A post earlier this week on In Custodia Legis, the blog of the Law Library of Congress in Washington, explained that the Australian federal legislative website ComLaw and the New Zealand legislative website were offering official versions of their laws.

In other words, the sites guarantee that the text that a searcher finds there (usually the PDF version) is a correct statement of the law and is admissible as evidence in court. Traditionally, only the print version of legislation from a government printer is official.

Many people are surprised to find out how few electronic versions of laws . . . [more]

My class at University of Ottawa Law is now over. But the thoughts provoked in class hopefully are not. U of O has, probably more so than other Ontario law schools, a social justice/access to justice bent and I have been critical of the CBA’s recent Reaching Equal Justice Report mostly because it is unrealistic and provides little hope for change. So it was interesting for me to see two presentations by students that focussed on ideas that should have been part of that CBA Report.

One student presented ways in which gamification could be used in legal services. It . . . [more]

The 2008 Law via the Internet conference got things started; October 3, 2011 marked the first meeting specific to the EuroLII initiative. January 2014, the EuroLII Observatory site launched with the aim at answering the question of how European countried promote and improve free access to law.

The site provides a jumping off page to the European Law overview page at WorldLII which helps searchers determine data coverage as well as search.

Some of the new content added to WorldLII January 28, 2014 includes:

Portuguese Constitutional Court Summaries
Portuguese Constitution 2005
Vatican City Laws
Bulgarian Laws
Azerbaijan Laws
Albanian Constitutional . . . [more]

The Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL) is accepting nominations for the 2014 Hugh Lawford Award for Excellence in Legal Publishing.

It honours a publisher (whether for-profit or not-for profit, corporate or non-corporate) that has demonstrated excellence by publishing a work, series, website or e-product that makes a significant contribution to legal research and scholarship.

Members as well as non-members of CALL can make nominations.

Nominations can be submitted to Cyndi Murphy, past president of CALL, before February 15, 2014.

The award honours Hugh Lawford (1933-2009), Professor of Law at Queens’ University and the founder of Quicklaw. . . . [more]

My team is consumed with rolling out the new WestlawNext Canada platform to our colleagues. This is a big job that many firms will face, so I thought I would share some things we have done to support this project.

First, as with any change, communication is key. Before we started down the rollout road, we discussed it as a library team, then with our key stakeholders – our Library Committee, and also with the Director of IT. We looked at the timing of this rollout from the perspective of capacity of our human resources, capacity of our technology (hardware . . . [more]

Canadian scientific research is under threat following the federal government making it more difficult to access scientific information and significantly down-sizing or closing federal science libraries. We are seeing a drastic reduction in accessibility to information and related literature research services needed by the Canadian scientific community, far exceeding library maintenance and restructuring that would typically be done to keep up with changing information, technology and standards.

Today CBC News reports that the main Health Canada science library has been closed. According to the news report, the closure was justified by a drop in in-house staff use of the . . . [more]

What’s in store for civil advocacy in Ontario?

It is a vexing question. No one seems to know the answer.

But here are some things we do know: fewer and fewer cases are reaching trial; fewer and fewer litigators are getting trial experience; more and more cases are being resolved through mediation; there has been no corresponding reduction in the cost of litigation or improvement in the speed of resolving disputes.

A world that offers only mediated, interest-based resolution of civil disputes is a world where the rule of law is weaker, where rights are not robust and predictable.

The . . . [more]

I’m on for a little rant today but this is significant topic, courtesy of one of my LRW students conducting some research on the Nadon appointment to the SCC (on the plus side this does drive home the point I continually try to make that you cannot exclusively rely on one source or the web all the time). Interestingly, I thought we were getting rid of all the print government publications because the Interwebs are so much more efficient and effective? Well try and find SC 2013, c 40 which received Royal Assent on December 12, 2013, over a month . . . [more]

There are some recent decisions of the Federal Court that acknowledge the necessity of using online legal research sources and seem positioned to allow law firms to charge reasonable disbursements for them. The basis for having computer research costs allowed appears to be the ability to justify both the amount claimed, how it is calculated and the relevance and necessity of the research performed.

The key to costs happiness will lie in how legal researchers keep track of their work. A researcher in a costs argument will have to explain that the disbursements for billed research on Westlaw or Quicklaw . . . [more]

It is the time of year when blogging is celebrated. The Clawbies, the Blawggies and ABA Blawg 100 winners have been announced and the ABA Blawg 100 Hall of Fame was added to. January is also a time when infrequent posters get their game on and make “this year I will post more often” promises.

Great stories have been shared on the benefits of blogging from a variety of people.

There are many benefits that have come my way from blogging. I have met some great friends, gained some street cred by being recognized by clients waiting in our . . . [more]

At the end of November, Creative Commons announced the release of an updated set of copyright licenses, dubbed version 4.0. The aim, as it has been since the start of the Creative Commons movement, is to let producers and owners of content make that content legally available for re-use by others with no conditions or some few conditions attached, depending upon the particular license chosen.

Version 4.0 contains a number of important improvements. It has greatly improved the usefulness of CC licenses around the world by taking many countries’ copyright and other laws into account. As well, the . . . [more]

UN Women, the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, a three-year-old organization, has made available online a database of those provisions in nations’ constitutions that concern gender. The Constitutional Database covers 195 countries and provides relevant passages in both the original language and English translation. It is possible to download the entire database in PDF.

The database is searchable, of course, with filters available for country, region, or type of provision (e.g. reproductive rights, marriage family rights, equality…).

[Hat tip: Blogging for Equality] . . . [more]