A short while ago the first issue of the UC Irvine Law Review became available via the UC Irvine website. Given the school’s initial growing pains it is welcome to see this first issue. Many SLAW readers may remember the political controversy involving the initial offer, withdrawal of offer, and rehiring of leading US constitutional law scholar (and frequent critic of the Bush administration) Erwin Chemerinsky as the school’s Founding Dean. Dean Chemerinsky addresses the controversy in the journal’s opening article on the school’s founding and his vision for a new law school. Of interest to SLAWers is that . . . [more]

Law students or young lawyers sometimes struggle when they are faced with a complex research problem. Where do they start?

At the root of this is the need to think strategically about the problem to identify what sort of problem it is and how to best break it down into manageable pieces.

In retrospect, I realize that I in fact don’t necessarily address this challenge head on in my book, aside from citing some of the suggestions on how to analyze the facts and the law made by Maureen Fitzgerald in her Legal Problem Solving – Reasoning, Research & . . . [more]

Law library consultant Nina Platt is the editor of the new PinHawk News free daily email alert service for law librarians, the Librarian News Digest.

From the inaugural issue:

Welcome to the first issue of the daily Librarian News Digest, a free digest of news from publications and blogs on the internet that focus on topics of importance to librarians. As editor of Librarian News Digest, my goal is to track pertinent news and select what’s most important to you as a librarian. Expect to see news and ideas that help you manage, acquire, organize, research, and market your

Justia.com is now providing free daily and weekly opinion summaries for the US Supreme Court, all US federal courts of appeal, and state supreme courts. As well, free weekly opinion summaries are available for nearly sixty areas of practice. These, it would seem, are delivered by email; there doesn’t seem to be an RSS feature. If you’re curious, you can look at a sample daily email for the US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals or a sample weekly summary for the practice area of environmental law.

Needless to say, this is a powerfully impressive service and a considerable contribution . . . [more]

There’s a new Columbia research study that looks at our ever growing reliance on search engines for memory recall. Not a ton of surprises here. Yes, we’ve become more reliant, especially for certain types of information. We’re also becoming better at remembering the successful search strategies that led us to obtaining certain facts. In some cases, our memory of the search strategy is better than our recall of the trivia itself.

Oh, and three cheers for Columbia for including an embed code within their video player! So I can show you this:

. . . [more]

In a bit of tragic irony last week, I finished my post on some of Canada’s constitutional documents and hit the publish button and left Slaw to discover that Dalhousie, and indeed, Canada had suffered a terrible loss with the passing of Professor Peter Aucoin. I’m sure that many Slaw readers are familiar with the name as he was one of, if not the, preeminent scholar on Canadian government and public service; he was a key figure in many Royal Commissions and published books and journal articles of high quality, too numerous to mention here. His scholarship and contributions . . . [more]

Thank you for the kind welcome Simon. I’ve just returned fresh from a research leave where amongst other things I investigated the challenges and possibilities around creating a Canadian subject based research tool that does for Canadian Journals what the wonderful Current Index to Legal Periodicals does for US journals. I hope to talk a bit more about this project in a future entry.

In the meantime, along with many SLAW readers and contributors I have been missing the excellent Current Law Journal Content service offered by the Washington and Lee Law Lbrary. Simon has recently written about CLJC here . . . [more]

A few months ago on SLAW I mentioned the ebook initiative by LexisNexis Canada for three of their court rules / legislative services.

They have now added a fourth title, being the Canadian Federal Courts Practice 2012 (Hughes, Renaud and Horne).

The books are published in epub format and can be read in a variety of readers. Purchasers of the print version get the ebook version included as part of their purchase.

Since lawyers seem to increasingly be using the iPad and other larger screen tablet devices, I think it is useful that publishers are experimenting with ebook versions of . . . [more]

It appears that SLAW has not yet mentioned what appears to be a very useful and reasonably priced current awareness and case law service in Manitoba: Cite-on-Site Publications.

The site is run by Manitoba lawyer Brad Brooks and offers current awareness newsletters with case law summaries for the following 5 topics of Manitoba law: civil, criminal, family, first nations and municipal. Annual pricing seems extremely reasonable, with a range from $20 per year for the municipal service and $100 per year for the First Nations service, with the other services falling in between those ranges. Sample newsletters are provide . . . [more]

Some of you may know that I am celebrating the unboxing of the Mireau family treasures onto library shelving that travels most of the length of my new house. My husband and I are getting up extra early these days to enjoy our reading time before the work day begins. The alarm ringing at 5 is obnoxious but the extra minutes spent with a novel is lovely. I am secretly hoping that it continues to rain so that I can read novels for my vacation next week rather than landscape.

A few of the novels read in the past couple . . . [more]

With a hat tip to my colleague Ben Keen, who spotted the story below on the Torstar website.

“Internet Archive Canada, a small non-profit company, fired 35 of its 47 employees on Wednesday due to a massive drop in donations. Most will leave Aug. 12 unless a white knight appears soon”.

It’s difficult to find out exactly what the issue is – the website offers no explanation.

The story ends:

“The loss will be felt by more than those who will be out of work.”

Here they all are – they’ve made a major contribution in digitizing Canada’s . . . [more]

Fellow law library consultant Kathie Sullivan and I have been working together to track new collaboration tools and document the challenges that groups face in using them. New project management platforms such as Basecamp, collaborative mindmapping, and wireframe/mockup tools like Mockingbird and Balsamiq join familiar tools like wikis and Google Docs to make teamwork easier, regardless of where everyone is located. We are specifically interested in how these might be used in library and legal settings.

We are building a wiki that will document the tools and related stories (still to be made public), and will be speaking at two . . . [more]