Believe it or not, but legal prose can be turbid, turgid and really quite impenetrable. It can, it can. (It might be fun to share our own favourite “paragraph of shame” from lawyerly or judicial — okay, okay, or legal academic — writing, a Slaw version of the “It was a dark and stormy night” contest.)

But if you want to have a good laugh and shake your head at some seriously bad writing, take the Postmodernism Text Generator for a spin. It’s a marvelous machine that can generate horribly lifelike swatches of Foucaultian or Lacanian prose all wrapped . . . [more]

For about a year now, I’ve been reading D’Arcy Norman and Brian Lamb [another great find from my Northern Voice attendance last year]. Both are social software advocates in Canadian universities, and both have a keen interest in how web software can facilitate learning. If you enjoy that kind of stuff, and I think most Slaw members do, I highly recommend their blogs individually.

About a week ago, D’Arcy announced that SocialLearning.ca was back in operation after switching servers. I hadn’t heard of it, and checked it out — glad I did.

You can see the list of contributors . . . [more]

“Broadband… is freeing us from the geographic restrictions. Will this trend continue to gain momentum? Hard to say, but early indicators show that office is where the laptop is.”

Welcome to the virtual worker of recent fame — and the subject and object of Om Malik’s new blog, Web Worker Daily. He hopes it will provide aid and comfort to the geek diaspora.

Which it may. But it got me thinking about the virtual lawyer. I suppose there have always been lawyers who practised alone out of a room in the house. But I wonder whether, now that broadband . . . [more]

I’m forgoing what I intended to post about today after yesterday’s events in the Senate. I’m not linking to anything other than the parliamentary website as I’m assuming most readers of Slaw are well aware of what I refer to. I realize that I am likely in the minority but I think that the Canadian Senate actually functions fairly well and needs only min0r tweaks rather than wholesale reform. The bulk of the work that takes place in Senate is in committee, which is away from where the majority of the population can see the work that is done, and . . . [more]

Newspapers of the CanWest Global chain distributed a Janice Tibbetts article today that claims that the federal government may be considering the elimination of the Court Challenges Program as part of an overall review of government programs.

The Program provides funding to help minority, women’s and other disadvantaged groups so they can launch “test court cases” challenging laws that may violate equality rights under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The CanWest News Service article entitled Funding for minority groups to challenge federal laws under review reports that the program, first set up under former Prime Minister Pierre . . . [more]

ZDNet’s Between the Lines pointed me yesterda to Confused Of Calcutta, the blog of JP Rangaswami, the chief of “alternative market models” at the investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein in London. This is not my usual fare, but he is seriously intrigued by technology. He thinks about enterprise software, social software from a market believer’s perspective, but focuses on its impact on the individual. With your indulgence, I’m going to quote holus bolus his “About This Blog”:

I believe that it is only a matter of time before enterprise software consists of only four types of application:

The Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, along with Dell, Howard University, and the University of Texas Libraries, just launched the online library Avoice that features primary documents related to the contributions of African-Americans who have served in the US Senate and House since the 1870s.

You can access virtual exhibits (containing legislation, photos, debates, timelines) chronicling black lawmakers’ efforts related to the Voting Rights Act, Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday Bill, the dismantling of the apartheid system in South Africa, and the formation of the Congressional Black Caucus.

The University of Texas Libraries digitized Congressional Black Caucus records (photos, speeches, political . . . [more]

Confirmation this morning from Lexis, that U.S. Adults More Likely to Turn to the Web For Legal Information, New Survey From lawyers.com Reveals.

Almost three times as many U.S. adults today turn to the Internet to get advice and information about legal matters, aside from asking a lawyer, than they did six years ago (27% in 2006 versus 10% in 2000), according to a new survey conducted by Harris Interactive.

“Besides lawyers, traditional sources of legal advice, such as friends and family, are on the decline today as consumers increasingly turn to widely-available online resources to become better informed

The World Bank has created Doing Business, a database of economic and regulatory indicators that are comparable across 175 economies.

The site includes a Law Library, “the largest free online collection of business laws and regulations”.

For each country, one can find laws on such topics as banking and credit, bankruptcy, companies, labour, securities, taxation and trade.

Cross-posted to Library Boy. . . . [more]

The most recent issue of The Lawyer’s Weekly (vol. 26, no. 17) has an article entitled The meta menace: what you can’t see could come back to haunt you which discusses the many problems that can arise when legal professionals forget to clean up the metadata embedded into computer files before distributing documents.

Metadata can include changes made, names of previous document authors, document revisions and versions, and hidden text.

“Problems can arise if law firms send files to clients or opposing counsel that still contains markup. It may as well be hard copy full of sticky notes. Consequences may . . . [more]

GlobaLex, an electronic legal collection run by the Hauser Global Law School Program at New York University School of Law, recently published a Research Guide on International Health Law.

“While globalization has facilitated world trade and economic growth, it has also enabled regional epidemics to spread at unprecedented speed worldwide. A chilling example is the SARS epidemic, which started in China and quickly spread to two dozen countries. This research guide provides information about the general trends in global diseases and legal efforts against them, effects on trade and human rights law, and legal research in the new field . . . [more]

An interesting note on GL and Libraries…

NLE ON BOARD AS AN ASSOCIATE MEMBER OF GREYNET AND CURRENT GL8 SPONSOR
GreyNet, 6 September 2006

The National Library of Education, a subsidiary of the U.S. Department of Education has become an Associate Member of GreyNet http://www.greynet.org and in so doing has returned to the GL-Conference Series as one of its main Sponsors. http://www.textrelease.com/textreleasehome/gl8sponsors.html.