We tend to focus a lot on Google on Slaw, and for good reason – it’s still the main search engine that people use to find information, including information relating to law and lawyers.

The Advanced Search function is indispensable in refining searches, especially if you’re looking for things like results from a specific date range, a different language, results on a particular website, and a certain file type. In late 2011 Google removed Advanced Search from the main search page, though it was still available through the gears tab or by direct link.

Jim Calloway lamented the move on . . . [more]

A couple of weeks ago the University of Toronto Faculty of Law hosted the Grafstein Annual Lecture in Communications. This year, Robert Darnton, the University Librarian at Harvard, spoke on “Books, Libraries & the Digital Future“. A webcast of the talk is available via the UofT’s Information Commons website.

I know a number of law librarians were disappointed to miss the talk as it was not publicised widely outside the University community. As it turned out Professor Darnton spoke to a packed house. His talk picked up on the themes in his widely read New York Review of . . . [more]

In honour of law student week I am sharing some advice for students on the differences between writing in law school and writing at a law firm. First let me remind you that I am not a lawyer. My experience in this area comes from being surrounded by legal writing – in the sources that I am responsible for evaluating and collecting in my library, in work product I assist with, read, and have responsibility for retaining for future use, in my email, on the web. I also have responsibility for training articling students in legal research and writing.

There . . . [more]

The rule of law requires that laws be widely known.

Few would dispute that Twitter can be quite useful at making things widely known.

I have been preoccupied with this idea for a little while now. Last month I wrote a piece on it for publication on Slaw (watch for it on 16 April 2012). The explosion of Twitter activity surrounding the Ontario Court of Appeal release today in Canada (Attorney General) v. Bedford, 2012 ONCA 186 confirms my belief that Twitter provides an excellent outlet for lawyers, other legal professionals and the public itself to augment the work of . . . [more]

JURIST, the legal news and commentary website based out of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, needs money. Your money.

The well-known, pioneering news site explains that it is “anticipating a significant reduction in funding (meaning several tens of thousands of dollars) from our primary benefactors”.

It needs funds to:

• Redesign the JURIST.org website
• Fully develop a mobile version of JURIST.org, as well as iPhone and Android apps
• Increase outreach efforts to JURIST’s audience
• Develop new programming, including audio and video coverage, seminars and conferences that will directly benefit our community
• Cover costs associated with managing our

Last week Mary Abraham (Above and Beyond KM) asked What’s the Right Question for a Better Answer? Mary’s thought provoking post discussed an experience with preparing questions to get expert advice and realizing that the questions could shape the answer, limit the conversation, and possibly lead to an undesired or lengthy outcome.

By setting out the questions beforehand, I had limited the range of answers and set up false boundaries for our conversation.

I filter Mary’s post with my legal research goggles on. From the librarian perspective, we know to ask open ended questions, identify what the researcher has already . . . [more]

[ UPDATE (March 19, 5 pm): As you will see from the comment below from Colin Lachance, the judgment has now been restored. So far as I can determine, no element of the court’s criticism has been altered. ]

Slaw has learned that the judgment of Justice David Brown in Romspen Investment Corp. v. 617666 Canada Ltd 2012 ONSC 1727 has been withdrawn from all publishers’ electronic databases pursuant to the request of the court administration. The request said that the decision had been “sent to publication in error,” and asked that publishers “remove [it] from your records and destroy . . . [more]

I vividly remember the salesperson coming to our home as a child, brandishing the 32 shiny, leather-bound volumes. “This,” he said, “is the Encyclopedia Britannica.” Although we had the Vic-20, we simply didn’t have the same access to information online that we do today. As an insatiable bookworm who already professed an encyclopedic knowledge on everything I claimed to be right about, I was completely enthralled.

We ended up settling for the Britannica Children’s Encyclopedia. As I recall it met its eventual demise being cut up into pieces for its pretty pictures for use in elementary school projects in . . . [more]

GPO Access, the online disseminator of official U.S. government publications, is shutting down permanently tomorrow, March 16th. It has gradually been replaced over the past two years by the new FDsys or Federal Digital System.

FDsys offers authentic, digitally signed PDF documents from dozens of different collections of U.S. Federal Government information (Congressional, Presidential, judicial and federal agency materials)

Some of the new system’s highlights:

• Information is preserved for permanent public access
• Search multiple publications at once
• Conduct complex searches
• Narrow, sort, and filter search results
• Access documents in multiple file formats
• Access metadata in standard XML formats

Sarah Glassmeyer, Faculty Services and Outreach Librarian & Assistant Professor of Law, Valparaiso University School of Law, has made available her Legal Research Flowchart, which you see below. Though it’s a process for discovering U.S. law, it’s got a lot to recommend it universally.

You can follow Professor Glassmeyer (“Information liberator. Coffee achiever.”) on Twitter @sglassmeyer.

Click on the image to enlarge it. . . . [more]

Much has been written on SLAW about the fairly recent 7th edition of the Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation (known as the McGill Guide, red in colour, and published by Carswell), including a lengthy 21 September 2010 post by John Davis that includes links to prior posts.

Although I was initially against the “radical” change to remove periods from most citations, I have since come to prefer the simplicity of removing periods on citations to legal documents over which I have editorial control.

However, the focus of the guide (understandably) is on citation style for your footnotes . . . [more]

Check out Virginia Decoded. It’s a new presentation of that state’s code aimed at making it easier for ordinary human beings to get access to the laws that govern them. Virginia Decoded is the first state to get to beta in The State Decoded program, a private, not-for-profit venture. The legal material is provided by the state via LexisNexis, which marks it up with SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), enabling the Decoded folks to manipulate it appropriately.

Canadians used to CanLII may be a trifle blasé, or even smug, about this development. It is the case that Americans . . . [more]