Michel-Adrien Sheppard, sometime Slawyer and full-time Library Boy, mentioned JurisPedia here a number of months ago, but didn’t talk about it then. I thought I’d take a look and see how things were going in this law wiki venture.

Jurispedia, which aims to construct an encyclopedia of worldwide law, looks to be an initiative of 5 institutions:

1. l’Équipe de Recherche Informatique et Droit, Faculty of Law of the University of Montpellier I in France,
2. the Faculty of law of the Can Tho University in Vietnam,
3. the Faculty of law of Groningen University in the Netherlands,
4. the JURIS team

How one thing leads to another in this webbed and polycentric medium…

In David Fraser’s excellent Privacy Law Blog I learn that Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner have a blog called Freakonomics, named after their book that takes an unconventional tack in the dismal science and is good reading (can’t believe that I, a product of the usual wretched micro- and macro-economics courses, said that about one of the most over-rated disciplines in the… but that’s another story). The blog looks like it’s going to be interesting.

And from that I learn that they write a column in the . . . [more]

A late and short fillip today — which got away from me (the day, I mean).

MIT is an endless source of fascination, most of which is available on the web. (I ask you: how many universities would let their students design the front page of their website — every single day??) Today I simply point you to the site of the Perceptual Science Group, which I kept reading as Perpetual Science Group, something else entirely.

Here you’ll find a music study that invites you to take part — do it, and tell them if this or that sound . . . [more]

This from Erica Anderson, TALL President and Research Librarian at the Legislative Library, Ontario:

The Legislative Assembly of Ontario website has been redesigned. It is a “soft launch” and a work in progress so you may notice some content changes, additions, or deletions. Not all of the content has been migrated yet, but it is on its way with more being added by the end of March. Specifically, the House Hansard and Committee Hansard indexes will be returning by about the end of March.

If you have any comments or questions on the new website and its content please direct

The idea of expert systems in law has been around for a number of decades at least and never seems to get much traction. The notion, drastically simplified, is that experts in an area of law analyse it into its components, arrange those components in such a way that it creates a progression of issues leading towards all possible conclusions, and then formulate questions based on this progression which can be posed to a non-expert. Because its meant to be a system, the whole thing has to be set up so that it can operate without the need for (any? . . . [more]

Statistics Canada just released the annual report Legal Aid in Canada: Resource and Caseload Statistics, 2005/2006.

Some highlights:

-Spending by Canada’s legal aid plans during 2005/2006 was up 9% from the previous year.

-Legal aid plans spent $673 million on providing services in 2005/2006, or the equivalent of $21 for every Canadian. Before 2005/2006, this spending had been stable for three years.

-Legal aid plans received 780,000 applications for assistance, an increase of 3% from the previous year.

-About 477,000 applications were approved for full legal aid service. This is up 2% from the year before.

-About 12,000 lawyers . . . [more]

Slaw’s very own Simon Fodden has an item today in The Court (Osgoode Hall Law School) that analyzes the “Authors Cited” sections of Supreme Court of Canada judgments for 2006.

Entitled What is the Supreme Court Reading?, the article states that the analysis “reveals a meagre and mundane stock of stimulation, heavy on textbooks and light on theory”.

Ouch!

Fodden adds: “I assume that the great bulk of references in decisions originate in parties’ factums and do not represent independent research by the judges”.

Blame the lawyers. Sounds good to me. Don’t want to antagonize the bench too openly, . . . [more]

The new CANLII Beta is awesome! Not sure on the interface yet, but they’ve taken a big step forward on the RSS front. Just look at that list!

My only request would be to implement search feeds prior to launch. I want to be able to monitor new cases or legislation that match keyword phrases.

Got some feedback? Send it to beta@canlii.org . . . [more]

The Law Courts Education Society of BC has launched a new website – Court Tips: Representing Yourself in Chambers.

Here are the first set of videos:

• Presenting Your Case in Chambers
• Changing A Child Support Order
• Putting Your Best Case Forward
• Avoiding the Pitfalls in Family Matters
• What to expect from the Chambers Process
• Frequently Asked Questions about Chambers
• What to Expect The Day of the Hearing

I supervise the student law journal at UVic, so I have been encouraging them to consider open source publishing, and in the course of reviewing some of this, I came across an good article on this from last September, care of Project Open Source at the University of Toronto.

I have referred to this earlier postings, but this is part of a larger initiative from north american research libraries called “The Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition” or SPARC. . There are also similar initiatives in Europe and Japan., although you will need to know Japanese to be able . . . [more]

La publicité sur Internet décolle, tout le monde le dit, et ce, même s’il a fallu attendre des années pour que cela se concrétise. Mais maintenant, çà y est. On l’a vu récemment au Québec avec l’affaire Igor et moi de Saputo, la publicité en ligne peut-être d’une efficacité redoutable. En l’occurrence, il s’agit d’un muffin en forme de gorille sympatique, drôle, présentant un message peu intrusif, différent (très différent même) de la publicité papier ou télévisuelle, par le biais de jeux disponibles sur Internet.

Sauf que, plus je lis la Loi sur la protection du consommateur, et plus . . . [more]

Two recent graduates of the Faculty of Law at the University of British Columbia have pointed me to their website, Legaltree.ca, which has the tagline “A growing resource for lawyers.” The idea is that lawyers will submit “research resources” they have written, building a corpus of valuable material for use by everyone. The idea isn’t a bad one, although, as with Wikipedia, the evident model, much will depend upon the editors’ willingness to check the quality and currency of the submissions. There are few resources in fact available at the moment, and what there is, unsurprisingly, has a B.C. . . . [more]