The Tuscaloosa News yesterday had a pot-pouri of useful information under the heading Lawyers Open Their File Cabinets for a Web Resource, focussing on JDSupra, a database for contributed legal documents and PreCYdent.

The San Diego Business Journal describes this under the headline PreCYdent Legal Research Web Site Takes on LexisNexis, Westlaw. The product was built in San Diego and Milan, and offers a free and quite robust interface to U.S. Supreme Court and Court of Appeals cases.

It describes its content as:

US Supreme Court: complete with official US citation and pagination since 1759

Federal Reporter . . . [more]

Louise Arbour, former Supreme Court Justice and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, will join the Board of the International Crisis Group. New fellow board members include Kofi Annan, (Lord) Paddy Ashdown, HRH Prince Turki al-Faisal and the former President of Poland, Alexander Kwaśniewsk. There are 54 members on the board all told.

The International Crisis Group meets twice a year and

is now generally recognised as the world’s leading independent, non-partisan, source of analysis and advice to governments, and intergovernmental bodies like the United Nations, European Union and World Bank, on the prevention and resolution of deadly conflict.

Their . . . [more]

Thanks to Jon Smithen for a link to a BBC piece discussing the availability of The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913, which is a fully searchable edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing 197,745 criminal trials held at London’s central criminal court.

The site is fascinating, although I would advise North American readers of Slaw to look at the site in the evening, since there is so much traffic from British researchers that the site is crashing.

A conference on the use of these resources is planned for later . . . [more]

Friday night 9,000 Toronto Transit Commission’s unionized workers voted on a tentative deal with the TTC and, despite the expectation by both the media and Toronto residents that they would either accept the deal or give 48 hours notice of any strike action, they did not accept the deal and went on immediate strike at midnight. Amalgamated Transit Union Local 113 President Bob Kinnear had endorsed the deal, but it is speculated that a number of maintenance workers were not happy with the lack of job security given in the agreement.

The immediate strike action was taken because the union . . . [more]

LawInfoChina offers a combination of free and subscription services to keep you up to date on Chinese law. Many of China’s regulations have been translated into English and can be searched here. As well there are notes on the Chinese legal system and doing legal research into Chinese law.

Curiously, I wasn’t able to find any links to RSS feeds. Perhaps I was looking in the wrong places. Which brings me to another criticism: the site is poorly laid out in my view — too busy, way too many red hyperllinks, and generally the kind of unlovely appearance we’ve come . . . [more]

A companion piece to my recent post on the various sites under consideration: the Law Society of Upper Canada has approved Lakehead University in Thunder Bay as a site for a new law school, Ontario’s seventh. The Toronto Star editorial points out that:

[b]efore it can be launched, the Lakehead law school still needs to win approval from the Federation of Law Societies of Canada and from the provincial ministry of colleges and universities.

It also suggests that there is already a sufficiency of lawyer-producing ventures in the province and in a stupid comparison tells its readers that we have . . . [more]

Via the keen eyes at the BCCLS:

The Canada Gazette Directorate has introduced RSS feeds for the Canada Gazette, Part I. 

Feeds are available for the following categories:

Department of the Environment

Department of Transport

Department of Health

Notices of Vacancy

I don’t go to the movies much, partly, I guess, because I’ll eventually watch the good stuff on DVDs at home, and partly because I’m hypercritical of the genre. This addiction to the “good stuff” means that when I do determine to see a flick, I wind up vapour-locked in the aisle at Blockbuster or glazing over at the movie section of the paper because the choice is so… all-fired important. Dumb, I know. But there it is.

Which is why sites like Apple’s movie trailer page are helpful. I get to sample a bit from the various contenders without . . . [more]

Previously I was not aware that the Supreme Court did theme weeks, but in what seems to be Evidence Week at the S.C.C., I noted, with interest, the following article in the Globe and Mail earlier this week: A chance encounter that might rewrite the rules by Kirk Makin. I have nothing to add to the commentary but given the significance of the case and the precedents involved, I thought I would do a little web 1.0 and provide the linking.

The Precedent, which has been cited over a thousand times in a little over 10 years:
R. . . . [more]

Tired, aching shoulders? Thumbs the size of zucchinis? You may need to ditch the laptop and the BlackBerry you’re using and plump for an ultraportable computer instead. Weighing in at something like 2 pounds, an ultraportable won’t do everything for you, perhaps, but a near full-size keyboard and a couple of hours of battery life should get you through most of life’s “got-to-write” situations with a whole lot less… well, a whole lot less. Simply.

Here’s a site with nearly two dozen of these submicros to choose from, some fresh on the market, others yet to come. And though I’m . . . [more]

So the University of Ottawa recently became a member of the New Media Consortium, “an international 501(c)3 not-for-profit consortium of over 260 learning-focused organizations dedicated to the exploration and use of new media and new technologies” based in Austin, Texas.

You’ll find some amazing content on their website which I have yet to fully explore. However, I might start off reading their 2008 Horizon Report [pdf], “that seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have considerable impact on teaching, learning, and creative expression within higher education”.

With membership to this consortium, you can opt to join the Technical . . . [more]

This from Maritime Law Book to Slaw:

Effective June 1, 2008 Maritime Law Book will provide free access to over 215,000 cases in our 12 databases that cover every common law jurisdiction in Canada plus the House of Lords and Privy Council (U.K.).

No registration is required. And the databases are searchable.

Free access is limited to the judgment without a headnote. Also the free access does not include the MLB Key Number System.

Existing subscribers will continue to have access to our time saving headnote material at existing prices. And note that all users will now have access to