No time for long posts, but three small timbits from the news today.

Job cuts announced at Reed Elsevier, the owner of Lexis-Nexis.

Reed Elsevier, the Anglo-Dutch media group, is drawing up plans to axe more than 1,000 jobs as part of a continuing efficiency drive, The Sunday Telegraph has learned.

The company, which owns the LexisNexis information service and the medical journal, The Lancet, is understood to be preparing to cut the jobs over the next couple of years as it centralises functions such as procurement, human resources and IT across the group. Analysts expect the job cuts

As Slaw readers know, effective April 1, 2008, Canada Law Book is pulling its law reports and case summaries from Quicklaw Lexis Nexis ((Dominion Law Reports (since 1912)
Canadian Criminal Cases (since 1898)
Labour Arbitration Cases (since 1948)
Canadian Patent Reporter (since 1941)
All-Canada Weekly Summaries
Weekly Criminal Bulletin
Canadian Law List
Alberta Civil and Criminal Cases
Federal Court of Appeal Decisions
BC Civil Cases
BC Criminal Cases
BC Labour Arbitrations
BC Labour Relations Board Decisions
Canadian Labour Arbitration Summaries
Saskatchewan Civil and Criminal Cases
Supreme Court of Canada Decisions
Manitoba Civil and Criminal Cases))

CLB today announced a new . . . [more]

These are “amber waves of grain” and they close off a short movie that would never win an Oscar. Edward Tufte, who’s appeared more than once before in Slaw ((Tufte Touted, Visualizing Ideas, The Friday Fillip)) does the voice-over in a film that, in his words:

blur[s] and… reduce[s] distinctions between movies and statistical graphics, to get some visual depth to data graphics, and to bring all the capacities of HD movie-making to data-graphics-making. As the metaphor for sparklines is the resolution of typography, the metaphor for wavefields is the HD video (which records approximately

From a story in today’s Global Reinsurance newsletter

Executives guilty in Gen Re/AIG case – 26 February, 2008

Former Gen Re and AIG executives face more than 1,000 years in prison … 

Four former senior executives of General Reinsurance and one from American International Group were found guilty of securities fraud and conspiracy by a federal jury.

Collectively the five defendants face more than a 1,000 years in prison and $213.5m in fines.

This is the case where the company executives were accused of setting up phony reinsurance schemes (about $500 million worth under which Gen Re undertook no risk)  . . . [more]

Amazing what retired Canadian family law professors get up to.

The Law Foundation of Ontario has launched a project on access to legal information and legal services by linguistic minorities and persons living in rural or remote areas. It recognizes the challenges faced in gaining access to legal information and services by persons who do not speak English or French and persons living in rural or remote areas of the province. George Thomson will be leading it.

This project will focus on access to two components (legal information and legal services) by two groups who can face isolation in

Amazing what one stumbles over.

A website devoted to the cultural significance of law school T-shirts, all I regret to say from the United States and mostly from the Eighties and Nineties. Information in cyberspace has never been quite as geeky. . . . [more]

Friday’s Daily Texan (which is yet another reason to keep an eye on Austin) featured a piece on Anthony Taussig, retired tax litigator and his visit to the Tarlton Law Library.

Not much unusual there, except that Taussig owns the largest private collection of rare English law texts in the world. His library is surpassed by only a small number of institutions in the United States and England. He teaches a one day course on Collecting Law Books and Manuscripts. . . . [more]

Two weeks ago over on my personal blog I talked about taking part in My ooVoo Day, an event taking place in the new video chat platform ooVoo in which participants could sign up and talk to their favourite new media specialists. I took part in a talk with Joseph Jaffe of Crayon and Jaffe Juice fame.

Last week I participated in a workshop via ooVoo with Laura Fitton of Pistachio Consulting in Boston in which she taught us how to improve our presentations. I was doubtful how much I could get out of a one-hour session in . . . [more]

Following on the interesting news Steven posted about Quickscibe’s use of RSS feeds, I found this list of 14 “other” ways to use RSS feeds. Some of these are quite specialized.

If you have ‘intellectual property’ concerns about any of these, maybe Cory Doctorow’s recent column in the Guardian will be of interest, though probably not much immediate help.

And then, if you are getting tired of all the options, and you harbor the fear that, in spite of your reputation as a web-efficient techno-savvy computer geek, you will eventually be exposed, perhaps this discussion will be therapeutic. . . . [more]

I’m having to scan through a lot of search results in CanLII, looking for cases that might be appropriate to include in some teaching materials, so I’m paying attention to the five keywords or phrases that are used to classify the various judgements (about condominiums in Ontario, as it happens). Some of the five-word clusters — “pentalogs”? — provide an intriguing narrative arc, if not quite what I’m looking for, and I found myself imagining what might have underlain these very short stories. Herewith some examples:

• caveat emptor — bulldozer — latent defect — leak — purchaser
• spousal support

Back in September we joined the chorus of praise for the New York Times’ decision to make a whackload of their archives available free (Some NY Times Articles Now Free). Now the folks at the Times have shown once again that they really are interested in making their data available, this time by releasing a browser designed to view the free archives (which stretch from volume 1, September 18, 1851, through that of December 30, 1922). Called, naturally, the TimesMachine, the browser is in fact an online app that appears within your current browser. A few clicks . . . [more]

First the newsy bit: The New York Public Library has a blog. This isn’t law, but it is libraria (is there such a word? there should be), which is a lot of what Slaw is about. And even more, it’s simply interesting. It’s a multi-author blog, so at the moment there’s stuff, for example, on an animated Bayeux Tapestry, on Aubrey Beardsley (who was something of an animated tapestry himself, come to think of it, and English 17th century hand-pressed propaganda.

Then the terminology bit. At the top of the blog page is the word “Blogs.” Now a lot . . . [more]