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]

The unique and indefatigable Tom Bruce is the Director of the Legal Information Institute at Cornell – no need for a geographical adjective when you were the first on the block.

Yes, LII was the first – and it’s coming up to its Twentieth Anniversary – or at least an excuse for a party in Finger Lakes.

Tom explains:

The LVI conference started out as a rather clubby event for a smallish group of open-access publishers largely based in the academic world. More recently, we’ve been joined by some academic researchers in legal informatics and by a few government

One of the most popular uses of libraries and archives–especially public libraries and municipal archives–is genealogy research. I had never seen law libraries, however, used for this purpose. I was therefore surprised when watching the celebrity family history research show Who Do You Think You Are? on Friday to see Jennifer Frazier, Kentucky State Law Librarian, filling in some of the last vital pieces of the puzzle for NFL superstar Jerome Bettis.

Some of the key pieces of information in researching his family history were found in a court decision: his ancestor Abe Bougard had taken on the Illinois Central . . . [more]

Many SLAW readers will already be familiar with the excellent video legal research tutorials that the Courthouse Libraries BC have put together. If you are not I encourage you to check them out. The videos look great and really demonstrate the power of the medium as a teaching tool.

The tutorials provide the novice researcher with an excellent introduction on how to approach researching legislation and case law. For those of use who are librarians or lawyers working with students, the tutorials are a wonderful resource for supplementing and reinforcing our instruction and giving students something short and engaging . . . [more]

Recently, I made a major life change. After having been at my firm, Norton Rose Canada, for a number of years, I accepted an offer to become senior counsel, employee relations, for a major Canadian retailer. My focus is going from a mostly Quebec-based practice, to one with Canada-wide scope.

In the same vein, I’ve decided to change the focus of the blog I created (the Quebec Labour Law Blog) to give it a national and international scope. I have the benefit now of having collaborators from ex-colleagues from across the Norton Rose Group (Australia, South Africa, Germany, France, . . . [more]

Documents are at the heart of any legal system—writing’s the thing, ever since Hammurabi. And though legal documents do change in form and character, there’s a strong impulse for things to remain “the same” or at least sufficiently similar that past experience and rulings can limn the future. That’s on the surface.

The relatively recent introduction of digital documents has, perhaps paradoxically, brought about considerable and continuing change underneath. As the duck seems serene but paddles furiously below the waterline, so it is with legal “duckuments”: it’s all text above the waterline, but underneath there’s much churning as HTML, DOC, . . . [more]

On Friday the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner, Ontario released the paper Embedding Privacy into the Design of EHRs to Enable Multiple Functionalities – Win/Win authored by the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario Dr. Ann Cavoukian and Richard C. Alvarez, President and CEO of Canada Health Infoway.

From the March 2, 2012 news release:

Research indicates that Canadians have a degree of comfort with using EHR information for such purposes, as long as privacy and security protections are in place. The paper underscores the need for transparency in the way EHR information is managed and safeguarded.

This week the Supreme Court of Canada released the decision in Richard v. Time Inc., considering an appeal of prohibited business practices in marketing under Quebec’s Consumer Protection Act. John Gregory summarized the case on Slaw previously here.

The plaintiff received $1,000 in compensatory damages and $15,000 in punitive damages after he received a direct mailing from the defendant that appeared to indicate that he had won a Cash Prize of $833,337.00. The Quebec Court of Appeal reversed the trial judge’s decision in favour of the plaintiff, indicating that the campaign did not explicitly make any promises and . . . [more]