The IALL 2009 Website Award Competition is now open. Previous winners:

2002 – HeinOnline from William S. Hein & CISG Database from Pace Law School (2 winners)
2003 – Intute
2004 – EISIL
2005 – Peace Palace Library
2007 – GlobaLex
2008 – WorldLII
[no winner for 2006]

Here is the announcement with all the details:

The International Association of Law Libraries’ 2009 Website Award Competitionis now open. This is an opportunity to nominate your favourite legal information website. The winner will be announced at the 28th Annual Course in International Law Librarianship in Istanbul (Turkey), 11th

In today’s Star, David Olive notes an interesting phenomenon,

A funny thing happened on the way to blogosphere dominance of the global conversation. Many of the most prominent bloggers have hitched their wagons to the traditional mainstream media (MSM). Yes, the same MSM that bloggers, or Internet diarists, ceaselessly ridiculed as slaves to conventional wisdom…

It works the other way, of course. The Toronto Star is in the company of scores of MSM outlets, broadcast and print, in “repurposing” traditional journalists into bloggers. Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman completes the points he makes in his New York Times

I had earlier asked about efforts to organize the increasing amount of legislation being digitized as a result of various efforts by academic and courthouse law libraries.

While conducting such historical legislative research online I stumbled across the Canadian Legislation Online page at the Great Library and I don’t think SLAW has yet commented on their page.

Kudos to the Great Library. They provide links to a number of the historical material, including:

– Revised Statutes of Canada, 1970

– the Canada Gazette (soon to be from 1841 to 1997) (via Library and Archives Canada) (the site works great and . . . [more]

We learned this morning of the death of Professor Hugh Lawford, a legend in Canadian legal information. He will be mourned by many students who studied with him at Queen’s University Law School, and his passing should be noted by every Canadian lawyer, because Hugh and his colleagues revolutionized how law is practiced. . . . [more]

The Law Commission of Ontario (LCO/CDO) has an ongoing project on the possible reform of the law of crossborder litigation, particularly the matter of judicial jurisdiction. A consultation paper has been prepared by Professor Janet Walker, a scholar in residence with the LCO/CDO, and comments were invited from members of the profession.

The Ontario Bar Association submitted its response to the consultation paper this spring, and has made its work available online in PDF. . . . [more]

Congratulations to Slaw and The Court founder Simon Fodden for being featured in the article “The Paperless Chase” by Emily White in the July/August 2009 edition of National, the Canadian Bar Association magazine (see pages 38 & 39). Simon talks at length about Slaw, law blogging, and technological change.

In the article, Simon explains:

I think there are a good many lawyers who would like to write much more than they do…Of course, they write memos and opinions, but I think they’d like to expand on a topic. And blogs give them that opportunity to do that.

White also . . . [more]

The excellent Stéphane Cottin has launched a collaborative bibliography on researching French legal information, using Zotero as the collaborative tool. The project is described in an associated website (in French); and the bibliography can be found at the Zotero Groups site Recherche doc juridique. At present there are over 300 entries in the bibliography/library.

Stéphane was until recently Chef de service du Greffe-Informatique et de service Bibliothèque – Documentation at the Conseil constitutionnel, France’s high constitutional council whose principal duty is to rule on the constitutionality of proposed legislation. He is currently working in the Prime Minister’s office, . . . [more]

One doesn’t normally expect a Blog quite as focused as the Huffington Post to spend much time on the legal publishing industry but Peter Schwartz’s post on the Reinvention of Legal Research is worth a bit of attention.

A couple of extracts:

When online legal research platforms were proprietary, online publishers imposed per-minute and per-use pricing structures. This pricing model facilitated client cost-recovery and allowed publishers to use law firms as information wholesalers. Because information is now a commodity, law firm clients will no longer pay for online legal research. New flat-rate pricing models for online research products reflect this

The Register reports that a California lawyer has written to the Chief Justice of that state to object to the state Supreme Court’s practice of passing lawyers’ briefs on to the commercial publishers, LexisNexis and Westlaw, who then sell access to them. It seems from Edmond Connor’s letter to the court that he is principally concerned about the profit-making aspect of the situation as a violation of copyright, rather than about the simple public availability of documents prepared for litigation.

At an earlier time all briefs filed with the California Supreme Court had been copied four times and placed in . . . [more]

Charon QC, the UK’s one-man blogging, podcasting and ‘zine publishing machine, has put a contract text online and made it available for free. Properly Mike Semple Piggot, he has taught contract law over the past 25 years at BPP Law School, an institution that he helped found. His text is, as he says, more of an outline, along with a collection of other resources related to contract law. On the site you’ll find up-to-date contract news; links to appropriate recent case reports are available within the text notes.

Semple plans a similar site dealing with the sale . . . [more]

Anne Foster Worlock’s comment reminded me of how far we have come in the technology of legal research.

And we had furious debates in the Eighties comparing this to the Walt. There would be a dedicated terminal for legal research in each library. And we had to remember commands like . . . [more]

Canadian law report citations are riddled with “full stops”, more commonly referred to as “periods”, all of which are completely unnecessary. Needless to say, there are crusaders amongst us who would do away with them altogether, sooner rather than later.

I will admit to having been the unwitting source of a number of the offending citations. In the development of Carswell’s series of topical law reports, an official citation was required for each of them. By tradition, it is the publisher who determines what the citation shall be and how it is to be styled. That task fell to me. . . . [more]