♫ Rise up this mornin,
Smiled with the risin sun,
Three little birds
Pitch by my doorstep
Singin sweet songs
Of melodies pure and true,
Sayin, (this is my message to you-ou-ou:)

Singin: dont worry bout a thing,
cause every little thing gonna be all right…♫

Music and lyrics by Bob Marley, recorded by Bob Marley & The Wailers

This year there are three great conferences on legal technology that one can attend. In order of time, the first is:

ABA TECHSHOW, held in Chicago April 2-4, 2009.

Close on the heels of Techshow is LegalIT in Montreal on April . . . [more]

I was on the CBA website today and noticed they have changed their look. According to the press release, the new logo was formally launched at the Mid-Winter Meeting on February 21st, and the new website look was rolled out on February 23rd. In the March 2009 issue of CBA’s National magazine (page 44), it explains:

A new brand strategy, complete with a revamped CBA logo, branding compaign and refocused strategy, was unveiled by CBA President Guy Joubert of Winnipeg.

Developed under the guidance of a Brand Advisory Group that reported to the CBA’s Membership and Communications committees, the

An item in yesterday’s Bits (“Better Search Doesn’t Mean Beating Google” NY Times – Technology) talked about a search engine that promises to do things differently. Wolfram|Alpha, the creation of mathematician Stephen Wolfram due out in May of this year, has been much ballyhooed as using “a mixture of many clever algorithms and heuristics, lots of linguistic discovery and linguistic curation” ((Wolfram Blog)) to provide answers to your questions, rather than lists of websites that relate in some fashion to your search terms.

Apparently, Wolfram has been making strong claims for the novelty and ingenuity . . . [more]

Here is a link to a thoughtful article in the Harvard Journal of Law & Technology by Hofstra Professor Katrina Fischer Kuh entitled Electronically Manufactured Law – Why the shift to electronic research merits attention.

It seeks to understand how present and future changes in the communication of law, including electronic legal research, influence the legal profession and legal practice. It explores how the shift to electronic research is likely shaping the law in little-noticed, but nonetheless significant, ways. . . . [more]

A year ago, we mentioned that the Law Foundation of Ontario had launched a project on access to legal information and legal services by linguistic minorities and persons living in rural or remote areas. It focussed on access to two components (legal information and legal services) by two groups who can face isolation in our communities (linguistic minorities and persons in rural or remote areas). We should have updated that report to note George Thomson’s report issued in January, and the creation of a website on the topic.

It discusses the digital divide in terms of rural access . . . [more]

This morning’s Globe and Mail carried a death notice for Alison Youngman, who spearheaded Stikeman’s Technology and Outsourcing group, dead of cancer at too early an age.

She promoted the adoption of new technologies before it was fashionable to do so. She became a self-taught expert on technology law, creating a nationally recognized Technology and Outsourcing group for Stikemans. She published widely and served her profession by co-chairing the American Bar Association Negotiated Acquisitions Committee Task Force on Joint Ventures.

She was part of the OBA’s Business Law Section on the Modernization of Business Law in Ontario . . . [more]

I just received this message via Facebook:

Hi Creative Commons Cause,
As you have probably heard, Facebook has been revising their terms of service.

This has spawned a grassroots movement inside Facebook to encourage the platform to adopt Creative Commons licenses, similar to Flickr or blip.tv‘s implementation.

The group has gained momentum and already has almost 2,000 members, so we thought we would point it out to you, our supporters.

Check it out if you’re interested in organizing for this feature and see some of the mockups of what CC-in-Facebook might look like:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=55178542061

Thanks for your continued support!

This year’s Canadian Association of Law Libraries conference will be taking place in Halifax, NS May 24-27, 2009 with business meetings on Sunday, May 23rd and sightseeing tours and a pre-conference workshop on Saturday, May 22nd. . . . [more]

A contentious policy week on both sides of the border:

• In Canada, a meeting this week between the Canadian Association of University Teachers and Gary Goodyear, Canada’s Minister of Science and Technology descended into a shouting match over cuts to research funding announced in Canada’s 2009 federal budget.
• In the U.S., old controversies were stirred by the introduction of the Patent Reform Act of 2009(high-tech vs. biotech); by the Supreme Court’s ruling, in Wyeth v. Levine, that drug makers are not exempt from state tort liability (tort reform vs. plaintiffs’ bar); and by the nomination of Kathleen Sibelius to

Canadians used to think about HIV/AIDS as a problem that only affected people in Sub-Saharan Africa, or homosexual males.

Thanks to the efforts of many activists this perception has shifted, and there is a broader awareness of its challenges among the general population.

On May 12, 2009 I will be part of a Canadian delegation that is presenting at the United Nations at the 53 Session on the Commision on the Status of Women. As one of the few law students in the group, I will try to address some of the legal and policy issues facing women in . . . [more]

There are times when you want to know who the head of state / government / power is in a particular jurisdiction, and for those times Rulers is the site you need. Something like CanLII’s new point-in-time legislation database, Rulers offers a point-in-time database of information about who was in charge here, there and everywhere between 1700 and now.

The site offers you four ways, more or less, to get into the data: an alpha index to the jurisdictions, an index of dates (this only back to 1996) of “relevant events,” an alpha index of everything, and a map keyed . . . [more]

Hawaiian legislators are working on a bill to ensure collection of state sales tax on goods and services bought online from out of state, while Idaho legislators have declined to do any such thing:

Hawaii Proposes To Collect Taxes On Internet Sales
Buying tax-free music, books and electronics over the Internet would be a thing of the past under legislation pending before Hawaii lawmakers. The measure being pushed by Senate Democrats is meant to force online shoppers of Amazon.com Inc. and eBay Inc. to pay the state’s 4 percent general excise tax, just like customers who buy the same items