The Technology Review published by MIT offers up some great food for thought via Tweets of article headlines. The publication fills my need for a quick review of what is up with science and technology since I rarely read in this area. Occasionally, there is an excellent business oriented article thrown in the mix.

An article titled Trusting Data, Not Intuition is a worthwhile read. The main point of the article is that for technology related business decisions, nothing beats testing.

Studies of the software industry indicate that when ideas people thought would succeed are evaluated through controlled experiments, less

The deadline is approaching for nominations for the Walter Owen Book Prize, awarded by the Foundation for Legal Research. This $10,000 prize rewards outstanding new contributions to Canadian legal literature. This year, the selection committee will consider books written in English and published in 2009 or 2010. For additional information, see the Foundation for Legal Research website. . . . [more]

Here is a link to a Press Release from Los Angeles this afternoon, announcing that Richard Susskind, the controversial (in some circles anyway) author of The End of Lawyers?

Note the importance of the final question-mark.

Integreon’s Client Advisory Board will be composed of managing partners at law firms and general counsel at organizations that Integreon serves. The board will provide Integreon’s clients with an opportunity to share ideas about legal service trends, specify future requirements for Integreon’s services, and identify opportunities for collaboration.

Integreon (according to its website) “applies technology intelligently to legal solutions to automate processes and . . . [more]

The latest issue of the Yale Law Journal contains a supremely sane and caustic attack by Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals on the tendency of the Blue Book (Uniform System of Citation) to proliferate increasing thickets of rules and increasingly trivial sub-rules.

In an earlier essay, Goodbye to the Bluebook, 53 University of Chicago Law Review 1343 (1986), Judge Posner suggested four principles to guide the design of such a system:

“to spare the writer or editor from having to think about citation form,”

“to economize on space and the reader’s time,”

“to

If you enjoy worrying the ambiguous spaces in legislation, or shaking your head at the foolishness of those who are wrongheaded about interpretation, you might like Lawrence Solan’s new book, The Language of Statutes, Laws and their Interpretation (University of Chicago Press, 2010, ISBN: 9780226767963—also available as an e-book, including what appears to be a 30-day “rental” for $7). His is a balanced, pragmatic view of statutory interpretation and the role of the courts, welcome, I’d say, in a U.S. climate where otherwise reasonable people can say that judges should simply apply laws mechanically and leave the creativity to . . . [more]

Slaw has always had an interest in publishing and in technology, so I’m using this track record as an excuse for telling you about Bibliotype, even though it has nothing whatever to do with law. My deeper reason is that we’re all in this together, and anything that might help improve the experience of reading materials online should interest lawyers. So much for the prolegomenon.

Bibliotype is the work of the niftily-named Craig Mod, a writer and book designer. I came across it because of Mod’s article in the online web designer’s publication, A List Apart. There he . . . [more]

If you’re not familiar with Instapaper, may I suggest you take a moment now to click on that link and get acquainted? Too busy? See, that’s the whole point. Instapaper is for you because you’re too busy — too busy now, at least. It’s a way to lodge the text of an interesting web find in a personal archive so that later, when you do have the time, you’ll be able to read it. It’s free and it’s easy.

And when “later” comes, you can read your saved gems in your computer (iPad, iPod, laptop), of course, or on . . . [more]

If you’re ever in the mood to drop back a good few yards to get some perspective, you might want to take a look at the Philosophy of Law section of the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP). You’ll have almost a dozen essays to choose from:

• Feminist Jurisprudence
• Human Rights
• Just War Theory
• Law and Economics
• Philosophy of Law
• Legal Positivism
• Legal Pragmatism
• Natural Law
• Punishment
• Right to Private Property

The essay on Philosophy of Law might be a good place to start, as it does a tour d’horizon of various theories of jurisprudence: analytical, normative, and critical.

The IEP . . . [more]

There is a wonderful spin-off magazine from the Economist called More Intelligent Life.

Like most other magazines, it does a year-end review of the best books of 2010.

But someone at the magazine didn’t quite check the clipart that accompanies that page:

Who actually thought that the Pacific Reporter was worth a plug? And thought that caselaw might be enhanced by snow?

Happy New Year – and a Guid Hogmanay. . . . [more]

There’s an interesting conversation over at Edge — not the legal consulting company, but the foundation that holds colloquiums on important issues in science, philosophy, and art. This discussion is entitled Who Gets to Keep Secrets? and the question was posed by Daniel Hillis, a computer scientist, who amplified it thus:

The question of secrecy in the information age is clearly a deep social (and mathematical) problem, and well worth paying attention to.

When does my right to privacy trump your need for security? Should a democratic government be allowed to practice secret diplomacy? Would we rather live in

Here’s a book for the lawyer on your Christmas gift list: Representing Justice, by Judith Resnik and Dennis E. Curtis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). From the blurb:

By mapping the remarkable run of the icon of Justice, a woman with scales and sword, and by tracing the development of public spaces dedicated to justice—courthouses—the authors explore the evolution of adjudication into its modern form as well as the intimate relationship between the courts and democracy.

From the review in the New York Times, we learn:

Lady Justice’s familiar blindfold did not become an accessory until well