The deadline is approaching for nominations for the Walter Owen Book Prize, awarded by the Foundation for Legal Research. This $10,000 prize rewards outstanding new contributions to Canadian legal literature. This year, the selection committee will consider books written in English and published in 2009 or 2010. For additional information, see the Foundation for Legal Research website. . . . [more]

The New York Public Library has unveiled its $50 million exterior renovation. There is a brief and entertaining article on it here, and another with a good photo gallery here.

Here is a little more on Library President Paul LeClerc, who seems to be a remarkable person. . . . [more]

Here is a link to a Press Release from Los Angeles this afternoon, announcing that Richard Susskind, the controversial (in some circles anyway) author of The End of Lawyers?

Note the importance of the final question-mark.

Integreon’s Client Advisory Board will be composed of managing partners at law firms and general counsel at organizations that Integreon serves. The board will provide Integreon’s clients with an opportunity to share ideas about legal service trends, specify future requirements for Integreon’s services, and identify opportunities for collaboration.

Integreon (according to its website) “applies technology intelligently to legal solutions to automate processes and . . . [more]

The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom has just released a policy statement concerning “The Use of Live Text-Based Communications from Court” [PDF]. The nub of the policy is simple and clear:

[A]ny member of a legal team or member of the public is free to use text-based communications from court, providing (i) these are silent; and (ii) there is no disruption to the proceedings in court.

Use of mobile phones from the court is prohibited. And, presumably, no video or still cameras are to be used: the court itself broadcasts proceedings using installed video cameras.

A few . . . [more]

IBM's Watson and Wolfram/Alpha are different approaches to getting information out of data.

Linkedin Labs lets you map your various connections on that service. You can see mine in the image below, as an example of what you’ll get.

Click on image to enlarge

The map on the Linkedin site is dynamic, in that clicking on or hovering over various points reveal the people behind the dots and their links to the people in your circles. The program attempts to group your connections, and you can then label these groups however you please. The brief video below explains:

. . . [more]

Sources of Egyptian Law.

The latest issue of the Yale Law Journal contains a supremely sane and caustic attack by Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals on the tendency of the Blue Book (Uniform System of Citation) to proliferate increasing thickets of rules and increasingly trivial sub-rules.

In an earlier essay, Goodbye to the Bluebook, 53 University of Chicago Law Review 1343 (1986), Judge Posner suggested four principles to guide the design of such a system:

“to spare the writer or editor from having to think about citation form,”

“to economize on space and the reader’s time,”

“to

. . . [more]

I read with great interest a recent article by Chris Anderson in Wired Features how video on YouTube is having the unexpected effect of allowing people to learn–and innovate–at an accelerated rate. He gives the example of people learning from one another how to dance, developing skills previously unheard of. Take for example the Legion of Extraordinary Dancers:

According to Anderson, many of these dancers were self-taught through Internet video, bringing together tricks and moves previously unknown in dance. Part of this is accelerated learning and innovation, he says, comes from people sharing what they know, so that others who . . . [more]

Although I have the benefit of a number of internal online research guides where I work, I occasionally find myself resorting to my free legal research and writing site.

However, in so doing, I realized my site inadvertently emphasized Canadian law to the exclusion of most other foreign law. As such, I have updated the case law, legislation and government pages to include links to more British, American (and other common law) sites. I hope this will be more useful for researchers and I welcome suggestions for improving the site.

I have also added the 3 law-related movies . . . [more]

“If you have a big enough dictionary, just about everything is a word.”
Dave Barry

There is something lovely about opening a package and finding a new book. To my surprise, this feeling also occurs when you get an email saying that your eBook purchase from the “I want to buy this as soon as it is published” list receipt comes by email. Another remarkable new book thrill appear in my inbox today in a note about the newly revamped OED website.

Oxford is proud to unveil a dramatically new OED Online: a redesigned, reengineered site that offers

. . . [more]

We have talked a number of times on Slaw about projects funded by the Law Foundation of Ontario. Even here at Slaw our re-development over the past several months has been assisted by a grant from the LFO. What impresses me with the LFO is that they put funding into projects that are of the interest of the public. One such effort is the Connecting Legal Interpretation Network.

Based on the June 2010 Access to Sign-Language Interpretation in Community Legal Settings: Report to the Law Foundation of Ontario [pdf] (“Sign Language Report”) and the earlier Connecting Report . . . [more]