The Canadian Forum on Civil Justice, based at the University of Alberta, has announced that it is moving to York University.

The Forum undertakes research to improve the civil justice system for Canadians by:

• collecting in a systematic way information relating to the system for administering civil justice;
• carrying out in-depth research on matters affecting the operation of the civil justice system;
• promoting the sharing of information about the use of best practices;
  functioning as a clearinghouse and library of information for the benefit of all persons in Canada concerned with civil justice;
• developing liaisons with similar organizations in

Thanks to our neighbour, Mary Saulig of Goodmans for lending me her copy of an old acquaintance, Benjamin on the Sale of Goods. But this post isn’t about presumptions of delivery or FOB contracts. It’s about one of the most remarkable stories of a legal author I’ve heard.

Let’s start at the Cimetière du Père Lachaise‎ in the 20th arrondissement, though the website doesn’t list this grave, which has this inscription on the tombstone:

Judah Philip Benjamin, Born St. Thomas West Indies August 6,1811, Died in Paris May 6,1884, United States Senator from Louisiana, Attorney General, Secretary of

Let me start by saying two things that I believe:

1. I am an optimist
2. Change is good

I imagine that Slawyers, being those with an intellectual bent who read widely on the web and elsewhere, already know about Patrick Lamb’s recent ABA New Normal column titled “Does It Pay to Hire a Law Firm Librarian?” The comments are interesting and there have been plenty of follow up posts:

LLB – Do law firms still need librarians?
3 Geeks and a Law Blog – Who needs a librarian anyway?
iBrary Guy – A grain of salt and a teaspoon . . . [more]

Plain language — the written kind — has been of interest here on Slaw recently, with John Gregory’s post “Enforcing Plain Language” and Simon Chester’s post announcing the (October) Educaloi conference, “Telling the Law to the Public. Are There Better Ways?“. I’ve got a couple of things to offer here.

First, I thought readers might like to be reminded of The Legal Writing Institute and, particularly, its open access journal. (You should also have a look at volume one of their Monograph Series: The Art of Critiquing Written Work, which comprises 15 articles.)

There’s . . . [more]

We haven’t seen an update on Carl Malamud’s Law.gov project in quite a while. There is much to report. To start, here’s a reminder of what the project is about:

Law.Gov is an idea, an idea that the primary legal materials of the United States should be readily available to all, and that governmental institutions should make these materials available in bulk as distributed, authenticated, well-formatted data. To make this idea a reality, a series of workshops were held throughout the country, resulting in a consensus on 10 core principles.

In June the project completed its consultation phase, which included . . . [more]

I confess: I love law reform commission reports. I find they are wonderful sources for legal research. Many of the reports provide historical background on an issue and you can often find comparative information about how other jurisdictions have responded.

In the past few days, by pure coincidence, I have come across a wealth of new reports by law commissions in New Zealand, Ireland and Australia:

• New Zealand Law Reform Commission Introductory Issues Paper on Law of Trusts : this is primarily a background paper. It traces the development of the trust from its origins in medieval England through to

Some new stories from around the world:

Honey – I forgot to renew the domain name

That’s the story out of a free public website in Massachusetts: The site provides the public with online copies of opinions from both the Supreme Judicial Court and the Appeals Court. C. Clifford Allen head of the SJC’s Reporter of Decisions office woke up to find that his website was gone and that a notice — “massreports.com expired on 11/08/2010 and is pending renewal or deletion” – was substituted.

If they did send a (renewal) notice, it must have been caught in

If you are a law firm starting from scratch looking to build an intranet, what would you do? Would you emulate many of the big US and Canadian firms and implement MS Sharepoint? Or look for a different solution? So often firms look over each others’ shoulder to see what the other is doing. But with intranets one size does not fit all.

I am currently in Washington, DC for KM World 2010 and was fortunate to have a good discussion with Gordon Ross, Vice President of Open Road Communications Ltd., web consultants and creators of the social intranet . . . [more]

A few days ago Google released a very interesting tool: Google Refine 2.0. For anyone who’s ever had to sort through messy data to try to turn up a meaningful treatment, and who hasn’t, this tool is a godsend. You may never need to utter another regular expression.

It offers a suite of functions that allow a person to clean up the data (detect and remove inconsistencies), to transform the data into formats suitable to the final destination (such as html), and even tools for finding and adding more data from disparate sources.

There are three 6+ minute videos . . . [more]

Inspired by Ted Tjaden’s custom search engine that principally queries Canadian law firms, I’ve put together a Google Custom Search Engine for Canadian law blogs. The engine queries only the 249 blogs which are currently on the Canadian law blogs list maintained by Steve Matthews at lawblogs.ca.

As I explain on the page, because Google doesn’t let you rank your CSE results by date, I’ve given you the option of looking at results from the past day, a week, a month, or year.

What would make this really useful, of course, would be an RSS feed for your . . . [more]

Google’s been speeding things up lately, as you’ll know if you’ve turned on Google Instant for your searches. (See Google’s Instant Search: An Alphabet Book.)

Now Google’s rolling out Instant Preview, which, as the name suggests, lets you get a preview of the site itself. I’m not one of the lucky rolloutees yet, but Google, ever solicitous, has a Google Labs site that will let you play with the new feature. You’ll know when it arrives in your neighbourhood, because a small magnifying glass icon will a appear beside each of your results.

A click on it brings up . . . [more]