There are a couple of note-taking tools I use when I’m using my browser to do research, and I thought I might mention them here in case there’s a Slaw reader not familiar with them.

I use Firefox, now in the recently released version 1.5. There’s simply no contest in my mind, when it comes to browsers: Firefox beats Internet Explorer hands down, for a whole host of reasons that I urge you to explore (if you’re not already a Firefox user). Firefox lets you plug in extensions that can be downloaded from their site; these add to the . . . [more]

Woo hoo! Current Cites finally gets an RSS feed and I’ve subscribed: http://lists.webjunction.org/currentcites/cites.xml. Their emails were the last info-mails I received. Everything impersonal is now RSS, and emails are from people. . . . [more]

I've circled back to take another look at Google Base because of a weblog post by Rashmi Sinha, “The blooming of information architecture at Google: A close look at facets, tags & categories in GoogleBase.”

A number of discussions arose at a meeting with colleagues today on the future of law firm legal researchers given changes in technology. It was hard enough twenty years ago (when I was still typing my law school papers) to imagine the impact of the Internet, the scope of online law-related information and other technologies that support legal research (e-mail, laser printing, scanning, etc.) [although twenty years ago I did have a Commodore computer that used a cassette tape deck as its memory – you had to fast forward the tape to get to different spots on the memory!.] Could . . . [more]

In reviewing the work of Eugene Garfield (of whom more anon) two points were fascinating.

Firstly that the idea of citation databases in the sciences came from Shepards Citations. See his 50 year old article Association of ideas techniques in documentation: Shepardizing the literature of science. I’d assumed that the legal documentation theorists drew from the mathematicians and information scientists, not the other was round. His article is worth reading.

Second the history of information science used to assume that techniques of organizing information were essentially from the Enlightenment, and the founding of the great national libraries, like the . . . [more]

The web democratizes information. But I just stumbled on a fascinating site with case law and articles for authors considering suing publishers. Check out http://www.akme.btinternet.co.uk/lawlibry.html which presents a model for decentralized subject specific information.

In a different more academic vein, we had occasion to look at restitutionary remedies on Friday and my colleagues were delighted with the depth of UCL’s restitution site at http://www.ucc.ie/law/restitution/restitution.htm
What other subject specific hoards do we use? . . . [more]

We’ve all heard of Wikipedia, the freely editable online encyclopedia, but have you heard of its sister site WikiBooks?

Wikibooks is a collection of open content textbooks, manuals, and other texts, with supporting book-based texts that are being collaboratively written. This site is a wiki, meaning that anyone, including you, can edit any book module right now by clicking on the edit this page link that appears in every Wikibooks module. Set up in July, 2003, volunteers have written around 12,294 book modules in a multitude of books.

I fully admit I am no expert in IP, but . . . [more]

The Royal Society urges caution over open-access publishing. See
Polly Curtis, education correspondent, Thursday November 24, 2005, Guardian Unlimited

One of the most prestigious scientific academies today warned against a rush to “open-access” publishing, saying a change to the current system of releasing research could have “disastrous” consequences for science.
The Royal Society today published a position statement urging caution against radical reform, in a move which will anger academics and universities who have been pushing for a replacement to the current costly system.

The row over how to publish research centres on the role of the biggest academic publishing

. . . [more]

There is a good article in the most recent issue of the CBA National for October-November starting at page 31 called the “Legal Research Roundtable”, in which SLAW is given as one of the websites.

At the same time as I was reviewing this article, which stresses the importance of legal research skills for law practice, I received notiifcation from WestlaweCarswell about their new certification programme:

http://www.westlawecarswell.com/lawschool

I use this as a refresher for upper-year law students. I’d be interested in hearing about other experiences and uses of the ecarswell certificate.

nc . . . [more]

A recent Reuters article reveals that Cybercrime proved more profitable than drug trafficking in 2004.

A somewhat dubious milestone, but it casts another light on various efforts to rein in Cybercrime. . . . [more]

Musing in the rain this morning on the nature of reported Vs unreported decisions and wondering just what the distinction means any more.
In the ‘old days’ (Simon C set me off on this train of thought with his recent posting) the distinction was very clear. Reported, print decisions were all you had access to. Finding information about recent, unreported decisions was very difficult. Doing any sort of comprehensive search was impossible. Of course we had a lot less to read! But now? When researching anything, and I’m not alone in this, I look at reported or unreported decisions, making . . . [more]

Once in a while, one needs to be reminded of just how partial the electronic tools are, and how much we’ll continue to need old-fashioned libraries.

Let’s get away from the grand abstractions and make this very concrete.
Here was the issue. We had to consider whether a contract was binding. It had been made on April *, 200*. But we discovered that one of the parties named in the contract hadn’t been incorporated until May *, 200*. If it wasn’t yet in existence, could it validly contract?

If this were just involving Canadian parties, the answer would have been . . . [more]