The interesting blog, Computational Legal Studies, has a recent post on Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s posts to the Islamic forum, Gawaher. (Abdulmutallab is the person who tried to blow up a plane on Christmas day.) All of his 310 posts have been downloaded by NEFA, which has made them available online in a zip file. (I have no idea what NEFA stands for and I’ve been unable to find out. There’s a… creepy element to this “anti-terrorism” site, though, I have to say.)

Some very basic analysis of the content of the posts has been done at . . . [more]

It’s been a little while since I wrote about The Law Librarian podcast created by Richard Leiter and available over at BlogTalkRadio and iTunes. I am one of several regular panelists; panelists now take turns participating in the shows depending on the topics. Richard has also expanded the schedule from once a month to once a month plus frequent updates, which will hopefully mean a new show every couple of weeks.

In case you missed them, the last two shows are:

Google Scholar Legal Opinions and Journals: A Conversation with Anurag Acharya (Dec. 4/09)
– Anurag Acharya is a . . . [more]

Louise Hamel, manager of the Judges’ Library for Ontario Courts, just announced to Canadian legal publishers that beginning January 2, 2010, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice will assign a neutral citation to their decisions, except for the Small Claims Court.

The Neutral Citation Standard for Case Law was developed in 1998 by the Canadian Citation Committee, an informal group that brought together various specialists in legal information from the judiciary, academia and the publishing industry, including slawers Martin Felsky and Daniel Poulin. The standard was approved in 1999 by the Canadian Judicial Council and has since then been . . . [more]

Readers of Slaw may have come across the small volumes that have been published annually for over sixty years – the Hamlyn Lectures. They resulted from an application for directions before Mr. Justice Wynn-Parry of a Trust resulting from the Last Will and Testament of Miss Emma Hamlyn. They’re delightfully accessible general talks on various aspects of English and comparative law.

And the older volumes of the series are now available from the University of Exeter Law School website. CUP is publishing the current volumes.

Miss Hamlyn bequeathed the residue of her estate to her executors as . . . [more]

The people at the Law Reform Commission of Ireland have been very busy little beavers recently.

Last week, they published a consultation paper on electronic evidence. Then they brought out a report on criminal defences (self-defence, provocation, duress).

Yesterday, boom, another consultation paper, this time on search warrants and bench warrants.

In each case, the Commission has adopted a very pronounced comparativist point of view that can be of interest to Canadians, as all of the documents take a close look at what is happening in other jurisdictions, such as the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and the . . . [more]

Thanks to a tweet by @richards1000 I was reminded about Cornell University Library’s digitization project, which has resulted in over 2000 law books’ becoming freely available online at the Internet Archive. Slawyer Michael Lines spent some time at Cornell in 2008 and reported on the digitization project then current. As with most texts in the Internet Archive, you are able to read these materials online in an interactive version of the actual books, see or download them in plain text or PDF, or obtain them in, among others, a format suitable for Kindle or EPUB.

I’ve done a fairly . . . [more]

I have made the following enhancements to my Custom Google Search of Canadian Law Firms available at http://tinyurl.com/canadianlawfirms:

– Renamed the site to “Search Canadian Law Firm Websites, Blogs & Journals”

– added 28 more law firms to include boutiques and regional (smaller) firms for a total of 79 Canadian law firms (and I broadened URLs to include subdomains of law firms [e.g., lawfirm.ca instead of http://lawfirm.ca/*]).

– added 205 Canadian law-related blogs

– added 20 Canadian law journal websites, the BC Courthouse Library and the CBA and CBAO

– added refinement tags to refine search results to publications . . . [more]

The American Bar Association’s Technology Resource Center has launched a search engine that enables you to search the “free full-text of over 300 online law reviews and law journals” as well as some additional material. There is a list of sources searched on the page where you’ll find the search box.

Because the search facility was constructed using Google Custom Search, it only searches those resources made available online by the journals and indexed by Google. The historical depth of such material will vary greatly, of course, from journal to journal.

Sensibly, perhaps, the sources look to be all from . . . [more]

When I closed an old Google account over the weekend, it appears that I inadvertently deleted the Custom Google Search of Canadian law firms that I had created (and that I understand is used a fair bit by researchers).

I have created a new Custom Google Search of Canadian Law Firms, now at a new URL of:

http://www.tinyurl.com/canadianlawfirms

Click here to see a sample search result on the phrase “fiduciary duties.”

The new site is free of ads and has more Canadian law firms included (now there are 51 or the larger law firms from across the country). I also . . . [more]

At lunch, I attended a round table organized by the National Capital Association of Law Libraries that took place at the University of Ottawa.

One of the more interesting announcements concerned the ongoing digitization of older publications relating to the activities of the Parliament of Canada.

According to the person from Library and Archives Canada who was present, the following material is now digitized:

• Journals of the House of Commons and Senate for 1901-1954
• Committee proceedings and evidence for 1901-1934
• Public Accounts and Estimates for 1867-1993

The material is available on the site of the Internet Archive.

Debates for . . . [more]

So try this: create a link to section 650 of a freely available online version of the Criminal Code. Basic law, basic task in this digital age, right?

Unless I’ve missed something obvious, which is the best sort of thing to miss, it ain’t so easy nowadays. There are two online sources of the Code: CanLII’s and the Department of Justice’s, which are actually just one version because CanLII publishes what the DOJ provides.

But let’s start with the CanLII version. There’s the whole statute with no table of contents. And that’s it. A search within for “650,” . . . [more]

An announcement early today from Google Distinguished Engineer Anurag Acharya that Google Scholar now features major cases, as well as an ability to search in legal periodicals for case citations.

I thought initially it was just American, but searching on the following names brought interesting results:

Donoghue v. Stevenson 2380 hits
R. Drybones 849 hits
Delgamuukw 956 hits
Mabo v. Queensland 2770 hits

Google hat-tips “several pioneers, who have worked on making it possible for an average citizen to educate herself about the laws of the land: Tom Bruce (Cornell LII), Jerry Dupont (LLMC), Graham Greenleaf and Andrew Mowbray (AustLII), . . . [more]