Would the public tolerate giving judges discretion in the sentencing of murderers?

Are online child pornography offenders likely to commit offences involving sexual contact with children?

Are job training programs for people leaving prison useful?

These — and another four — interesting questions get addressed summarily in the current issue [PDF] of Criminological Highlights, a publication of the University of Toronto’s Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies. Although criminal law is a specialty practised by relatively few lawyers, given the present federal government’s interest in crime, it might not be a bad idea if more of us educated ourselves . . . [more]

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The Canadian Legal Information Institute — CanLII — has just introduced a refinement to its search and citation tools where legislation is concerned. Now, in the case of legislation for which CanLII provides a table of contents, when you consider a specific section or subsection, you’ll see a link to a popup that will offer you a link to cases citing that specific provision and a further link to a perfectly formed citation for that specific provision. As you’ll see in the graphic below (click on it to enlarge it), the number of citing cases is given in the popup, . . . [more]

Greg Lambert crafted a well written and thought provoking piece at 3 Geeks and a Law Blog yesterday titled “The 3 Foot Radius of the Law Library“. Greg inspired my reflection on the law library as a place vs. the law library as a service.

After thinking about it, I believe that in my organization, the library has always been about service from the librarian perspective, but may have been about place from the lawyer perspective. My team and I regularly deliver “service bubbles” in many ways:

• print based current awareness – compiled by others
• email based current

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]