A press release shared that William S. Hein & Co. and Fastcase announced a publishing partnership today. Hein will share federal and state case law to subscribers via links provided by Fastcase. Fastcase will integrate HeinOnline’s law review and historical legislation. The press release goes into greater detail about the linkages and even discusses how customers will see this material.

This is pretty exciting news. I am looking forward to hearing the reactions of AALL Members at the American Association of Law Libraries 106th Annual Meeting and Conference which kicks off this coming weekend. . . . [more]

Recently my friend and colleague (and fellow Slaw-yer) Joan Rataic-Lang and I spent five six weeks walking the historic pilgrimage route, the Camino Frances, which for us started in St. Jean Pied-de-Port, France, and carried us through the Pyrenees and across northern Spain–a total of 780 km. We learned many personal lessons along the way, but surprisingly we also learned many things that apply to work. I thought it time to start sharing some of what I learned.

Most days we got up at 6 am and started our walk at 7 am. Ideally we would have some yoghurt . . . [more]

Summer has finally arrived. The on purpose plantings have finally overtaken the weeds and the chickens are big enough that they don’t have to be chased indoors at night. These are signs that it is past time to execute the big summer project.

The big summer project this year is adding to the firm archives. Part of the library portfolio at my firm is collecting, describing, and housing the firm archives. We had a consultant work up a plan for archival description, set up a holdings list, and start the archives collection a couple of years ago. We have a . . . [more]

Today’s conclusion of the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) 2012-2013 session calendar— after a burst of some high-profile opinions—is an opportune occasion for a reminder of the fantastic resource that is SCOTUSblog. The site’s been around since the relatively early days of blogs—2002—and it has been discussed or referenced on this blog a few times. Indeed, a Google search for “SCOTUS” returns SCOTUSblog before it does the home for SCOTUS itself:

SCOTUSblog can be seen as a superb example of an excellent public resource supported by commercial partners, including a legal publisher. It started small and rather . . . [more]

On Thursday, the retiring English Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer QC, published final guidelines for crown counsel on the approach they should take in cases involving communications sent via social media. The approach they take could be usefully read by Canada’s prosecutors.

First step is to assess the content of the communication and the conduct in question. It distinguishes between :

Communications which may constitute credible threats of violence to the person or damage to property.

Communications which specifically target an individual or individuals and which may constitute harassment or stalking.

Communications which may amount to a breach

Actually, the big news, of course, is that the U.S. Library of Congress has integrated its web archives into its main web search function. For quite some time now, LOC has been archiving significant websites, of which Slaw is one. At the moment there are 940 such sites being archived. Though archiving began in 2008, the archives of Slaw contain some posts reaching back to its inception in 2005 but extend only up to 2010, because the archiving process lags by a few years. (As a digital archivist at LOC explained to me by email, “We do have an . . . [more]

Yesterday the Digital Public Library of America launched a partnership with HathiTrust, marrying the preservation mission of one with the access strengths of the other. The partnership will have the DPLA—itself only a couple of months post-launch—employ HathiTrust’s metadata to improve discoverability of and access to that content in HathiTrust that is in the public domain or otherwise freely available. HathiTrust’s own discovery and access platform will continue to develop as well. As has been noted previously here and elsewhere, HathiTrust preserves a fair amount of content useful for legal research.

Details of the partnership are in yesterday’s . . . [more]

A brand new peer-reviewed academic journal has just come into being and is issuing a call for papers. The Journal of Open Access to Law (JOAL) is a project of Cornell’s Legal Information Institute (LII), the Italian National Research Council’s Institute of Legal Information Theory and Techniques (ITTIG-CNR), and the Institute of Law and Technology (IDT) of the Autonomous University in Barcelona.

From the main web page:

JOAL is an open-access, peer-reviewed academic journal of international scope. Its purpose is to promote international research on the topic of open access to law.

JOAL provides

I used to have a working VHS player and a copy of the movie Speed. Often a scene from the movie will pop into my (overactive?) mind when I am looking for legislation from my desk:

01:03:38 – Jack, what did he say?
01:03:42 – What’s the matter?
01:03:49 – There’s a gap in the freeway. – What?
01:03:53 – What do you mean? – How big is a gap?
01:03:56 – 50 feet. A couple of miles ahead.

I remember when looking for legislation at my desk was rarely a reasonable option. Today, if I can’t browse my . . . [more]

The name of Dwight Opperman will be familiar to older members of the Slaw community – he was the former head of the West Publishing Company, who presided over the sale of the premier US legal publishing company to Thomson.

Back in 1996 he sold West for $3.4 billion. According to Wikipedia, in 2002, Forbes 400 ranked Opperman as the 239th richest person in the United States – and I’m willing to wager that no-one else (before or since) has made quite as much out of legal publishing. He started out as the son of a railroad worker, whose . . . [more]

I occasionally like to draw attention to the wealth of information that can be found in law commission reports.

When I help people with research or do a training session, I like to remind them that law reform bodies often deal with important public policy issues that are not on the government agenda but may nevertheless require critical analysis and potential reform. And judges who often need to address difficult or novel legal issues do refer to law reform publications in their judgments [a simple caselaw search in CanLII for the expression “law reform commission” produces close to 1700 . . . [more]

The Spectator, which bills itself as “the oldest continuously published magazine in the English language,” has put online its archives, dating back to its inception in 1828. The Spectator is a relatively small-circulation, conservative-oriented publication in the United Kingdom.

This is not strictly a law-related matter, of course; but general research sources are worth noting and bookmarking for a possible future legal use when they are of this historical depth. And from a brief trial run I can say that it seems that the magazine has done the archiving very well indeed, with text items digitized and also . . . [more]