Ted Tjaden‘s excellent online guide on LLRX to doing legal research in Canada has been updated. The sub-heads are as follows:

• Doing Legal Research in Canada — April 4, 2008
• Canadian Primary Legal Resources — April 1, 2008
• Introduction: The Canadian Legal System — April 1, 2008
• Canadian Secondary Legal Resources — April 1, 2008
• Canadian Legal Organizations — April 1, 2008
• Canadian Legal Publishers — April 1, 2008
• Canadian Legal Research: By Topic — April 1, 2008

Props to Ted. . . . [more]

The US SEC website finally has RSS feeds. There’s one for the latest filings received and processed, and one for press releases issued by the SEC.

Thanks to Dealbreaker for noticing. . . . [more]

Scribd is a free service that lets you put your document or image files online, where they are available to the public. Now Scribd is offering to scan your print documents and put those online — for free. You mail in your documents, wait some weeks, and then enjoy your words in pixels. Even accounting for the fact that Scribd is in complete charge of the project and so can move as slowly and as selectively as it wishes, this is a remarkable offer.

…and it got me wondering: would this be a good way to put public domain case . . . [more]

For all you law and IT lovers, I am pleased to announce that Leg@l.IT is back this year! With Canada’s Privacy Commissionner, Jennifer Stoddart, and Prof. Pierre Trudel as co-presidents, three tracks with the most interesting and en vogue subjects (here is the agenda) and an impressive group of speakers, including fellow Slawers (Simon Chester, Jordan Furlong and Vincent Gautrais) and blogger (David Bilinsky), it is THE event you don’t want to miss!

Leg@l.IT is an accessible and spearheading conference, the most important of this kind in Canada, about the potential and . . . [more]

The most recent issue of The Lawyers Weekly features an article entitled Animal law: from the classroom to the real world? that describes the emergence of animal law as a serious field of study and perhaps legal practice:

“If the law schools are any indication, animal law is a growth area. University of Toronto has just become the seventh law school to offer animal law on its curriculum, after McGill, Dalhousie, University of Alberta, University of Ottawa, University of Victoria and Université du Québec à Montréal(…)”

“Just as actually practising environmental law was seen as a pipe dream of law

We’ve blogged a couple of times about Carl Malmud’s efforts to provide free access to U.S. cases and other important documents (see: Case Law Just Wants To Be Free and Carl Malmud Publishes Cases). Now Boing Boing reports that Malmud’s efforts to gain access to U.S. federal legislative histories has run into a block in the form of Thomson West. Complied by law librarians at the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the histories have been scanned by Thomson West pursuant to a deal they made with the GAO; and now Thomson West claims an exclusive right to the documents.

Malmud . . . [more]

I earlier commented on SLAW on the problem of link rot on the web.

I am updating my “Doing Legal Research in Canada” guide on LLRX.com since I believe I last updated it in 2004 and it is out-of-date (my similar guide on NYU’s Globalex site is more current for now than the guide on LLRX.com).

As part of updating the LLRX.com guide, I was struck by the fact that easily more than 50% of the links were broken (and for some topics, it was as high as 90%). All within 3 years or so! And the existing links were . . . [more]

A colleague made me aware of an online Compendium of Damages Awarded in Personal Injury Actions Across Ontario (January 1999 – November 2005). It is posted on the website of the County of Carleton Law Association (CCLA) and appears to have been part of a project chaired by Mr. Justice Chadwick, with the help of local lawyers, students and law clerks.

I assume it was aimed at pro se litigants and must have been quite an effort. What I find puzzling though is that most of this data (and I assume more extensive data) is available in Carswell’s Goldsmith’s . . . [more]

Thought I’d pass along this excellent resource that was featured in a message posted to the NCALL listserv today by Neal Ferguson of Borden Ladner Gervais LLP in Ottawa. It’s a PowerPoint by Catherine Best of Best Canadian Guide to Legal Research fame that was used at a presentation to the Vancouver Association of Law Libraries last month. It’s available here.

The CanLII interface is also reviewed.

This will certainly be useful for legal research sessions when people start asking why they should use one resource over the other…. . . . [more]

The UN Statistics Division has a search tool, UNdata, which is worth looking at. Drawing on 13 databases — environment, population, agriculture… but not law — UNdata provides a window on some 55 million records.

The search results are presented in a really useful format, as well. The results page offers you two tabs, Data Series and Table Presentations, that will give you documents or tables, respectively, in which your search terms appear. As well, in the Data Series tab you may choose whether to download the document, view it online, or preview it in a popup window.

[via . . . [more]

Canadian Lawyer has given SLAW a nod as a Top 10 luminary of the Canadian blawgosphere.

Others include:

Michael Geist

Law21

Law Firm Web Strategy

eLegal

The Bizop News

Toronto Estate Law Blog

Law is Cool

Library Boy

Rule of Law . . . [more]

From Library Stuff, we learn that Zotero has outperformed all other citation software tested at Citefest 2008, sponsored by Northwestern University Library and Academic Technologies. They tested CiteULike, Connotea, EndNote, NoodleBib, RefWorks, and Zotero. Now we just need a Canadian legal citation style. . . . [more]