A few days ago, I presented the issue of copyright & licensing of information found on court web sites. In this post, please find – please feel welcome to comment! – our draft on the topic of “Balancing Privacy and Public Access to Court Information: The Need for Confidentiality Rules”. Essentially, our recommendation on topic is to follow the Canadian Judicial Council Model Policy on topic. . . . [more]

About a year ago, I announced the creation of a Canadian Centre for Court Technology (CCCT) “IntellAction” working group with the mandate to promote the modernization of court web sites in Canada by way of producing guidelines on topic. We have now finished our first draft and invite you to take a look, in upcoming weeks, to selected parts of the guidelines. Your comments and suggestions are welcome! . . . [more]

At the Association of College and Research Libraries’ Blog ACRLog, California Law Librarian Michael Ginsborg issues a call for united action on the part of libraries to protect themselves from anticompetitive practices in the publishing world. Ginsborg references Robert Darnton’s recent work in the New York Review of Books highlighting the extent to which libraries (and their users) are damaged by such practices. He also links to his own more detailed article in Spectrum, the American Association of Law Libraries’ topical monthly, where he looks at some of the current realities in the relationship between law libraries and legal publishers. . . . [more]

Law librarian and colleague Susan Barker at the Bora Laskin Law Library has let me know that the new 5th edition of Legal Problem Solving – Reasoning, Research & Writing (LexisNexis Canada) is now out. She has worked with author Maureen Fitzgerald in updating this new edition and has let me know that purchasers of the book will receive a mini 36-page “insert” guide called The Ultimate Guide to Canadian Legal Research, which provides a nice overview of legal research (I have seen the mini-guide but not the new edition).

I have always liked this book and use it . . . [more]

Simon Fodden previously mentioned that CanLii recently enacted deep linking on their site to allow referencing of specific paragraphs. Frédéric Pelletier of CanLii provided their own update on this on Friday here.

They add that the anchors are not currently visible, which is why the process is still a manual one. But this suggests that in the future this might change. Another important consideration is that not all cases will have this function,

Please note that many older decisions do not have numbered paragraphs. Also, since this feature is the result of automated processing, there will always remain a

Professor Kate Sutherland has launched a new blog, law.arts.culture. Sutherland, who has scholarly interests in feminist theory, constitutional law, and the law of defamation, is also a writer of fiction.

As we learn from the Welcome post, she plans to enlist contributors from the faculty and student body to “broaden the focus to include music, film, theatre, visual art, and more.”

Her first full post is up, a delightful tale of Dickens’s woes when in January of 1844, just after his (self)publication of A Christmas Carol, he sued a publisher who issued an “improved” version of his book. . . . [more]

The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom has just released a policy statement concerning “The Use of Live Text-Based Communications from Court” [PDF]. The nub of the policy is simple and clear:

[A]ny member of a legal team or member of the public is free to use text-based communications from court, providing (i) these are silent; and (ii) there is no disruption to the proceedings in court.

Use of mobile phones from the court is prohibited. And, presumably, no video or still cameras are to be used: the court itself broadcasts proceedings using installed video cameras.

A few . . . [more]

The latest issue of the Yale Law Journal contains a supremely sane and caustic attack by Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals on the tendency of the Blue Book (Uniform System of Citation) to proliferate increasing thickets of rules and increasingly trivial sub-rules.

In an earlier essay, Goodbye to the Bluebook, 53 University of Chicago Law Review 1343 (1986), Judge Posner suggested four principles to guide the design of such a system:

“to spare the writer or editor from having to think about citation form,”

“to economize on space and the reader’s time,”

“to

There are times when, in this age of rapid technological change, I’m tempted to think that Slaw’s five and a half years of life make it a veteran. Some research I’m doing has led me back to one of my root interests in poverty law and to a true legal veteran on the web, PovNet. This anti-poverty group gives legal advocacy a central role, which should make it of interest to Slaw readers. From their website:

PovNet began in 1997 with a meeting attended by community representatives from all over British Columbia. Not a computer in sight. Advocates talked

Writers from Canadian Lawyer and Law Times magazines have co-launched the Legal Feeds Blog. And with close to 40 posts in their first four weeks, it’s great to see such strong early volume and blogging enthusiasm! [and yes Gail, I was hoping a Clawbies mention would inspire everyone to keep up the early pace!]

One attribute that really stands out for me, and it’s really more about editorial approach than anything, is the mixed delivery styles for their blog content. Whether it’s an early preview to the day’s story, a roundup of newspaper headlines, or a short opinion . . . [more]

Those who get Slaw’s entries by RSS or email may not regularly read comments to our posts and so might have missed a rather important, laconic comment to my entry yesterday on the New York Times’s deep linking feature. Lexum’s Ivan Mokanov wrote in to say that CanLII now has anchors at the paragraph level in judgments. They’d just not got around to announcing it. And they’re planning to build further functionality around it.

The illustration Ivan gave makes the point clearly and simply. This link
http://www.canlii.org/en/ca/scc/doc/2010/2010scc63/2010scc63.html#par14
will take you to directly to paragraph 14 of the judgment in question . . . [more]

Kendall Gray over at The Appellate Record has had some fun recently reformatting a Supreme Court of Texas opinion in an attempt to apply modern typographical practices to a product that still owes its shape to the typewriter. I won’t repeat here his layout choices and reasons—you can read them for yourselves—and see the before and after examples he gives.

I’ve long griped about the ugly way our courts publish their decisions, which look like something from the (by now) fuddy-duddy fifties, replete with double-spacing, two spaces after periods, 1 inch margins, etc. So I thought I’d take Gray’s choices . . . [more]