Colleagues from the Ontario Courthouse Libraries Association have developed a wonderful web app to help lawyers plan their visit to the courthouses and courthouse libraries around the province.
Information includes details such as :
Is there one right way to research the law?
No.
Do most of us know the best? the most? or even a handful of useful search strategies? Almost certainly not, according to a few recent studies. As one of those studies highlight, even those who do probably aren’t sharing strategies in any event. These studies paint the picture of a profession that plops a few words into a single search engine, relies heavily on the machine to sort the results returns, and then stops looking within a few minutes having grabbed a few documents that look useful.
There are valuable . . . [more]
The cohort of students currently in law school and the junior ranks of firms are often described as “digital natives.” Wherever possible, we prefer to access information online instead of going to the library for books or other secondary sources. Our preference for online research is reinforced as we learn to engage with legal information. In our first year of law school, we are directed primarily to online platforms like CanLII, Quicklaw, Westlaw, and SSRN, and are encouraged to develop our skills in operating those services.
My generation of law students not only grew up with technology, but with the . . . [more]
The Canadian Research Institute for Law and the Family, an independent organization affiliated with the University of Calgary, closed on 31 August 2018. The closure of the Institute is somewhat of a national tragedy, given that it was one of the very few organizations conducting empirical research on family law, justice processes and access to justice in Canada, and was the inevitable result of today’s singularly infelicitous funding climate.
The Institute has conducted some remarkable, innovative and often ground-breaking work over the 31 years of its existence. Highlights include some of the first work on the financial consequences of . . . [more]
Next week I have the delight of presenting a session about free legal research to a clinic of the U Alberta Law School titled Low Income Individuals and the Law. A very collaborative team led by Professor Cathy Bell is responsible for this clinic and it is great fun to participate. My annual presentation update coincided with some renovations at Chez Mireau – no surprise – and as usual my handy work allowed me to ponder the brain work. My thesis: carpet removal, as a project, shares some analogies with legal research using free sources.
Background:
This particular renovation, one . . . [more]
Earlier this week, American President Trump nominated Brett M. Kavanaugh from the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to take the place of Justice Anthony Kennedy who will be retiring as of the end of this month.
Who is Kavanaugh?
There are plenty of resources to figure that out.
The Library of Congress in Washington has published a page with resources about the nominee. The page includes links to articles and books by and about the nominee, to cases decided by him, to Congressional materials about his earlier nominations to federal judicial posts, and to web resources. . . . [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:
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]
Students of the UVic Environmental Law Club contribute the following guest post. They discuss their initiative to conduct an all-day legal research event, putting their learning of the legislative research process toward a public interest effort. The event was inspired by a national student-driven research event on another issue a year ago. We thank Slaw’s Kim Nayyer for coordinating this submission.
Friday February 2, 2018, the UVic Environmental Law Club coordinated a full day research-o-thon involving more than 50 law students from UVic. The event: “Mining Law in BC – Digging up a Dirty History” focused on the history of . . . [more]
The 20th edition (2017) of the Code civil du Québec annoté by Jean-Louis Baudouin & Yvon Renaud is now available on the website of the CAIJ.
CAIJ is the Centre d’accès à l’information juridique, the network of courthouse law libraries associated with the Québec Bar Association.
The annotated Civil Code includes:
There’s a relatively new online journal focusing on open access and scholarly communication called The Idealis. The Idealis was introduced in April this year and as Lee Skallerup Bessette put it, writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, it’s a “resource for librarians looking for high-quality, open-access library and information science research.”
Each week their team of experts, led by founding editors Stacy Konkiel and Nicky Agate, work to “liberate research” by recruiting the “very best scholarly communication literature from across the Web, working with authors to make their research available, ensuring that librarians are connected to . . . [more]
The key to improving ease of use is to erase assumptions.
That’s important when aiming to improve website usability, generally, but it’s not always easy when you’re dealing with an esoteric culture of users (such as lawyers) who are used to finding information according to old patterns.
Calling all BC residents – help @theCLBC improve usability on its website and enter for a chance to win https://t.co/TRptSQsUDt #BCLegal pic.twitter.com/hRammoMW7C
— Clicklaw (@Clicklaw) June 26, 2017
Luckily, tools like Treejack, offer “tree testing” as a “usability technique for evaluating the findability of topics in a website.” This is a structure . . . [more]