We all run into design-related questions when creating a web page. Questions like “Should this button be red or green?” or “What would the most effective headline for this paragraph be?”. While these decisions may have a dramatic impact on the overall effectiveness of a website, they are often the product of subjective judgement calls by an individual, or worse, a committee.

What if, instead, we could approach such design decisions scientifically? A/B testing makes this possible by treating a web page design instance as an “experiment” where multiple variations of a webpage are randomly presented to page visitors; data . . . [more]

Despite the advent of Smartphones (Blackberry, iPhone, etc.) and the many ways they facilitate our lives (i.e. we can now start a car, open a bank account, receive and send e-mails, read the news, etc.), the legal profession still seems to be behind on technology. Although the technology is clearly available, we unfortunately fail to take advantage of its full potential. We have all the tools and gadgets necessary to practice the law from our own homes, without ever even having to physically meet a client or go to court. In fact, the virtual world is less costly, greener, . . . [more]

Though we frequently mention New Jersey, we haven’t mentioned the Channel Islands – and their unique local laws and language. The local BBC news on Jersey mentions today that the Jersey Legal Information site was according to the BBC designed by Richard Susskind and that Richard is leading a conference on the use of social media within law, and how social media might enhance a legal information institute portal.

The event will look at using social media such as Twitter and Facebook to provide legal information for lawyers and citizens alike.

Richard notes that smaller jurisdictions may be . . . [more]

I’d forgotten about pastebins until recently, when someone I was following on Twitter linked me over to some text he’d parked on one of them. For those who don’t know, a pastebin is a web location that lets you put up some text on an ad hoc basis so that others can read it. That’s all there is to the thing. Sometimes a pastebin will let you password protect your text; other times not, relying on someone’s having to know the URL to offer a degree of privacy.

Why would you use a pastebin? Because you’ve got some text you . . . [more]

In Windsor Law, we do not just believe in social and legal justice, we live it.

One member of the faculty is challenging the validity of that slogan. Dr. Emily Carasco of Windsor Law has filed a human rights complaint against the law school and co-faculty member Dr. Richard Moon, as a result of the school’s search for a new Dean.

A background of the facts are available through The Windsor Star here, here and here. A copy of the Appendix to the complaint is also available through the Star here, which also outlines the background and . . . [more]

We’ve talked a whole lot on Slaw over the years about translation, as befits a law blog in a country rich with immigration and with two official languages:

[related-posts]

And while the computer translation services such as Google Translate are miracles, they don’t always get it right — and sometimes get it comically wrong. A couple of the tough nuts in translation are idiom and professional jargon. A new online service, Linguee, may help here. Linguee, as it says, uses “the web as a dictionary,” allowing you to search for a word or a phrase and find its . . . [more]

A look at the cultural touchstones that shape the lives of students entering university this fall.

All right everyone, back to work! Holiday time is over. Now it’s down to looking out the window — you do have a window, don’t you? — with longing at whatever is moving freely where’er it listeth.

Or you can flit in a nanosecond (in a Flash, actually) to parts unplanned, thanks to MIT grad student, Joe McMichael‘s Globe Genie. For example, what you see below is a stretch of highway near San Pedro de Visma way in the upper left hand corner of Spain, and I got there thanks to Google Street View and Joe’s randomizer. (I’ve . . . [more]

The right to a thesaurus has been established by the Federal Court of Canada. Or rather, the thesaurus has received official recognition as an “educational textbook or supply.”

Ken MacKay appealed successfully to the Federal Court after being denied thrice by the Correctional Service of Canada. The Honourable Mr. Justice Harrington cites A. V. Dicey, the first Edition of Roget’s, and US Supreme Court Justice Scalia and Bryan Garner (current Editor in Chief of Black’s Law Dictionary) in reaching his decision. In concluding, he writes:

According to Lewis Caroll, “[w]hen I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather

. . . [more]

My library is frequently asked what the best tools are for legislative research in the territories. For provincial legislation (with the exception of British Columbia*) CanLII tends to be our resource of first choice. When it comes to the consolidated legislation for the territories, the situation is a little trickier. Free consolidated legislation is not available for all territorial legislation, so in some cases it may be easiest to go straight to the paid source.

The following is a list of the resources available for finding territorial legislation. Please note that in some cases a completely up-to-date consolidation may not . . . [more]

Montreal-based legal informatics group LexUM, in collaboration with the Southern African Legal Information Institute and the Centre for Internet and Society, recently released a preliminary project report called Free Access to Law—Is it here to Stay? An Environmental Scan Report. The project is funded by the International Development Research Centre in Ottawa:

The overall goal of this research is to respond to a need to study what free access to law initiatives do and how they do it. This will lead to an understanding of the effects FAL [free access to law] initiatives have on society and to an

. . . [more]

I was following links from tweets yesterday and came across an old, if May 2010 meets that criteria, Rex Gradeless post about citing podcasts in legal documents and the new Bluebook (the US equivalent to the McGill Guide). Rex Gradeless is one of the social media savvy (former) law students that we talk about.

There has been a lot of traffic on Slaw regarding podcasts lately, and as you can read, plenty of great offers via that medium.

I just HAD to check out my new McGill guide to see if we had an equivalent! I am happy to . . . [more]