You know it is September when:

• The College and University crowd adds 15 minutes to your commute
• You hear yourself saying “put some protein in that lunch girls”
• Life suddenly resumes warp speed

September is proving to be interesting on the eBook front.

Sarah Glassmeyer posted to the Law Librarian Blog today about some free eBooks. These include Federal Rules of Evidence, Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, and the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. The books were compiled by the Legal Information Institute and made available through CALI‘s eLangdell Press.

There are interesting questions on a CanLII survey . . . [more]

On September 15, two legislative research experts will help to uncover the hidden gems in Ontario and federal legislation.

Caroline Hyslop is no stranger to CALL – some of you may have already attended great presentations she has given in the past. And I may be a little biased because I work with him, but Rick Sage is both an engaging speaker and experienced e-Laws spelunker.

This is the second in CALL’s 2011-12 series of webinars. More information is available at the CALL website. (Online registration available!) . . . [more]

Courtney Minick has written a post on Universal Citation for State Codes over at VoxPopuLII, a blog published at the Cornell University Law School.

She discusses the spread of universal, or vendor-neutral, citation in the United States. The bulk of the article is devoted to developing neutral citation for state laws, but one detail attracted my attention. In contrast to Canada, where neutral citation has been widely adopted for caselaw, the practice is still not very widespread South of the border:

To date, 16 states assign universal citations to their highest court opinions. (To date, Arkansas, Illinois, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi,

Publishers across the board, not just legal publishers, are under George Monbiot’s microscope in this very interesting article in The Guardian the other day. The title is enough to make you look twice — ‘Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist’.

It is a similar tale in legal publishing. We need to be aware of the added power we put into publisher hands every time we cancel a paper subscription…. . . . [more]

Jureeka! is a browser extension for Firefox and Chrome built by Michael Poulshock now in collaboration with Cornell’s Legal Information Institute that turns legal citations into hyperlinks to open access versions of the material cited.

Somewhat surprisingly, it works with some citations to British materials and to Canadian materials, principally federal statutes and Supreme Court of Canada cases on CanLII, so far as I can judge. This is no substitute for the high-end commercial products and neither for CanLII material. But if you find yourself working with US material in HTML outside either of the biggies, you might find this . . . [more]

I agree, this is not news. Our lives are getting faster and we expect to know what is happening right now in the world, not what happened five hours ago or yesterday. For those of us who work with information and live online, television and radio are often not fast enough. We expect to hear about things as they happen.

Lawyers need to stay on top of what is happening to clients so they can help respond in a timely manner. As librarians, the challenge is pulling information together so that those we serve are up to date. In the . . . [more]

Attention: what follows is not me, my head shot to the left is not representative of the following paragraphs. Over the summer we have had a library school intern working in multiple capacities at the Sir James Dunn Law Library as our student reference assistant. During this time Amanda (Andie) Bulman has become a fan of Slaw and I thought that as the summer is drawing to a close I thought I would give her a chance to craft a post for Slaw on what her experience has been like over the past several months. I gave her a . . . [more]

Bloomberg announced this morning that it was acquiring the legal publisher, BNA for $990,000,000.

Bloomberg will acquire all 25,116,830 outstanding shares of BNA for $39.50 per share in cash for a total purchase price of approximately $990 million.

It is a key development in Bloomberg’s strategy to challenge Thomson West and Reed Elsevier in the lucrative legal information market.

In Bloomberg’s history, this is only the third acquisition – they bought Businessweek and New Energy Finance in 2009. Bloomberg’s growth has all been internal and organic to date.

Normally, prices aren’t given so this one is revealing – the . . . [more]

Offered in Beta from the Office of the Law Revision Counsel of the United States House of Representatives, this new website offers excellent access to the Code.

The US Code is an official consolidation of Federal US Laws by subject, and highly useful. Its various accessories, such as the indispensable Popular Name Tool make it a first resort of legal researchers. The online version, and various commercial print versions, are not considered official for US courts. However, this particular online version will likely be the most up to date version of the code, given its provenance. . . . [more]

Last week, the Law Commission of Ontario released its proposed Draft Framework for the Law as it Affects Older Adults:

“The Framework is intended to assist with the development and evaluation of laws, policies and practices to ensure that the realities of the circumstances and experiences of older adults are taken into account, and that laws, policies and programs promote positive outcomes for these members of society.”

“It is accompanied by an extensive Interim Report, which sets out the research and analysis which form the basis for the Framework, and provides examples of its implications and implementation.”

“It is

For the last few months, I have been tracking new issues of Canadian law journals for Bora Laskin Law Library’s Recent Law Journals Tables of Contents service (July issue here) . This was as part of a bigger project, that will hopefully see the light of day someday. One of my collaborators on that project Andrea Davidson (a lawyer who is currently a masters student at the University of Western Ontario’s Faculty of Information and Media Studies) thought it was worth noting that a number of the journals we were looking at were not available on either Lexis . . . [more]

The papers recently carried the news of the death of Paul-André Crépeau, C.C., O.Q., c.r., LL.D., D.h.c., m.s.r.c., who I would argue was the most influential law reformer in Canadian legal history.

From the initial invitation in 1965 from Jean Lesage’s Justice Minister Claude Wagner to take over the Office de Révision du code civil, originally set up during the Duplessis years with Thibaudeau Rinfret and André Nadeau, Crépeau’s vision and his life work was la révision du Code civil, and under his leadership the Office focused on the daunting task of updating the general provisions of a century-old . . . [more]