I like to look for law reform commission reports when doing legal research.

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.

• Alberta Law Reform Institute Final Report on Estate Administration: “In our Final Report on Estate Administration, ALRI makes a number of recommendations for reform (…) The objective of these reforms is to create clear, rational and accessible legislation that will provide guidance to estate representatives who are responsible

Here are a couple of new features in relation to searching.

1. I’ve taken to using DuckDuckGo as my basic search engine because, if they are to be believed, they don’t track my searches as some other search engines do and, consequently, don’t feed me back ads they imagine I’ll like. (I just wish the name were less silly.) I think you’ll find a bunch of things to like about it, among which is the potential to search within certain other sites through the use of a “bang” marker: !

   It’s not exactly same thing as using the site:xxxx.zzz search

The Law Library at the University of Windsor is pleased to announce two new Google Custom searches.

The first is a meta search of policing journals, magazines, reviews, reports and news feeds.
The second is a meta search of police review board decisions from across Canada.

Both are available here, along with the full list of the sites being searched:
http://www1.uwindsor.ca/law/library/research-on-policing-in-canada

This is a new addition to our offerings. Two years ago, we had also announced the creation of a meta search
for military law journals: http://www1.uwindsor.ca/law/library/canadian-military-law-articles . . . [more]

Today I read with interest Toronto law librarian Katie Thomas‘ post on the On Firmer Ground blog, “MOOCs: What’s In it for Law Librarians?“. She does a great job of outlining the availability of MOOCs (massive open online courses) for librarians.

She asks the question, though:

And what of MOOCs for law librarians? I did not find any that were purposely geared to law and librarians. There are courses on environmental law, criminal law, English common law, constitutional law and more. I think Wendy Reynolds raises a good point when she surmises in a comment on SLAW

Pieces this week in the New York Times and Jonathan Zittrain’s Future of the Internet blog brought our attention to broken or altered links in legal scholarship and in decisions of the Supreme Court of the US. The news is based on research by Professor Zittrain, Larry Lessig, and Kendra Albert, currently released as a working paper.

The paper’s abstract notes that “more than 70% of the URLs within the Harvard Law Review and other journals, and 50% of the URLs found within U.S. Supreme Court opinions do not link to the originally cited information.”

This should not be . . . [more]

Shortly after being disappointed that Oxford’s Constitutions of the World wanted money from me — my university background and the ethic of free knowledge can’t be taken out of the boy, it seems — I learn about Constitute. Here, too, are the world’s constitutions, but absent any fee.

Now, Constitute doesn’t promise to update according to a schedule (they claim they’re up-to-date as of September 2013), and though all the constitutions I’ve had a quick look at are set out in English, there’s no indication of how or by whom they were translated from their original language, this is . . . [more]

Those of you who are into legal informatics will like to know that there’s a proposal to form a new technical committee at OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) to work on “an open standard for machine-readable tagging of legal citations.” Legalcite, if the draft proposal is approved, will come up with a “tagging model” that would let content producers affix a variety of metadata to a case or statute citation in such a way that a computer could, first, recognize that the citation was just that: a legal citation; and then “understand” a number of things . . . [more]

The Law Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. recently produced a report comparing the legal situation of temporary or guest workers in 14 countries (including Canada):

“The report includes a comparative analysis and individual chapters on each country, the EU, and relevant international arrangements. It provides a general overview of a variety of immigration systems, and addresses issues such as eligibility criteria for the admission of guest workers and their families, guest workers’ recruitment and sponsorship, and visa requirements. The report further discusses the tying of temporary workers to their employers in some countries; the duration and the conditions that

CanLII launched their new site today. After several months of beta testing, plenty of opportunities for feedback, and some direct user surveys, CanLII has a new look and new functionality.

I highlighted my favourite function, the ability to have a field based search functions right up front. My use of the system will most often be the “advanced” searching. I have to acknowledge that the wide searching offered by the single entry box search interface is backed up with some excellent filtering and narrowing options that make the system flexible and user friendly.

A nice feature fo the new site . . . [more]

I am interested to see what comes out of the CanLII hackathon that took place this weekend. F. Tim Knight kindly shared slides and notes from his presentation on Friday, Linked Data and Canadian Legal Resources.

Don’t know what linked data is? Tim walks us step-by-step through what it is, some of the theoretical background of this concept, how linked data could be used, and how it might apply to Canadian legal resources (such as case law), especially using CanLII.

I especially recommend his slides with notes. In them, he encourages more open contributions of legal data:

If

At the CanLII Hackfest in Ottawa this weekend I learned, among a great many other things, about a simple, neat tool that’s already been built with the CanLII API: Common Cases. It enables you to insert up to ten URLs of cases and kicks out citations that your cases have in common. I can see how this might be a useful shortcut for researchers at some points, enabling them to zero in on a core cluster of decisions with rapidity.

The bonus feature is that on the Common Cases page you’re reminded by links of a couple of other, . . . [more]

Law reform bodies can be a great source for legal research. They often conduct widespread consultation with stakeholders, may compare how other jurisdictions deal with the same problem and they frequently dig into the history of an issue.

Here are a few examples from the past few weeks:

• Law Reform Commission of Ireland Issues Paper on Consolidation of evidence legislation: “As part of its forthcoming Report on Evidence (the ‘Report’) the Commission is considering recommending the consolidation of existing legislation concerning the law of evidence , together with reform of three areas of the law of evidence : hearsay,