The Canadian Judicial Council is a source of publications that should interest lawyers. The most recent report is The Canadian Justice System and the Media [PDF], a 2010 update to their publication of the same name in 2007. Although written explicitly for the benefit of members of the press and other news media, the section on Publication Bans and Other Restrictions on Media Coverage provides a handy review of the law in this area.

The Council commissions more frequent analyses on technology and its impact on the judicial system. For example, thus far in 2010 they’ve released four pieces by . . . [more]

Over the last few months I have noticed a marked uptake on the topic of legal project management in the legal literature and blogosphere. Although I think lawyers have always “done” legal project management (not always well), I also think the recent buzz on the topic is related to the economy and the recent emphasis within the legal profession on changing trends and the need to do legal project management better.

SLAW recently did a book review of Steven Levy’s book called Legal Project Management. In addition to Steven’s book, there is also Jim Hassett’s The Legal Project Management . . . [more]

My colleague Laurel Murdoch showed me the latest issue of the Harvard Law School Bulletin, the lead article focusing on the changes happening at the Harvard Law Library, led by John G. Palfrey, the Law School’s vice dean for library and information resources (formerly of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society). Palfrey is the author of a very interesting piece that Louis alerted us to, entitled Cornerstones of Law Libraries for an Era of Digital-Plus

Palfrey’s piece ends with a collaborative challenge:

Our next step should be a process akin to a design charrette.60 We ought to

Two interesting topics have come up in recent days; both of which seem connected. The first is Amazon’s prediction that ebook sales will overtake paperback sales by the end of 2011. Not entirely surprising, considering they’re already outselling hardcovers (“180 e-books for every 100 hardcovers”). And on it goes: paperback sales are eclipsed, ebooks will then be compared to the combined sales, paper becomes the minority, and so on. I think we all know the trend.

So if the market’s future is digital, what exactly do we want from the experience? The answer to this question depends a lot . . . [more]

As was mentioned a number of years ago here on SLAW, the free Thomson Reuters newsletter called Perspectives: Teaching Legal Research and Writing was a useful assortment of articles for those who are involved in teaching legal research and writing.

Word comes now that the newsletter will no longer be published in print. Anyone wanting to receive the newsletter, however, can sign up for free delivery by email of an electronic version. . . . [more]

The Google Scholar Blog has pulled up a metric dozen “entertaining legal opinions” for our amusement — and, presumably, to remind everyone that Scholar makes many U.S. judgments available free. For example, there’s a reference to US v. Syufy Enterprises 903 F. 2d 659 (1990) which is said to contain the names of over 200 movies smuggled into the ordinary text.

(The blog helpfully provides a link to an article that marks up the titles in the judgment for you. Me, I think it’s interesting that in Syufy one of the judges is named Quackenbush, because that’s the . . . [more]

The Law Society of Upper Canada commissioned a study by Michael Ornstein at York University’s Institute for Social Research, resulting in a report, Racialization and Gender of Lawyers in Ontario [PDF], presented to Convocation in April of this year. As expected — and, in my view, hoped — membership in the profession by visible minorities, Aboriginal people, and women is in fact growing. This growth has been dramatic in the case of women: in 1971 women accounted for 5% of the profession, whereas in 2006 they constituted almost 60%, as revealed in the chart below.

Click image to enlarge . . . [more]

The legal press around the world this weekend featured a variety of stories that caught my attention. Let’s visit India, Sierra Leone, Namibia and England. . . . [more]

Librarians will know about the federal government’s Weekly Checklist of Canadian Government Publications, but I thought others might like to learn of its existence. A product of Government of Canada Publications, the checklist provides subscribing Depository Libraries with a list of those official publications from all organizations including Parliament that are catalogued and sent out to them — and incidentally informs the rest of us as well.

Most useful to this “rest” will be the sub-list of publications available online: see, for example, the electronic list for publications available as of last week.

The whole Government of Canada . . . [more]

Let me introduce you to Document Cloud (DC), an online service funded by a very substantial grant from the Knight Foundation.

Document Cloud directly addresses a concern that I’ve expressed a number of times here, that online news stories often refer to, or depend on, documents that are themselves not made available to the reader. Occasionally, of course, a link to an outside source would suffice. But at other times it would be most sensible to lodge the document in a secure place, and, better, a place that would help the referencing news organ to embed it in the . . . [more]

At a session at the Fourth International Legal Ethics Conference at Stanford Law School this morning Laurel Terry pointed us to a very elegant model for organizing legal information. It was developed a decade ago by the Project on International Courts and Tribunals. Simon noticed the link in the post here, but didn’t drill down.

The PICT Research Matrix is the first comprehensive, systematic and holistic mapping of the international judicial system. It encompasses 18 international judicial bodies, grouped in six clusters according to their geographical scope and/or subject-matter jurisdiction. For each institution, 29 issues, grouped in five . . . [more]

For those who aren’t on the Federal Courts or other mailing list that provided the information, 

The Federal Courts Reports are pleased to announce that in an effort to meet the changing needs of its users, full volumes of the Federal Courts Reports are now available on its Web site at: http://reports.fja-cmf.gc.ca/eng/. The Federal Courts Reports continue to be available in print, but you can now access the same content online beginning with [2007], Volume 4, Part 1, including numerous value-added features such as a side by side (French and English) layout, the contents of the volume, and lists