The law can tell us a few things about love. Legislation, jurisprudence and doctrine.

Remember Wystan Auden’s poem, Law Like Love which you can hear read in the great man’s voice:

Law, says the judge as he looks down his nose,
Speaking clearly and most severely,
Law is as I’ve told you before,
Law is as you know I suppose,
Law is but let me explain it once more,
Law is The Law.

And Auden goes on to contrast that with love – but you really should read the work yourselves.

Let’s start with legislation. All young . . . [more]

Thanks to Steve Abram’s blog for a quite deliciously concise translation by Peter Binkley of Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan’s Five LawsRanganathan, S. R. (1957). The five laws of library science. London: Blunt and Sons, Ltd. The implications of Ranganathan’s work continue to be explored in the world of Web 2.0.

Libri utendi.
Omni libro lector.
Omni lectori liber.
Otium lectoris servandum.
Virescat biblioteca

So elegant in its simplicity . . . [more]

The front page of today's Globe and Mail had a piece on a project/application called Psiphon, which is aimed at helping those in closed societies circumvent government restrictions.

The wonderful Erik Heels told me ten years ago about a websiteCould it have been Random Website, Erik? that took one at random to unexpected destinations on Mr. Gore’s Information Superhighway.

I’ve lost the link, of course, but each week I try and stop by a wonderfully quirky collection of links at Web Zen.

This week’s links will I think appeal to Slaw readers, who are quintessentially people of the written wordI had initially written people of the book without realizing that this has a quite precise meaning in Islamic teaching.

The keeper is the Ask . . . [more]

1. Ongoing: Everybody’s Blogging
2. Sifry’s Alerts: State of the Blogosphere, February 2006 Part 1: On Blogosphere Growth
3. The Basement: The Blog Bang – Is the Blogosphere Contracting?
4. Prism Legal – Strategic Legal Technology: Good KM Article in National
5. CBA National
6. CBA National Vol. 15 No. 1 [pdf version]
7. Selkirk College: Knowledge Management Information Paper, Oct. 2003 [pdf]
8. Pacific Legal Technology Conference, Oct. 2002: S. Chester, “Knowledge Management in a Canadian Law Firm”
9. IBM Systems Journal, Volume 32, Number 1, 1993
10. IBM Systems Journal, Volume 32, 1993, index
11. Leadership Tools: Leadership Versus Management
12. Minister of Justice
13. The. Hon. Vic Toews
14. R. v.

. . . [more]

…[T]he number of known blogs, now somewhere around 25 million, has been doubling every 5½ months… At this rate, in August 2009, the number of known blogs will more or less equal the population of the world.
Ongoing: Everybody’s Blogging

For a seriously detailed look at the blogosphere, see Sifry’s Alerts: State of the Blogosphere, February 2006 Part 1: On Blogosphere Growth. . . . [more]

Delighted to see (thanks to Ron Friedmann’s blog ) that Steven’s smiling faceSee page 33 is found on an excellent piece in Jordan Furlong’s CBA National assessing the state of knowledge management in Canada as applied to law firmsI leave to one side my own work on this topic.

Ron observes that with trends in US law firms away from structured knowledge management, Canada may offer more interesting developments than south of the border.

But Slawers can also see what Steven Matthews, Knowledge Services Director, Clark Wilson,Vancouver, looks like in person. . . . [more]

With all of the discussion earlier about II and Lawyers; I was half expecting to hear someone use the phrase … “can’t we all get along?” I deliberated on whether to enter this debate; but, after having gathered my thoughts here goes… First, to think that this is a problem of IT and lawyers is to look at this through too narrow a lens. Indeed, there is discussion throughout management and IT literature that is looking at the IT-Business problem. What follows here is one person’s view of the problem and some suggestions for dealing with it.

Canada has a new Minister of Justice, The. Hon. Vic Toews, and I thought that it might be interesting to look at some of his previous work.

He has two entries in the Index to Canadian Legal Literature:

– “The Charter [Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms] in Canadian society.” (2003) 19 Sup. Ct. L. Rev. (2d) 345-350

– Manitoba, Department of Justice, Report on Manitoba public consultations on the Young Offenders Act. (Winnipeg: Manitoba Justice, 1999)

And has appeared 7 times before the SCC:

– R. v. Butler [1992] 1 S.C.R. 452

– Reference Re Canada Assistance . . . [more]

In my post from January 20th called “The Elusive Search for Historical Canadian Stock Trading Prices” I mentioned that I didn’t know if the trading data included on Lexis Nexis would be included in a subscriber’s flat rate or not. Helen Katz kindly spoke with Lexis Nexis and found out that, if you speak with them before the end of February (i.e. this month) you should be able to include it in your flat rate.

I wanted to confirm this directly with Lexis Nexis Canada . I spoke with Christine Burchert, Sales Manager for Ontario. This is . . . [more]

Take a look at Google China, if only to be like the bear who went over the mountain to see what it could see. The URL is simply http://www.google.cn, and it will accept English queries. Try “tienamin” and the variants “tiananmen” and “tianamen,” because it seems likely that China will not want to let viewers find out about the massacre in 1989 — provided that it’s worried about English.

Then compare (English) results with those that google.com throws up. I followed some of the Google China links, and found that, because of my browser history function I guess, that . . . [more]

When someone asks you for the Wagon Mound (1) Case, just where do you look? At the BC Courthouse Library Society’s Popular Case Name Table, of course!

Someone asked me to get a copy of the Wagon Mound 1 case. That was all they had for me. No proper case name. No citation. “Funny name for a case,” I thought, after I had them repeat it to me about three times. So I did a Google search and I stumbled upon this BC resource that lists the popular names of cases and their corresponding proper names and citations, . . . [more]