The Balkinization blog has a post entitled If Supreme Court Justices Were Rock Stars that matches judges from the United States’ top court with the musicians who have the same basic “style” in their opinion writing.

The following results emerged in what are described as “dinner table discussions” (glug, glug, glug):

• Sandra Day O’Connor– Britney Spears. (The early Britney, pre-K-Fed, not the later, trashy Britney.) Artistically incoherent but enormously successful attempts to appeal to the exact center of popular taste.
• William Rehnquist– David Byrne of Talking Heads, Blondie, Devo. Unsentimental, terse, and cleverly ironic 80’s New Wave post-punk. (Psycho-Killer could

This week’s Legal Week contains an interesting account by a judicial assistant to Lord Justice Thorpe on what it’s like to clerk in the English courts – not surprisingly a fair amount of the work involves legal research.

Lots to contrast with the Canadian systemThere is a great wiki on this at the UWO website. and the work of law clerks elsewhere.

For more on the larger issues of law clerks and their role in the development of the law see my earlier post. . . . [more]

Following my previous post regarding the blogger who was arrested, charged and later acquitted here is the case, R. v. LeBlanc, 2006 NBPC 37. . . . [more]

Take a look at dotReader, a new, open source reading and annotation tool. I won’t have a chance for while to take it for a spin, but it seems my kind of app — though I have to say that the descriptions on the website don’t really give me a clear picture. I’d recommend going to the features page, where you’ll find this description…

The dotReader is an open source, cross-platform content reader/management system with an extensible, plug-in architecture. Developers can add additional, customized features or re-brand the reader to meet their business needs. An optional DRM model

Got a nice little legal information business you want to cash in on?

Bloomberg’s reporting that Thomson has a nice chest of cash (rumour is $5 Billion) accumulated for acquisitions:

Thomson seeking acquisitions

Thomson Corp., owner of the Eagan-based Westlaw legal research and TradeWeb financial products, will seek purchases after raising cash from the sale of its education unit, Chief Executive Officer Richard Harrington said.

“We’ll look for acquisitions within the existing business segments and we’ll look for acquisitions in a new segment if it fits our business model,” said Harrington.

Thomson has said it’s reorganizing operations to focus on . . . [more]

Simon Chester’s post about the new Halsbury’s about to be released has reminded me of a few discussions I had last week with the good people at LexisNexis Canada.

I was concerned when I saw an advertisement that went out from LexisNexis Butterworths about the Halsbury’s being released in paper, since I was sure it had been promoted in the “new Quicklaw roadshow” as coming out in electronic format. Since my library does not have space for 57 volumes of anything new, no matter how good, I was concerned. After a couple of inquiries, they had me speak with Pat . . . [more]

At Dean Mayo Moran‘s prompting, the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto is reconsidering how to teach legal research and writing to law students, with the goal of ensuring that graduates know how to find the law, and conduct effective legal research. That and food too

This is of course a perennial topic, raised every few years. No law school appears to have found the magic bullet, and if they had persuading a fiercely independent faculty to adopt change is always an interesting challenge.

I was struck that UofT is conducting this review at the same time . . . [more]

Exploring the Advocates Library, I came across a remarkable archive that I hope will be familiar to every first year torts teacher: the records of what Scots Lawyers know as (Poor) Mrs Mary M’Alister or Donoghue, Pursuer (Appellant) v. David Stevenson, Defender (Respondent)The reference in the link is to the cover of the original pleadings

What becomes interesting is the wealth of social detail involved. The case was brought as an in pauperis proceeding, but that Latin abstraction doesn’t ring as the following does:

She averred that “I am very poor, and am not worth in all the world . . . [more]

Hats off to John Swan who has just published Canadian Contract Law, the second contributionFor the first. to Canadian contract scholarship in treatise form this year.

The contents are:

Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Promises that Will Be Enforced
Chapter 3: Third-Party Beneficiary Contracts
Chapter 4: Making an Enforceable Contract
Chapter 5: The Requirement of Writing
Chapter 6: Remedies for Breach of Contract
Chapter 7: Performance, Non-Performance and Excuses
Chapter 8: Interpretation and Risk Allocation
Chapter 9: The Control of Contract Power
Chapter 10: Illegal Contracts

At 864 pages it’s really solid, though at $240, it’s not quite . . . [more]

Whenever I demonstrate the Internet ArchiveAlthough even the Archive has to be alive to its legal obligations on privacy and confidentiality – see Complainant E v Statutory Entity [2003] VPrivCmr 5 (31 October 2003) – or Wayback Machine – you can see the lightbulbs go off, as people recognize just how useful it can be to go back in time to see what was on a page a while ago.

The life of the average website is around a hundred days.

The best discussion of how legal researchers can use it is at LLRX.

For a general

C’est «Règlement de compte à OK Corral», mais cette fois, dans les Laurentides. Un conflit classique, presque banal, entre un maire et un journaliste qui serait passé totalement inaperçu n’eut été du fait que la blogosphère québécoise a su faire preuve de solidarité: suite à quelques propos supposément «illégaux» de blogueurs de Saint-Adèle envers certains représentants municipaux de ladite ville, une mise en demeure page 1 et page 2, leur a été adressé leur demandant de cesser 1) leurs activités de publication sur le sujet et 2) de restreindre les commentaires supposés contrevenir au droit. Sauf que, . . . [more]

A note from the Gujarat papers informs us that at last week’s Law Day conference, the Indian Legal Information Institute was launched, with Dr. Manmohan Singh, the Prime Minister at the mouse.

A nice portal interface to Indian law, and some novel features, but the content doesn’t seem to be there.

In terms of statutes, the Indian Constitution (natch) and some Acts (selective and rather old) from the Centre. Very little from the State level – one from Kerala and nothing from Tamil Nadu, which was what I looked for first.

The court links are similarly spotty. . . . [more]