There’s a long and thoughtful piece in the New York Review of Books by Robert Darnton on “Google and the Future of Books.” Darnton is a renowned Harvard scholar on the history of the book and the director of the university’s library.

The NYRB piece negotiates the twin aims of promoting development through commerce and copyright on the one hand and enlightening as broad a segment of the public as possible through wide and free access to books on the other. Darnton explores the costs and benefits of Google’s having effectively captured the right to publish electronic versions . . . [more]

Devin Johnston, a second-year law student at the University of Manitoba, predicts the death of Facebook within three years.

A major reason is alternative social media platforms that will compete with it more effectively.

I’ve already mentioned Jurafide as one alternative for lawyers seeking American clients, and Jordan Furlong has mentioned LawLink just over a year ago. At that time, LawLink was restricted to American attorneys. It has since opened up to include lawyers from the UK, Canada, and Australia.

However, they still have a statement under the “threat of perjury” that the registrant is a practicing attorney . . . [more]

As we all know, there’s a continuing quest to encompass and, at the same time, tame the spate of information from the internet. Google is the most obvious champion in the quest: all the world’s knowledge … conjured up according to your particular search/need. Without that there’d be simply the blare of everything, which is to say, nothing. Another approach is to filter the flood through others, your friends or people whose judgment you respect: social networks perform this function, of course — Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, etc. Somewhere in between are those services that bring you streams of everything in . . . [more]

A new effort on the web, OverFlowLegal.com (“The Definitive Portal of Legal Information on the Internet”), is aimed at filtering the flow of blawg posts to bring you only those of quality. How does this happen? Though the effort of members, apparently. You join OverFlowLegal and:

OFL members who demonstrate an ability to identify, post, rate, categorize and comment on quality content will be invited to become Associate Editors of OFL. Associate Editors who demonstrate an ability to manage other member’s posted content may be invited to become full time staff as Editors of OFL.

As you’ll see if you . . . [more]

LexisNexis has just published the first two volumes of a major encyclopedia of Quebec and Canadian law in French – the Juris Classeur Quebec. Modeled on the celebrated series of encyclopedias that have for 100 years set the standard for legal publishing in France, this “made in Quebec” version of the classic French encyclopedia is expected to quickly establish itself as an essential and authoritative element of the practice of law in Canada.

The Juris Classeur is in fact a series of five separate multi-volume encyclopedias known as “collections”, each one dealing with one of the grand subjects of the . . . [more]

LexUM has released a digital, annotated version of the Quebec Civil Code. With this release the Code for the first time obtains a hyperlinked table of contents, which even the version on the LexUM supported CanLII lacks. But the new LexUM version offers much more: each section is seeded with caselaw annotations extracted from CanLII and may be further annotated by viewers; there’s an “[add]” button at the bottom of the screen that in good AJAX fashion opens out a form to receive the relevant data about a case. As well there’s an “[annotate]” button allowing the viewer to . . . [more]

Traditionally, a key indicator of the quality and the utility of any case citator is the breadth and depth of its coverage. The better citators purport to cover all of the cases reported in print. Law reports published by a competitor are included as a matter of course, both as an original reference and as a correlative or parallel citation.

Online databases and “electronic citations” have not been treated in the same manner. Initially electronic citations were not seen as “legitimate” citations and were considered to be unworthy of the same attention as print citations. Case citators ignored them. There . . . [more]

Just posted to the CanLII blog:

CanLII invites you to a user meeting in Toronto

CanLII is pleased to invite you to a user meeting in Toronto on February 11 2009. On the agenda:

• demo of SATAL – the point-in-time legislative system soon to be launched on CanLII;
• creation of a CanLII users group;
• demo of APIs developed to streamline use of CanLII content by institutional users.

The presentation will be followed by a cocktail. They ask you inform them if you plan to be present.

For more info, check their blog post for time, location and RSVP contact . . . [more]

Nimonik is a Canadian outfit that offers to keep companies up to date on federal and provincial environmental regulations, as well as municipal bylaws for Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. The website provides updates on legislation and relevant rulings concerning a wide variety of industrial activities — e.g. air emissions, contaminated sites, emergency situations, fuel transfers, hazardous material management. Members of the site may comment on the material and have those comments restricted to their company’s account. There is the ability as well to integrate a corporate environmental management system register with Nimonik and have it kept up to date in . . . [more]

Caselaw databases are frequently described as being “comprehensive” collections of cases with the meaning of the word “comprehensive” left undefined. The exceptions, of course, are databases based on print series of law reports which are by definition “selective”.

Some but not all database providers do say that they have so many hundreds or so many thousands of judgments covering specific years or time periods. Some say nothing at all. A few provide further details of the number of decisions by court level but, in general, vagueness is the order of the day.

“Vagueness” is not an acceptable standard

Legal researchers . . . [more]

The 2009 Harvey T. Strosberg Essay Prize competition was announced earlier this month:

Harvey T. Strosberg, Q.C., Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Class Action Review, and Irwin Law Inc. are pleased to announce the sixth annual Harvey T. Strosberg Essay Prize competition. The prize of $10,000 is awarded to an outstanding student paper on Canadian class actions.

The competition is open to all Canadian students enrolled in an undergraduate, graduate, or professional program. The deadline for submissions is 2 March 2009.

Please see the Irwin Law web page for details. . . . [more]

This will be a brief post, since I’m on a dial-up connection from Nungambakkam in South India where it’s a balmy 30 degrees – and the word snow doesn’t appear to be in the vocabulary.

The ABA has just published The Little Red Book of Wine Law by Carol Robertson, which might just have been triggered by Slaw’s notes on the same subject and our more recent update.
The ABA President blurbs thus:

“Fans of law, golf and wine alike will enjoy these well-written and entertaining works. I give the Little Green Book to my golf hosts as thank-you