In light of the recent “birthdays” of each of Canada and the United States this past week, I am somewhat re-assured of my Canadianness in noting the differences in media reporting over the relatively notorious jury verdicts on different trials released in the past few days.

Both cases are tragic since they both involved the killing of young children.

In both trials, the accused parents were found not guilty, albeit for different reasons, perhaps surpringsly so based on media accounts (but not apparently too surprising for the respective jurors who sat through weeks of testimony hearing all of the evidence). . . . [more]

On Firmer Ground is a brand new blog site by and for law firm librarians. It is a collaborative effort of the Legal Division of the Special Libraries Association, the Private Law Libraries Special Interest Section of the American Association of Law Libraries, the Canadian Association of Law Libraries/L’Association canadienne des bibliothèques de droit and the British and Irish Association of Law Librarians.

OFG is an ongoing discussion about the challenges law firm librarians face and strategies for surmounting them. We are not here to merely talk about the state of our industry. We are here to discuss proactive solutions

In mid-May, the Council of Canadian Academic Law Library Directors adopted the Calgary Statement on Free Access to Legal Information.

The Statement, that promotes the principles of open access in legal scholarly publishing in Canada and free access to legal information in society, follows the Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship adopted by the law libraries of major American universities in late 2008.

The Durham statement called for two things: (1) open access publication of law school–published journals; and (2) an end to print publication of law journals, coupled with a commitment to keeping the electronic versions . . . [more]

Ubaka Ogbogu, Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Alberta is writing what I expect will be a very useful blog called Health Law in British North America. The blog is very new – there are only a couple of posts, but they lead to some interesting places in google books – historical statutes of Canada for example.

I like that the blog links to places I rarely visit:
British Library: Canadian Collections
History Matters
NLM:Medicine in the Americas, 1619-1920
SSRN Legal History Page

Professor Ogbogu’s teaching and research interests include health law, law and bioethics, law . . . [more]

Last week Simon linked to the piece in the New York Times which described the remarkable trend in the USSC towards resorting to dictionaries to determine legal meaning.

The US doctrinal literature has quite a history in a trilogy of articles by Judge Samuel A. Thumma & Jeffrey L. Kirchmeier, The Lexicon Has Become a Fortress: The United States Supreme Court’s Use of Dictionaries, 47 Buff. L. Rev. 227 (1999); Appendix A, Appendix B, The Lexicon Remains a Fortress: An Update, 5 Green Bag 51 (2001), and Scaling the Lexicon Fortress: The United States Supreme . . . [more]

…For Ice Cream or more properly “Iced” Cream, (this is one of those words that we have slang-ed much like Web Log to Blog). As we approach the Summer Solstice, the first day of summer, on Tuesday of next week, it’s time to celebrate our (all-too-brief) summer, notwithstanding that many of us have not experienced much summer-like weather yet. Nonetheless, I have already experienced more than one ice cream headache aka. brain freeze, cold stimulus headache or more accurately sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia (say that 3 times fast). It is generally agreed that the feeling of someone driving an ice pick into . . . [more]

I have made some updates to my legal research and writing website:

1) Knowledge Management

I have added on my website a page devoted to Knowledge Management that provides some basic information on knowledge management in the legal profession, along with links to various resources. When I wrote the third edition of my book last year, I added what was a brand-new chapter to the book on knowledge management. It was only during my presentation last week at the New Law Librarians’ Institute (see my previous post) did it dawn on me that the accompanying website lacked information . . . [more]

I’m an unabashed fan of TED. I’m not referring to Mr. Tjaden, although there is much to admire about the new Treasurer of CALL, but rather to the Technology, Entertainment and Design conference. This has been a source of inspiration, challenge and new ideas for me for years, and I’m certain that many of the SLAW community hold it in similar regard.

Imagine my delight when I learned that the University of Toronto will be hosting a TEDx event! The details on the speakers have been emerging over the last couple of weeks, and registration opens tonight at . . . [more]

My sense is the the inaugural New Law Librarians’ Institute last week in London, Ontario, sponsored by the Canadian Association of Law Libraries/L’Association canadienne des bibliothèques de droit (CALL/ACBD), was very successful.

It was a 5-day event, with sessions on substantive law led by various University of Western Ontario law professors, combined with sessions by various law librarians, including me.

Sessions included, for example, a Thursday morning session by Professor Sam Trosow on property law for law librarians (including a session on copyright law), followed by a session by UWO Law Librarian John Sadler on researching secondary legal literature. There . . . [more]

There are 320,000 inhabitants of Iceland, a country about twice the size of Nova Scotia. But small in size doesn’t mean small in thought. They’re in the process of revising their constitution at the moment, and one feature of the process is the invitation to the public to comment on committee drafts as they’re presented online. To get the widest possible involvement, they’ve established a Facebook page and a Twitter account for the purpose, as well as the basic web page.

As the official page states:

The Constitutional Council is eager to make sure the public can be up

A few of us here at Slaw have been giving testimonials to our tablet experiences and I am going to follow the trend today, I am very early in my iPad relationship, you could even call me a Pad-awan, if you will. I am currently using the iPad 2 as a test project to try and determine the applicability of the iPad as tool in legal education. In this post I’m going to try to focus on specific apps and why I use them and attempt not to reiterate the specifics of previous posts on this topic. I expect . . . [more]