The Canadian Legal Information Institute — CanLII — has just introduced a refinement to its search and citation tools where legislation is concerned. Now, in the case of legislation for which CanLII provides a table of contents, when you consider a specific section or subsection, you’ll see a link to a popup that will offer you a link to cases citing that specific provision and a further link to a perfectly formed citation for that specific provision. As you’ll see in the graphic below (click on it to enlarge it), the number of citing cases is given in the popup, . . . [more]

A couple of weeks ago the University of Toronto Faculty of Law hosted the Grafstein Annual Lecture in Communications. This year, Robert Darnton, the University Librarian at Harvard, spoke on “Books, Libraries & the Digital Future“. A webcast of the talk is available via the UofT’s Information Commons website.

I know a number of law librarians were disappointed to miss the talk as it was not publicised widely outside the University community. As it turned out Professor Darnton spoke to a packed house. His talk picked up on the themes in his widely read New York Review of . . . [more]

The rule of law requires that laws be widely known.

Few would dispute that Twitter can be quite useful at making things widely known.

I have been preoccupied with this idea for a little while now. Last month I wrote a piece on it for publication on Slaw (watch for it on 16 April 2012). The explosion of Twitter activity surrounding the Ontario Court of Appeal release today in Canada (Attorney General) v. Bedford, 2012 ONCA 186 confirms my belief that Twitter provides an excellent outlet for lawyers, other legal professionals and the public itself to augment the work of . . . [more]

JURIST, the legal news and commentary website based out of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, needs money. Your money.

The well-known, pioneering news site explains that it is “anticipating a significant reduction in funding (meaning several tens of thousands of dollars) from our primary benefactors”.

It needs funds to:

• Redesign the JURIST.org website
• Fully develop a mobile version of JURIST.org, as well as iPhone and Android apps
• Increase outreach efforts to JURIST’s audience
• Develop new programming, including audio and video coverage, seminars and conferences that will directly benefit our community
• Cover costs associated with managing our

[ UPDATE (March 19, 5 pm): As you will see from the comment below from Colin Lachance, the judgment has now been restored. So far as I can determine, no element of the court’s criticism has been altered. ]

Slaw has learned that the judgment of Justice David Brown in Romspen Investment Corp. v. 617666 Canada Ltd 2012 ONSC 1727 has been withdrawn from all publishers’ electronic databases pursuant to the request of the court administration. The request said that the decision had been “sent to publication in error,” and asked that publishers “remove [it] from your records and destroy . . . [more]

I vividly remember the salesperson coming to our home as a child, brandishing the 32 shiny, leather-bound volumes. “This,” he said, “is the Encyclopedia Britannica.” Although we had the Vic-20, we simply didn’t have the same access to information online that we do today. As an insatiable bookworm who already professed an encyclopedic knowledge on everything I claimed to be right about, I was completely enthralled.

We ended up settling for the Britannica Children’s Encyclopedia. As I recall it met its eventual demise being cut up into pieces for its pretty pictures for use in elementary school projects in . . . [more]

Much has been written on SLAW about the fairly recent 7th edition of the Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation (known as the McGill Guide, red in colour, and published by Carswell), including a lengthy 21 September 2010 post by John Davis that includes links to prior posts.

Although I was initially against the “radical” change to remove periods from most citations, I have since come to prefer the simplicity of removing periods on citations to legal documents over which I have editorial control.

However, the focus of the guide (understandably) is on citation style for your footnotes . . . [more]

Check out Virginia Decoded. It’s a new presentation of that state’s code aimed at making it easier for ordinary human beings to get access to the laws that govern them. Virginia Decoded is the first state to get to beta in The State Decoded program, a private, not-for-profit venture. The legal material is provided by the state via LexisNexis, which marks it up with SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), enabling the Decoded folks to manipulate it appropriately.

Canadians used to CanLII may be a trifle blasé, or even smug, about this development. It is the case that Americans . . . [more]

The unique and indefatigable Tom Bruce is the Director of the Legal Information Institute at Cornell – no need for a geographical adjective when you were the first on the block.

Yes, LII was the first – and it’s coming up to its Twentieth Anniversary – or at least an excuse for a party in Finger Lakes.

Tom explains:

The LVI conference started out as a rather clubby event for a smallish group of open-access publishers largely based in the academic world. More recently, we’ve been joined by some academic researchers in legal informatics and by a few government

Recently, I made a major life change. After having been at my firm, Norton Rose Canada, for a number of years, I accepted an offer to become senior counsel, employee relations, for a major Canadian retailer. My focus is going from a mostly Quebec-based practice, to one with Canada-wide scope.

In the same vein, I’ve decided to change the focus of the blog I created (the Quebec Labour Law Blog) to give it a national and international scope. I have the benefit now of having collaborators from ex-colleagues from across the Norton Rose Group (Australia, South Africa, Germany, France, . . . [more]

Publishing academic monographs – the kinds of books that may sell only a few hundred copies – in an era of digital platforms and shrinking library budgets is a serious challenge. Earlier this year leaders from many of the major US libraries and academic presses were hosted by Robert Darnton, the Harvard University Librarian, to discuss the idea of a Global Library Consortium (GLC).

In a nutshell something like the GLC would allow academic library members of the consortium to work with publishers to identify which monographs they would be willing to purchase. The more purchasers for a specific title, . . . [more]

The 2012 Conference in Toronto will mark the 50th annual meeting of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries and provide an occasion to highlight many of the accomplishments of the association and its members over the decades since its creation. One of many accomplishment worthy of note is the Index to Canadian Legal Literature for which CALL provided both the inspiration and the support required to create a Canadian publication that met international indexing standards.

The Proposal for a New Index

In December 1983, The Canadian Law Information Council and The Canadian Association of Law Libraries developed a proposal to . . . [more]