are the Tweets being posted to Twitter with the tag #IALL2014. Today’s content is focussed largely on human rights issues.

Related links:

• #IALL2014 on Twitter
• IALL 2014 Annual course website
• Full conference programme is here (PDF)
• International Association of Law Libraries (main website)

You are invited to participate in a Chat via Twitter being hosted tomorrow by the Canadian Law Libraries. It will take place from 12 – 1 pm EST.

We are using the CBA Futures report as our jumping-off point. The questions outlined below will be posted by the @CALLACBD Twitter account and we will be using the hashtag #CALLFuture to identify tweets from the discussion.

Please join us!

CALL/ACBD is very pleased to welcome Fred Headon, Past-President of the Canadian Bar Association and Chair of the CBA Legal Futures Initiative, who will be joining us for the first part of

A recent Canada Gazette Part II shared a Statutory Instrument proclaiming the sections 200-204 of Canada’s Economic Action Plan 2014 in force as of September 30, 2014, among other things. These particular sections of the act move responsibility for the Virtual Museum of Canada to the Canadian Museum of History.

The news release informs subscribers of that Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN) will cease publishing the virtualmuseum.ca Newsletter. Subscriptions will will not be transferred over to the museum. Folks who want info on the latest trends in museums and technology are encouraged to subscribe to the CHIN Newsletter (recent . . . [more]

The debate about how to improve access to justice most often discusses what lawyers and court institutions can do.

There is another potential player: law libraries. In Canada, a few law libraries offer legal information services to the general public. But there does not seem to be much coordination of these efforts or much analysis of the contributions law libraries can and should be making.

South of the border, the attempt to address this question appears to have been more ambitious, though there is still a long way to go.

For example, the American Association of Law Libraries recently . . . [more]

The amount of information required to stay abreast of the changing law, in a general sense, is massive. Supreme Court of Canada statistics tell us that there were over 70 decisions to read from that court alone every year. Add your jurisdiction’s Court of Appeal and trial courts decisions, federal and provincial legislative changes, tribunal decisions, municipal and other delegated legislation and you have way more material than any generalist can reasonably consume.

Of course you don’t need to know it all. Many of those pieces of legal information can be learned just in time rather than just in case. . . . [more]

Last week, Doug Jasinski graced my post with a comment challenging my interest in how different media like blogs and Wikipedia articles find their way into judgments.

His question: “Do 20-year old slacker movies count as different media?”

I don’t presume, Doug, that you really expected (or wanted) my take on this, but I’m prepared to share it anyway. Doug raised an interesting article from Business Insider which talks about a Texas Supreme Court decision citing the Big Lebowski. The reasons for judgment in Kinney v. Barnes, a freedom of speech injunction matter, were released on August 29, . . . [more]

The Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL) is organizing a live “tweet chat” on Thursday, September 25 with Fred Headon, Past-President of the Canadian Bar Association and Chair of the CBA Legal Futures Initiative.

The live chat on Twitter will take place from 12 to 1PM EST and the topic will be “Does the CBA Futures Report provide opportunities for law librarians? ”

The CALL website has details on how interested law librarians (and others) can join the chat.

People can read more about the CBA Legal Futures Initiative on the CBA Futures website.

  . . . [more]

Congratulations to the folks at LawyerLocate.ca Inc., Natalie Waddell and Mark C. Robins, for launching their new Canadian law video distribution site LegalTube.ca.

The website is aimed at the public, giving easy video access on a wide range of law-related topics. The site is made up of video content from lawyers listed on LawyerLocate.ca, with videos originally housed on YouTube or Vimeo, pulling everything together by topic as well as by participant profiles (lawyers and law firms). I found the site very easy to navigate with major law topics across the top. There is also a category . . . [more]

Yesterday, September 1, 2014, the new Alberta Court of Appeal Rules came into effect. The new rules were announced on May 23, and the new rules themselves were enacted on March 12, 2014. An announcement explains:

When the Alberta Rules of Court were replaced in November,
2010, they did not contain rules for appeals to the Court of Appeal of Alberta. While we waited for these new appellate rules, the “old (1968) rules” continued to apply to appeals to the Court of Appeal. With the enactment of the new Court of Appeal rules , all of the 2010 Rules of