In light of the recent “birthdays” of each of Canada and the United States this past week, I am somewhat re-assured of my Canadianness in noting the differences in media reporting over the relatively notorious jury verdicts on different trials released in the past few days.

Both cases are tragic since they both involved the killing of young children.

In both trials, the accused parents were found not guilty, albeit for different reasons, perhaps surpringsly so based on media accounts (but not apparently too surprising for the respective jurors who sat through weeks of testimony hearing all of the evidence). . . . [more]

In mid-May, the Council of Canadian Academic Law Library Directors adopted the Calgary Statement on Free Access to Legal Information.

The Statement, that promotes the principles of open access in legal scholarly publishing in Canada and free access to legal information in society, follows the Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship adopted by the law libraries of major American universities in late 2008.

The Durham statement called for two things: (1) open access publication of law school–published journals; and (2) an end to print publication of law journals, coupled with a commitment to keeping the electronic versions . . . [more]

Ubaka Ogbogu, Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Alberta is writing what I expect will be a very useful blog called Health Law in British North America. The blog is very new – there are only a couple of posts, but they lead to some interesting places in google books – historical statutes of Canada for example.

I like that the blog links to places I rarely visit:
British Library: Canadian Collections
History Matters
NLM:Medicine in the Americas, 1619-1920
SSRN Legal History Page

Professor Ogbogu’s teaching and research interests include health law, law and bioethics, law . . . [more]

What's *NEW* in the updated webpages?

There are 320,000 inhabitants of Iceland, a country about twice the size of Nova Scotia. But small in size doesn’t mean small in thought. They’re in the process of revising their constitution at the moment, and one feature of the process is the invitation to the public to comment on committee drafts as they’re presented online. To get the widest possible involvement, they’ve established a Facebook page and a Twitter account for the purpose, as well as the basic web page.

As the official page states:

The Constitutional Council is eager to make sure the public can be up

. . . [more]

BAILII, the British And Irish Legal Information Institute, reports that its future is at risk because of a funding shortfall.

Like its Canadian counterpart CanLII, BAILII seeks to make access to primary legal materials free to everyone via the Internet. They are members of the Free Access to Law Movement which seeks to ensure free, open publication of legal information throughout the world.

According to exchanges on the UK-based LIS-LAW listserv, a few major sponsors have withdrawn financial support and further support from the Ministry of Justice is “under review”. . . . [more]

The Alberta Law Reform Institute (ALRI) has launched a new website. It has a new look, new address and best of all new features. 

The new website offers three easy methods of communication:

A Mailing List – Receive notices of new publications or any other significant activities. Be assured that this will not create a flood of messages in your inbox, but simply an occasional update from ALRI.

A Feedback Form – A quick method to comment on their work or provide your suggestions. You can find this option under the Your Views tab on the new website.

An . . . [more]

Generations of law students cut their research teeth on the Index to Legal Periodicals . On June 1, its publisher the H.W. Wilson Company and EBSCO Publishing announced a merger, under the EBSCO Publishing banner. . . . [more]

Scribes is an American society whose goals include the creation of an interest in writing about the law, and above all, the promotion of a clear, succinct and forceful style in legal writing.

A few years ago some Bay St law firms subjected their associates to compulsory viewing of videos of interviews of US Supreme court Judges on the subject of persuasive writing. These interviews have now been transcribed and can be accessed in PDF form at Scribes Journal of Legal Writing.

In what the New York Times described as a “trove” of interviews conducted in 2008, eight justices . . . [more]

With digital publishing coming of age, many publishers are rethinking how they produce and sell their content. One of the main challenges we face as publishers is making our content and products accessible.

One of the cool things I learned last week at the Canadian Association of Law Libraries annual conference was that there are ebooks and also EBOOKS. Wendy Reynolds, Manager, Library Client Services, Legislative Library of Ontario, Helen Clarke, Associate Vice-Provost Collections, Libraries and Cultural Resources, University of Calgary, and Jeffrey Miller, President, Irwin Law spoke to attendees at a session titled “If eBooks are the Medium, What’s the Message?”.

Connie Crosby moderated this panel which included a discussion of various ereader devices – along with a show and tell of some favourite gadgets. Some themes that emerged from the session: . . . [more]

A new outfit in the UK, Judgmental, has just gone online, boasting 90,000 UK case law judgments. From what I can gather, their aim is to make judgments searchable in ways that BAILII currently does not. Principally, Judgmental’s cases are to be searchable by Google and Bing, whereas BAILII — and, I believe, most if not all LIIs — sends the indexers away with a stern robots.txt no. And, it seems, the group is working on making online law more “usable” than it currently is.

At the moment, however, things are still very much in the developmental stage. There’s . . . [more]