The Law Society of Upper Canada commissioned a study by Michael Ornstein at York University’s Institute for Social Research, resulting in a report, Racialization and Gender of Lawyers in Ontario [PDF], presented to Convocation in April of this year. As expected — and, in my view, hoped — membership in the profession by visible minorities, Aboriginal people, and women is in fact growing. This growth has been dramatic in the case of women: in 1971 women accounted for 5% of the profession, whereas in 2006 they constituted almost 60%, as revealed in the chart below.

Click image to enlarge . . . [more]

Librarians will know about the federal government’s Weekly Checklist of Canadian Government Publications, but I thought others might like to learn of its existence. A product of Government of Canada Publications, the checklist provides subscribing Depository Libraries with a list of those official publications from all organizations including Parliament that are catalogued and sent out to them — and incidentally informs the rest of us as well.

Most useful to this “rest” will be the sub-list of publications available online: see, for example, the electronic list for publications available as of last week.

The whole Government of Canada . . . [more]

Earlier today I stumbled across an excellent, free Investment Treaty Arbitration website at UVic Law that has so far appears to have gone unnoticed by SLAW.ca commentators.

According to the site, it provides access to all publicly available investment treaty awards along with information and resources relating to investment treaties and investment treaty arbitration and links to further resources.

Readers of the site are encouraged to send investment treaty materials and awards to Professor Andrew Newcombe for posting.

You can access awards chronologically or alphabetically by claimaint or by respondent state. Information is also provided for expert opinions and ICSID . . . [more]

In conjunction with the launch last week by Irwin Law of the new, third edition of my book with them called Legal Research and Writing, I am pleased to announce the launch of a companion website called:

http://www.legalresearchandwriting.ca

The site contains links to all of the major URLs listed in the book (and more) as well as providing basic information about legal research and writing.

I hope to continue to develop the site over time and to possibly include an “updates” section on the site containing any major updates on new cases or other information contained in the book. . . . [more]

This is an internal Heenan Blaikie piece which my colleagues Michel Gamache and Chantal Belanger (Technicienne en documentation) wrote to help those of us who have problems finding Québec official proclamations and the like. I think the tips are well worth noting for all Canadian legal researchers.

Some history

The Gazette officielle du Québec is the means by which the Quebec Government makes its decisions official. Published continuously since 1869, it makes public, on a weekly basis, all texts whose publication is required: statutes, regulations and other statutory instruments. . . . [more]

I see from Carswell’s online catalogue that a new 7th edition of the the Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation (the “McGill Guide”) is due out on July 19, 2010.

There are separate records for what appears to be a softcover version ($50) or a hardcover version ($93) with no immediate indication of there being an online option.

I have long been critical of parts of the McGill Guide so it will be interesting to see what is new in the 7th edition.

I found with the 6th edition there were no good examples of citing to the Canadian Encyclopedic . . . [more]

If you are attending the upcoming American Association of Law Libraries conference in Denver, you are invited to drop by the CALI booth on Sunday afternoon from 2 to 3 p.m. for a “meet and greet” session with hosts and panelists of the Law Librarian Conversations podcast. Hosts Richard Leiter, Marcia Dority Baker and Roger Skalbeck will be there along with a pack of panelists to meet you.

You are also welcome to attend the recording of the special AALL 2010 episode of LawLibCon on Tuesday, July 13th at 2 pm in the CALI booth at the conference. Richard . . . [more]

If you use Google Scholar at all, you may be pleased to know that it’s now possible to refine certain searches. In a particular kind of search you want to know how a judgment or article has been received: this you can get by clicking on the “cited by [n]” link that will appear beneath each item in your search results. The happy ability to refine comes from Google’s addition of a switch to let you search within the articles or judgments that cited your initial work. Thus, to use a pedestrian example, Google Scholar returns 789 results for a . . . [more]

Are any members of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries doing any recent bibliometric analysis of case law citation and noting up? I know of several such efforts in the past (see the Research Databank of their Committee to Promote Research).

There is also of course the study done by Greg Wurzer, Aleksandra Zivanovic and Rhonda O’Neill (“Canadian Electronic Citators: An Evaluation of their Accuracy and Efficiency” (2004) 29 Can. L. Libraries Rev. 68) and various citator comparisons done by American colleagues a few years back in the Law Library Journal.

However, I think the time has come . . . [more]

Westlaw Canada has added some search features:

1) Did you mean? If you misspell your keywords in a search (e.g., “fiducary”), the system will prompt you to see if you meant the correctly spelled word (e.g., “fiduciary”). Interestingly enough, the misspelled “fiducary” still had 5 results which raises the issue if one should always truncate the term to “fid!” (this recalls a library school exercise I used to assign in the old days prior to there being online citators for UK cases – the exercise had students “note up” the famous Jarvis v. Swan Tours decision. I had one student . . . [more]

And now for something long ago and far away. “Somethings,” I should say: the Tarlton Law Library at the University of Texas has an online exhibition of old legal dictionaries that will leave you itching to look something up — again and again. The exhibit features 30 of the some 100 old (before 1800) and rare dictionaries in their collection, stemming from the common law, Roman law, and civil law systems.

[click image to enlarge]

Vocabularius, for example, a small excerpt from which is pictured here, was first published in 1475 and last published early in the 17th century. . . . [more]

A Slaw exclusive: Jason Wilson in lengthy conversation with the VP of Tech at Thomson.