In the wake of last weekend’s mass shooting in Tucson, Arizona, I thought it might be useful to see what kinds of gun control laws exist in that state.

According to a number of sources, in the state of Arizona, pretty much anyone can buy pretty much anything that shoots. No questions asked.

The Legal Community Against Violence is a California-based public interest law centre dedicated to preventing gun violence. Last July, it published Gun Laws Matter: A Comparison of State Firearms Laws and Statistics. All 50 states were ranked according to 25 different polices. Arizona came last: . . . [more]

My colleagues at the Canadian Association of Law Libraries / L’Association canadienne des bibliothèques de droit (CALL/ACBD) are reminding us to get ready for that group’s annual conference meeting, this year held in Calgary from May 14-18, 2011.

The Conference website now has an ever increasing amount of content.

Early bird registration is March 16th.

The theme of the Conference is “Scaling New Heights” / “Ascension de nouveaux sommets”

Judy Harvie and her planning commitee are to be congratulated for their hard work in getting the conference ready and win the award for most puns possible on the theme of . . . [more]

If you have a moment right now, tune into the Livestream of the Acting Register of U.S. Copyrights Maria Pallante speaking at World’s Fair Use Day in D.C.

10:20 am update: Maria just finished her presentation in which she reviewed some key U.S. copyright cases. She completed her talk referring to fair use: “Embrace it, respect it and celebrate it.” There was no question period. . . . [more]

Those who get Slaw’s entries by RSS or email may not regularly read comments to our posts and so might have missed a rather important, laconic comment to my entry yesterday on the New York Times’s deep linking feature. Lexum’s Ivan Mokanov wrote in to say that CanLII now has anchors at the paragraph level in judgments. They’d just not got around to announcing it. And they’re planning to build further functionality around it.

The illustration Ivan gave makes the point clearly and simply. This link
http://www.canlii.org/en/ca/scc/doc/2010/2010scc63/2010scc63.html#par14
will take you to directly to paragraph 14 of the judgment in question . . . [more]

From time to time I bug the good folks at Lexum about introducing paragraph level anchors into the court decisions they publish: it would be very handy indeed to be able to make a hyperlink that went right to a paragraph within a judgment. And, of course, this feature, like many others, is on the crowded Lexum/CanLII agenda, and will have to wait its turn.

But in the meanwhile, the New York Times has just released a new version of its paragraph level linking tool, Emphasis. There’s a good article, “Emphasis Update and Source,” by Michael Donohoe, that . . . [more]

Kendall Gray over at The Appellate Record has had some fun recently reformatting a Supreme Court of Texas opinion in an attempt to apply modern typographical practices to a product that still owes its shape to the typewriter. I won’t repeat here his layout choices and reasons—you can read them for yourselves—and see the before and after examples he gives.

I’ve long griped about the ugly way our courts publish their decisions, which look like something from the (by now) fuddy-duddy fifties, replete with double-spacing, two spaces after periods, 1 inch margins, etc. So I thought I’d take Gray’s choices . . . [more]

I gave a presentation yesterday to some friends at the CBA Alberta Research Lawyers North subsection on using social media sources for legal research. My definition of a social media site is web delivered information that invites dialog. Perhaps my definition is over broad, but I include publicly available legal texts, like Mike Semple Piggot’s Contract Text that we have discussed at Slaw.

Lady luck was on my shoulder yesterday.

I rarely have an opportunity to research matters relating to criminal law. Perhaps if I had more experience in the area, I would know about Romaniuk’s Search Warrants Considered . . . [more]

You can use Twitter to learn about new top level court decisions in Canada.

ACJNet from the Legal Resource Centre Alberta has long been a mainstay for Canadian legal researchers. This resource has now been relaunched as three new portals for the public and those who work with the public:

• LawNet Canada
• LawNet Français
• LawNet Alberta

The press release from the Legal Resource Centre:

LAWNET IS NOW AVAILABLE!

Friday, January 7, 2011

The Legal Resource Centre is pleased to announce the launch of LawNet, three web portals that will help you find the legal-related information you need: LawNet Alberta, LawNet Canada, and LawNet Français.

What can LawNet do for you?

LawNet

. . . [more]

Wilson and LaFleur first to market

The first ipad application reached the Canadian legal research market just before the year end as Lexis Nexis joined Wilson and LaFleur in offering French language texts through an ipad. Using a free application developed specifically for Wilson and LaFleur publications, the two publishers have taken a small but significant step in making their content available to their customers by means of an ipad.

The titles offered by Wilson and LaFleur include:

1. Code civil du Quebec
2. Code criminal
3. Lois du Quebec
4. Droit des affaires
5. Code de procedure civile

The . . . [more]

A couple of years ago I posted on the few offerings about law that were available on iTunes U, Apple’s semi-successful attempt to corral some serious podcasts and videos. I’ve had another look and find that the corpus has grown — though it hasn’t exploded in the way I imagined it might — and now contains a fair number of worthwhile lectures, both audio and video.

Searching for law in iTunes U isn’t particularly easy. There’s no category for it per se, and it’s variously plunked in other slots in the roster of topics. And searching for “law” . . . [more]

There is a wonderful spin-off magazine from the Economist called More Intelligent Life.

Like most other magazines, it does a year-end review of the best books of 2010.

But someone at the magazine didn’t quite check the clipart that accompanies that page:

Who actually thought that the Pacific Reporter was worth a plug? And thought that caselaw might be enhanced by snow?

Happy New Year – and a Guid Hogmanay. . . . [more]