As of today, Harper’s Index is free online. For those of you who might not know, Harper’s Index is a collection of information set out in single lines as if it were statistical data and in a way that is meant to surprise and interest you. In the online Index you’re presented with a search box — which will return helpful suggestions as you type, guiding you to those terms that do in fact appear within the index.

For example, a search for “law” produces over half a dozen screenfuls of items, the first of which is:

1/85 Number of . . . [more]

The Georgetown Law Library will hold a symposium on the Future of Today’s Legal Scholarship on July 25, 2009 in Washington. It will debate how blogging has become an integral part of legal scholarship:

“The Future of Today’s Legal Scholarship is a symposium that brings together academic bloggers, law librarians, and experts in preservation to tackle the bigger, more imperative challenges that will influence legal scholarship and democratic access to legal information for generations to come.”

“We must determine how to prioritize, collect, archive, preserve, and ensure reliable long-term access to the burgeoning amount of legal scholarship being published through

With the renovations progressing here at the DMP Law Library, most of our print has moved off site, and is harder to get. To compensate the students, I’ve been giving some instruction in electronic-only legal research, and even though I’m immersed in this topic every day, it is still surprising to me just how much can be accomplished online. Generally, of course, Legislation that has any historical aspect still requires the print for most jurisdictions, though CanLII’s new point-in-time functions are great, and some jurisdictions offer this sort of detail online.

For Canadian case law, just about anything you want . . . [more]

1. Irwin Law has announced the development of its own online e-books platform. As of July 31, 2009, their current licensing agreement with LexisNexis Quicklaw will come to an end, and digital versions of all Irwin Law texts will be exclusively available on their proprietary platform as of the next day. Jeffrey Miller, Irwin publisher, makes it clear in his announcement to current authors that:

We respect the work of our authors and recognize our responsibility to publish in a manner that enhances their return and their reputation, while at the same time protecting their intellectual property rights. Finally, our

Ross E. Davies, of George Mason University School of Law, has a brief piece called “Law Review Circulation” available on SSRN. The article has been summarized by Inside Higher Ed, and, simply, reveals a serious drop in the the paid circulation for the “top 15” U.S. law reviews, where the figures are available (as they are required by the U.S. Postal Service to be).

One example will suffice here: The Harvard Law Journal’s paid circulation over time was as follows:

1979-80: 8,760 \ 1987-88: 7325 \ 1997-98: 4367 \ 2007-08: 2,610

This is not surprising, perhaps, given the . . . [more]

Just over three decades ago, the Canadian Law Information Council was established by the federal and provincial governments in order to create a framework for online access to legal information in Canada. The idea was that a national council of all of the interested parties could work together to ensure that any development was in the best interest of Canadians.

At the time, there was a serious concern that online databases of Canadian legal information would be built and controlled from the United States, with the result that Canadians would have to go offshore to access their own laws in . . . [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]

The Human Security Report Project, affiliated with Simon Fraser University’s School for International Studies, conducts research on political violence and makes that research available to scholars and the public generally. The Human Security Gateway is the tool used for dissemination of this material and as well relevant research available elsewhere.

Currently the counter on the site claims 23,701 resources, categorized as News Articles, Factsheets, Reports or Academic Articles. As well, it’s possible to filter the data by topic and region. There are, for example, 2,472 resources under the heading of International Law, Justice and Accountability . . . [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]

Spurred by Doug Cornelius’s post on the Lexisweb beta, I decided to give the new kid a try.

I created a couple of scenarios and compared results in Lexisweb (LW) against CanLII (CL) and Google (G). Of course, I expected a certain variability in the results. CanLII has a deliberately limited scope, and Google extremely large. I expected LW to come in somewhere in the middle, as according to the user’s guide, there is deliberate selection of sources to be indexed. I’m guessing that otherwise, the process is automated, making Lexisweb roughly like MOSS or other enterprise search products.

The . . . [more]

The Woodruff Library at Morehouse College in Atlanta has just made their collection of M.L.K. papers, books and other items available to the public. Via the website you can find the archival descriptions and other study aides. They purchased the collection in 2006 with the help of the Atlanta Mayor just before it was to go to auction, a coup for the city and an end to the controversy surrounding the estate.

From the website:

The Morehouse King Collection includes approximately 1,000 books from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s personal library with his handwritten notes throughout. In addition, there

In a rare immersion into a point of family law for something I was researching last week, I stumbled across – by accident because I wasn’t researching it – the phrase “jactitation of marriage” as a potential cause of action and recall having stumbled across the phrase in the past, having looked up its meaning in the past, and (of course) subsequently forgetting what it meant every time I came across it.

I assume that perhaps only two of our SLAW readers know the meaning, being the two Simons, one of whom wrote a book on family law and the . . . [more]