From Saturday’s Guardian – here is the complete transcript.

The NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden, has urged lawyers, journalists, doctors, accountants, priests and others with a duty to protect confidentiality to upgrade security in the wake of the spy surveillance revelations.

Snowden said professionals were failing in their obligations to their clients, sources, patients and parishioners in what he described as a new and challenging world.

No matter how careful you are from that point on, no matter how sophisticated your source, journalists have to be sure that they make no mistakes at all in the very beginning to the

Today I’m daydreaming of Italy …

“The district of Ravenna lies in the north east of Italy, some 80 km (50 miles) from Bologna, the regional capital of Emilia Romagna. Ravenna is the second largest commune as per land area in Italy.”

If you need a good excuse to travel to Italy this may be the perfect opportunity.

The Summer School LEX programme is taking place in Ravena the first week of September. This is “an intensive 6-day, 8-hour-a-day program, that requires participants’ total dedication and intellectual commitment.”

• September 1-2: Basic Module (an introduction to XML web technologies

Here’s another post under the “social media law” umbrella—this time about what intelligible advice, if any, lawyers can bank on when it comes to directing their own clients to “clean up” social media accounts. It’s not the first time this has been canvassed here on Slaw, as John Gregory’s post from earlier this year attests, but since I recently prepared materials for a webinar on social media as evidence, and in the course of that started a trial run of X1 Social Discovery (which is what the Department of Justice, RCMP, and at least two major Canadian law firms are . . . [more]

The Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL) has just published summaries of many of the sessions at its most recent annual conference held in late May in Winnipeg. Here are a few of the sessions for which CALL has prepared summaries (the list is not exhaustive):

• Legal research instruction: a whole new classroom, Eunice Friesen, University of Manitoba (May 26, 2014)
• Mysteries of government information revealed, Erica Anderson (Ontario Legislative Library), Susan Barker (University of Toronto Bora Laskin Law Library) and Wendy Reynolds (Ontario Legislative Library) (May 26, 2014)
• Notes from the road to access to justice,

Legal researchers too often overlook law reform commission reports as sources of vital information and analysis.

Law commissions consult widely with stakeholders, sometimes compare how other jurisdictions have dealt with the same problem and they frequently dig into the history of an issue.

Here are a few reports released in the past few weeks.

• British Columbia Law Institute Report Proposes Franchise Act : The report recommends that British Columbia become the 6th Canadian province to adopt franchise legislation. The report analyzes franchise legislation in force in Canada, the U.S., and elsewhere, and contains a detailed legislative proposal with commentary. Alberta,

How do you get started with Knowledge Management (KM) in the legal profession?

I get approached on a regular basis with this question by small law firms that want to have the advantages of the larger firms, by lawyers or librarians who want to become part of an existing KM team in a larger firm, or by individuals hired into firms to lead KM initiatives. There are programs specific to Knowledge Management that exist, but there is not a lot of introductory material specific to the legal industry.

I recently sat down with Garry Wise of Wise Law so he . . . [more]

Anyone following the possibilities of visualizing law will be interested in Robert Ambrogi‘s recent cover story in the ABA Journal, “Visual law services are worth a thousand words—and big money.” Ambrogi is a lawyer and consultant who has been writing about legal technology and social media for a couple of decades.

He provides a nice overview of the current players working in the visualization of legal research. He begin’s with Ravel, the “legal research alternative” developed by David Lewis and Nicholas Reed at Stanford Law School and Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design. When . . . [more]

This is a follow-up to last week’s Slaw.ca post Law Library of Congress Report on Restrictions on Genetically Modified Organisms.

The Law Library of Congress has recently released two other comparative law reports. They are:

• Child Restraint and Seat Belt Regulations: “This report contains citations to the laws on seat belt use in Antigua and Barbuda, Australia, Bahamas, Brazil, Canada, China, Cyprus, Egypt, England and Wales, Fiji, Ghana, Indonesia, Kiribati, Malta, Nauru, Netherlands, New Zealand, Oman, Philippines, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkey, and Vietnam, with information on provisions concerning children where available.”

The Canadian Association of Law Libraries List (CALL-L) is an e-mail discussion list fostering an interest in and discussion on law librarianship in Canada. A message went out today from CALL-L list owner/manager Susan Jones at the University of New Brunswick to all subscribers asking us to “opt in” to being on the list.

This measure is being taken to comply with Canada’s new anti-spam legislation coming into force on July 1st. While the list itself is not a commercial vehicle, some of the messages posted may be interpreted as such. From the message to subscribers:

CALL-L is used by

In a response to GitHub: Where Law Meets Technology? (The Sequel …) Ben let me know about a project developed in France that visualizes legislation called La Fabrique de la Loi. This is is a collaborative project launched in 2011 involving Regards Citizens, an association that promotes the liberation and reuse of parliamentary data for democratic purposes, and two research teams at Sciences Po Paris, the Centre for European Studies and médialab.

La Fabrique de la Loi provides visualizations that reveal the evolution of the law as it passes through the various stages of parliament. Here for . . . [more]

The Law Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. has published a new comparative law report on Restrictions on Genetically Modified Organisms.

The report analyzes legislation on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and genetically modified (GM) plants and foods in Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Egypt, England and Wales, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Lebanon, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, the Russian Federation, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, and the United States.

There is also a bibliography.

Earlier comparative law reports from the Law Library of Congress have covered topics such as:

• Adjudication of Sexual Offenses in Military Justice

This year’s CALL/ACBD conference ended about two weeks ago, and we’ve seen a few posts on impressions of the conference and selected sessions.

A frequent highlight is the pre-conference workshop and the opportunity it offers to dive deeply into a topic in which colleagues specialize. This year, as noted previously on Slaw, F. Tim Knight of Osgoode’s library and Sarah Sutherland of CanLII offered a timely presentation on the semantic web and legal information.

I wasn’t able to attend it because of another commitment. However, thanks to the institutional repository at York, Creative Commons licensing, and—most notably—the generosity and . . . [more]