At CanLII we believe that there is a real need for legal information, including commentary, without paywalls. Over the last year we have been working on making the policy and technological developments that will support this goal, and today we are ready to announce the next step: the CanLII Authors Program.

Starting today we accept submissions of legal commentary from the legal community. If you are the author of a text that you would like to see on CanLII, whether it was published elsewhere before or not, you can now submit it to us for inclusion in our commentary section. . . . [more]

The Criminal Law Series from Emond Publishing has won the 2018 Hugh Lawford Award for Excellence in Legal Publishing. The series is a collection of practical, accessible and affordable handbooks to assist criminal practitioners, judges and students.

The winner was announced yesterday at a reception held at the annual conference of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL) being held in Halifax. The Award is handed out annually by CALL.

It is meant to honour publishers who have produced excellent products and to encourage excellence in new publishing endeavours.

Other nominees for this year’s Award were:

• Alberta Law Review

It has been a long term goal for us to have a substantial collection of legal commentary on CanLII, so we are thrilled to be able to tell you about an expansion of CanLII’s secondary sources section to include law reviews.

Law reviews are often the only place a particular topic is discussed, and they often provide insight into the law for a particular jurisdiction where no one else does that make them invaluable for research.

In addition to being able to navigate within the commentary section by law review and issue, results from law review issues will appear in . . . [more]

The 2017 Ontario Accessibility Compliance and Enforcement Report is now available online and outlines the activities undertaken by the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario in 2017 to oversee compliance with the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act and its accessibility standards.

The report explains the results of the December 31st compliance reporting obligations of obligated organizations, and the various audits and inspections conducted by the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario in 2017. Overall, the report clearly indicates that there is a lot of enforcement work still needing to be done for Ontario to reach the goal of becoming an accessible province . . . [more]

The publishers in the legal industry often get a bad rap, either for their lack or insufficient level of innovation, the cost of the services they provide, or the reluctance to transition entirely to digital.

We gave the publishers an opportunity to weigh in on these issues at the Ontario Bar Association’s TECHxpo 2017, where Colin Lachance, CEO of Compass (formerly Maritime LawBook), Eric Wai, a Managing Director at LexisNexis Canada Inc., and Fred Glady, Vice President of Customer Segments at Thomson Reuters, joined us.

The first myth we dispelled was that print was dead in the legal industry. . . . [more]

Great post by John Sheridan over on VoxPopuli blog: “Deeply Intertwingled Laws.”

He starts off with this comment:

“There is no other form of written texts quite like legislation, nor a form so suited to the web. In retrospect, readers of legislation had been waiting a long time for a hypertext system, such as the web, to be invented.”

Sheridan is currently the Digital Director for the National Archives of the United Kingdom and led the team that brought us legislation.gov.uk the “official home” for UK legislation from 1237 the present.

Anyone who has done any legislative history . . . [more]

This summer, with the support of a Donner Foundation fellowship, I developed web pages for Community Legal Education Ontario (CLEO) that connect Ontario nonprofits to existing legal information on incorporation, maintenance, and governance. This article is about the process of creating those pages. My hope is that others will use the process in areas of law where legal information exists online, but is: overwhelming in quantity, difficult to find, and/or scattered.

Pitching the Project: The Pragmatic and Philosophical Justifications of Curation

Before anyone can start the project, somebody needs to be convinced it’s worthy of scarce resources. Why not . . . [more]

At Kobo last week, we had a guest-talk about machine learning by Sheldon Fernandez of Infusion.

After with a good grounding in deep learning systems, which mimic the human brain to a degree, we got to the interesting stuff: inscrutability, hidden factors and confounding variables. All of these pose problems to people trying to use AI, and illustrate reasons why others fear it.

Inscrutability in AIU is exactly what it is in people: an AI often cannot tell us how it arrived at a decision, or it’s description is so convoluted that it is almost worthless.

When we dig in . . . [more]

We often discuss here on Slaw the future of legal publishers, especially in a digital era. Although some of them have tinkered in-house with their own technological and big data solutions, none have independently brought anything revolutionary to the market to date.

Instead, what we might expect is that these legal powerhouses will either partner up with startups, such as with Thomson Reuters and Blue J Legal last year, or will simply purchase them outright.

In some ways, these patterns are not unique. Quicklaw was first created by the late Hugh Lawford at Queen’s University in 1973. Steven McMurray . . . [more]

To a jurist or a legal draftsperson, caselaw probably looks like a reliable, elegant way to record what legislation really means, in context.

To a programmer, it looks like a collection of bugs, for a program that was badly written in the first place and isn’t being maintained by its authors any more.

The programmer then goes looking for the bug-tracker for the criminal code and there isn’t one. At this point their head explodes.

Introduction

When a statute fails to deal with an unexpected situation, the courts fix it. This is a lot like fixing bugs in programs, . . . [more]

Connie Crosby, President of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL), has written a letter to The Honourable Judy M. Foote, Minister of Public Services and Procurement Canada, explaining the many concerns law librarians have about the idea of discontinuing the paper publication of the annual Statutes of Canada.

The letter is in response to a CBC News report that the federal government might consider changes to legislation that requires that Canada’s annual laws be made available in print.

In her letter, Crosby calls on the government to take care before any move to a digital-only policy, in . . . [more]

To combat link rot, the Supreme Court of Canada today launched an online archive of Internet Sources Cited in SCC Judgments (1998 – 2016).

Link rot refers to broken URLs or to URLs that direct to the original site but whose corresponding document has been removed or relocated without any information about where to find it.

From the Terms of Use:

“The Office of the Registrar of the SCC, recognizing that web pages or websites that the Court cites in its judgments may subsequently vary in content or be discontinued, has located and archived the content of most