In trying to get into the Halloween spirit, I have conducted a small search for ghouly related material in various Canadian legal fields. However; the only mention of Halloween in Canadian Legislation is in the Proclamation Declaring October 31st of each year to be “National UNICEF Day”. Vampires do get mentioned in the Wild Animal and Plant Trade Regulations but there is no mention of werewolves, zombies, mummies,or dracula. Mummy’s do get mentioned quite often in caselaw but that is a different type of mummy than what is associated with Halloween. Some of the other ghoulies mentioned previously come . . . [more]

Some of us might find this handy:

The Canadian federal government just launched a website with information on unhealthy and unsafe food and child products. I haven’t used it yet, but the Globe and Mail says we can search for information by keyword, date, or product or company name. We can also browse product recalls going back 10 years. . . . [more]

So the Hogwarts’ Headmaster was. So much for innocence. In a pre-wired, pre-web connected world, would it have mattered? Will this effect sales? Will there be be some re-enactments of Fahrenheit 451? Celsius 232.78 doesn’t quite have the same ring. Or class actions commenced by entrepreneurial legalists seeing the return of their clients’ ill-obtained shekels? Or alleging intentional or reckless or at least negligent infliction of mental suffering on the sensitive souls nurtured in the gentility of NASCAR ?

Off to more important matters. I think I can add to the discussion that Barbara Johnson has started in her Slaw . . . [more]

I’ve blogged a couple of times already about Zotero, that impressive Firefox extension that operates as a note-taker and bibliographic software. Zotero can tell when you’re viewing a book or an article or, now, a legal judgment, but until recently it had no category, if you like, for blog entry. That’s changed.

COinS (ContextObjects in Spans) is a simple way of embedding citation metadata in web pages. Zotero developed a WordPress plugin that uses the COinS specification for making basic metadata available to it. ((There seems to be a problem with the way the plugin interacts with version 2.2.2 . . . [more]

Microsoft’s Live Search has a “Books” section that lets you search for and within the books that Microsoft is scanning for those libraries with which it is partnering. Material in the public domain is 100% searchable, readable on line and, typically, capable of being downloaded in PDF.

I did a very crude search (Canada and Canada AND law) — there doesn’t seem to be an advanced search feature in Live Search Books — and came up with hundreds and hundreds of hits. There is truly a treasure trove here for legal historians and historians of law. . . . [more]

From the International Herald Tribune article, “Research libraries close their books to Google and Microsoft,” by Katie Hafner:

The Boston Library Consortium, a group of 19 New England institutions ((:The members of the BLC are Boston College, Boston Public Library, Boston University, Brandeis University, Brown University, the Marine Biological Laboratory & Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, MIT, Northeastern University, the State Library of Massachusetts, Tufts University, University of Connecticut, University of Massachusetts Amherst, University of Massachusetts Boston, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, University of Massachusetts Lowell, University of Massachusetts Medical Center, University of New Hampshire, Wellesley College, and Williams College” . . . [more]

I’ve just come across the site for a conference given at Berkeley early in the year: Law and the Emotions: New Directions in Scholarship and I have to say the topic was a new one for me. A couple of the papers may give you a sense of the thing:

• Cheshire Calhoun, Department of Philosophy, Colby College, “Hope Matters” [abstract] [full paper PDF]
• Owen Jones, Vanderbilt University Law School & Department of Biological Sciences, “Biology, Emotions, and Law” [abstract PDF] [precis PDF]
• Dan Kahan, Yale Law School, “Two Conceptions of Emotion in Risk Regulation” [

An interesting subject over at Slate: what can we learn from looking at the laws that are not enforced? Lawyer Tim Wu looks for patterns in how law is not applied (in the US).

Almost as much as the laws that we enact, the lawbreaking to which we shut our eyes reflects how tolerant U.S. society really is to individual or group difference. It forms a major part of our understanding of how the nation deals with what was once called “vice.” While messy, strange, hypocritical, and in a sense dishonest, widespread tolerance of lawbreaking forms a critical part

The World Bank has released the results of its ongoing examination of world governments along six dimensions: Voice and Accountability, Political Stability and Absence of Violence, Government Effectiveness, Regulatory Quality, Rule of Law, and Control of Corruption. Government Matters 2007 offers you various ways to see the data. For instance, you can call up a graph that compares Canada and the United States. Initially I looked at Canada’s current values compared to two prior years and was scratching my head a bit about the less than perfect record for “political stability,” understanding that it was about Quebec but thinking . . . [more]

Slaw is proud to appear, along with five other great blogs, in Binary Law’s list of “6 top legal info and legal web marketing blogs.” Tagged in one of those “top ten xxx” memes, Nick Holmes, the doyen of Binary Law, chose half a dozen blogs from his blogroll:

• Information Overlord
• LI Issues
• lo fi librarian
• Slaw (Canada)
• Lexblog (USA)
• Stem Legal (Canada)

Thanks, Nick. It’s good company you’ve put us in. . . . [more]

Some links to a podcast discussion of how the speed and collaborative nature of blogs is a real challenge to the traditional model of law journals.

In Santa Clara, a debate on Blogging, Scholarship, and the Bench and Bar Video: The event can be viewed by visiting this link.

Event login info: Username: aals, Password: scu2007

And a good discussion at Law.com, in a thoughtful posting and a further provocation, the debate continues. . . . [more]

The University of California, Berkeley announced today that it is posting the lectures from courses on YouTube.

“YouTube’s ongoing innovations create a great environment in which students and lifelong learners alike can discover, watch and share educational videos,” said Ben Hubbard, ETS co-manager of webcast.berkeley. “We are excited to make UC Berkeley videos available to the world on YouTube and will continue to expand our offerings.”

At the moment the offerings on the Berkeley Channel are mostly science courses, and there’s no law yet. A couple of the more accessible offerings include PACS 164A: Introduction to Nonviolence – Fall 2006 . . . [more]