Why don’t law librarians, legal IT folk and legal publishers all just get along? Do we need a Festivus airing of grievances?

This is the suggestion from Sarah Glassmeyer, Faculty Services and Outreach Librarian at the Valparaiso University School of Law in Valparaiso, Indiana, in her controversial guest blog post The Loris in the Library at the prominent VoxPopuLII blog at the Legal Information Institute, Cornell University Law School.

She says:

I wish I could say, “Librarians . . . computer scientists . . . legal publishers . . . let’s all hold hands now and sing kum-bay-yah!” However,

Dear Friends, Colleagues, Readers,

I’m writing a paper for a CLE conference that’ll be held in Vancouver next June. I’m trying to gather anecdotal information as to whether the SCC decision in Resurfice v Hanke, 2007 SCC 7 and the “material contribution” doctrine mentioned in the case are helping plaintiffs get before-trial settlements — by using the Resurfice“material contribution” notion to get them past difficulties in proving factual causation using the “but-for” test — which are settlements that they might not have been able to get before Resurfice. I’m not after settlement details, just a yes or . . . [more]

Have a look at the Research Buzz post today on Google Special Syntax: The Around Operator. Evidently, Google has had a proximity operator available for the last couple of months.

The operator is a capitalized AROUND followed immediately by a number within parentheses, representing the number of words within which you’d like the second term to occur from the first search term. For example, [cameras AROUND(5) courtroom] will find, of course, “cameras in the courtroom”, but also “cameras debated for sniper courtroom” and, interestingly, “Judge closes courtroom in Nodine trial to cameras.” These latter are results that would have . . . [more]

Section 12 of the Copyright Act gives the Crown copyright in any work “prepared or published by or under the direction or control of Her Majesty or any government department…” This broad sweep is considered, by the federal and provincial governments at least, to include court and tribunal judgments and legislation. The issue of whether this is appropriate or not has been somewhat finessed (albeit in a question-begging way) so far as federal legal material goes by the 1998 Reproduction of Federal Law Order SI/97-5 providing that:

Anyone may, without charge or request for permission, reproduce enactments and consolidations of

The Parliamentary Information and Research Service has published a brief report entitled “The Stuxnet Worm: Just Another Computer Attack or a Game Changer?” [PDF, HTML] by Holly Porteous. As most Slaw readers may know, this malicious software, spreading throughout the world, is aimed at disrupting or controlling certain industrial processes that are regulated by computers. The sophistication of the worm and the speculation that it was targeted at Iran’s nuclear facilities have raised concern and commentary about malware to a new level.

This report is a valuable overview, addressing briefly the manner in which Stuxnet was launched . . . [more]

The Federal Trade Commission in the US published – as part of a much larger report on privacy – a fascinating chart on the various routes that various kinds of personal information take from the individual to end users of all kinds.

There is a note on the website of the Centre for Democracy and Technology about the chart.

 
The chart itself is in PDF.

There is a lot of information on the chart, so you will have to blow it up at least to double size to see it clearly (if your eyes are no better than mine…). It . . . [more]

I read with interest a significant two page article by Kirk Makin in this morning’s Globe and Mail focussing attention on the steps that Canada’s judiciary have been making to demystify the legal system and the operations of the courts.

“The whole judicial system depends on public confidence,” said Lance Finch, Chief Justice of British Columbia. “If you don’t have that confidence, people will ignore the courts and the law. … Eventually, you get anarchy.”

As Kirk explains, “Not so long ago, a judge seeking a public profile, let alone explaining his legal worldview, would have been unthinkable. Lawyers ascending . . . [more]

The global Free Access to Law Movement has just acquired its 34th member. The Legal Information Institute of India (LIIofIndia) opened for public access at the end of November, though the formal launch isn’t until March of 2011.

LIIofIndia currently has 50 databases, including, as you’d imagine, case reports from the 28 state high courts, federal legislation, and case reports from federal courts. The databases are of varying depth, averaging, it would seem, five years or so.

The main (i.e. advanced) search form is here.

Some links need fixing. For instance, the “help” link on the main page . . . [more]

A SLAW hat-tip to Brenda Wong and her co-blogger Karen Sawatzky at Library Technician Dialog for making me aware of the following online slideshow called If you Want to Work in Libraries, Here are 10 Things You Need to Know by Ned Potter.

I think the author nicely captures some of the opportunities for working in the information field (e.g., working with people and technology) along with some of the challenges (e.g., constant change and tough competition).

Many of these topics arose in my regular guest lecture to the FIS 2133 Legal Literature and Librarianship class earlier this week at . . . [more]

If your researches take you into the area of human rights, you might want to avail yourself of a relatively new topical search engine, HuriSearch. One of the projects of the interesting HuriDocs, HuriSearch offers you a fairly sophisticated front end, allowing you to query any of four types of source (NGOs, national human rights institutions, academic institutions, and intergovernmental organizations), search in any of sixteen languages, and use word variations if you wish. As well, search results can be filtered by facets: source type, source organization, country, and document format.

Better yet, you’re offered a permalink to . . . [more]

Stem Legal has relaunched the Canadian Law Blogs List at Lawblogs.ca started by Steve Matthews in September 2005. The List is an open directory of Canadian blogging lawyers, law librarians, marketers, IT professionals and paralegals (essentially anyone blogging in the legal industry in Canada).

Along with a new look, the new site features:

• browsing by practice area, by province, by industry topic, and latest additions
• subscription to LawBlogs.ca by RSS feed or by email to be notified of blog additions to the site
• a sample of recent blog posts from the various blogs on the front page

Alex Manevich earlier bemoaned here on SLAW the abysmal state of online access to Ontario court dockets.

In a recent request to the Canadian Association of Law Libraries listserv I asked colleagues the current state of online access to Canadian court dockets.

Unfortunately, the situation is not much better two years later.

However, I have added to the Case Law page on my legal research and writing website a chart of links for accessing Canadian court dockets (and for those jurisdictions who do not provide access, I provide a link to contact the court registry).

I will continue to update . . . [more]