The Venice Commission, officially “The European Commission for Democracy through Law,” is:

…the Council of Europe’s advisory body on constitutional matters. Established in 1990, the commission has played a leading role in the adoption of constitutions that conform to the standards of Europe’s constitutional heritage.

Initially conceived as a tool for emergency constitutional engineering, the commission has become an internationally recognised independent legal think-tank.

It contributes to the dissemination of the European constitutional heritage, based on the continent’s fundamental legal values while continuing to provide “constitutional first-aid” to individual states. The Venice Commission also plays a unique and unrivalled

Zotero is a new plugin for Firefox 2 (it won’t work in earlier versions). It enables you, essentially, to split your screen and take extensive bibliographic notes much like those in EndNotes, RefWorks or other bibliographic software. You’re presented with three columns: the leftmost for your folders and subfolders, the central for basic information about items within those folders, and the rightmost for the items themselves. Items stored in Zotero can be labelled in a large number of ways — book, journal article… map, podcast… etc. — with new labels being added as the product is developed. (It seems they’re . . . [more]

Interesting post on Freedman Consulting’s blog entitled Get Control of Your Library. It refers to LibaryThing as a virtual library “which enables users to build their own web-based catalog. At a cost of 200 books for free, as many as you like for $10 (year) or $25 (life)”. Anyone ever used it? For that price, I might use it for my personal collection… especially there is a tracking feature! . . . [more]

En matière de protection des renseignements personnels, nous avons critiqué la semaine dernière l’approche ontarienne, pour trois raisons: 1) elle est trop technologique; 2) elle accentue le sentiment de peur sur des faits peu motivés; 3) elle est fortement centrée sur une technologie d’une compagnie en particulier, Microsoft.

D’un autre côté, le fédéral vient de sortir un document fort emballant s’intitulant «Lignes directrices en matière d’identification et d’authentification» que j’ai découvert en allant sur le blogue de ma référence en sécurité, Bruce Schneier. Il est pour le moins laconique:

«These guidelines were released by the Canadian

An interesting story by Rupesh Janve out of T.N. Ninan’s Business Standard today India needs to hone legal process outsourcing skills

India may lose out to low-cost countries like the Philippines, Malaysia and China that are providing legal research services to US-based organisations.

Nearly 750 professionals, for instance, are involved in legal processes outsourcing (LPO) in the Philippines as compared to 1,750 in India. Moreover, while the number is expected to grow to only 7,000 by 2010 in India, in the Philippines, the LPO market is expected to accomodate 10,000 professionals by 2010, according to analyst figures.

10,000 Filipino lawyers . . . [more]

In January of this year, Blackboard, maker of a very popular courseware suite, obtained a patent [pdf] from the U.S. Patent Office for what is described in the abstract in part as:

A system and methods for implementing education online by providing institutions with the means for allowing the creation of courses to be taken by students online, the courses including assignments, announcements, course materials, chat and whiteboard facilities and the like, all of which are available to the students over a network such as the Internet.

The genius must be in the details, because there doesn’t seem to . . . [more]

We’ve discussed cataloguing systems in the past. But of course there are different ways of organizing books.

One of Flann O’Brien’s works – perhaps The Dalkey Archive – talks about a book collector who only buys green books – that is books bound in green or with green dust-covers.

Eighteen months ago, the Adobe Bookshop in San Francisco was the site of an installation by Chris Cobb, in which he reorganized the entire shop by colour. A slide show of his effort exists on Flickr and an interview on McSweeney’s

Q: So you are going to actually be doing

Thanks folks, for nice comments. Aw shucks…

Now the more interesting party gameBearing in mind that I regard these sort of Legal Week, Nat LJ, Lexpert lists as inherently ludicrous. is who’s missing from the list who we would all regard as Global LeadersThe City TechMag list was top heavy with vendors, seemed entirely English speaking and was entirely USA and UK, except for my fellow PowerPoint Twin, Dan Pinnington of LawPro:

Let me start the ball rolling with my surprisingly missing sixteen:

Richard Susskind, London
Jon Bing, Oslo
Kingsley Martin, Chicago
Marc Lauritsen, Boston
Liz Broderick, Sydney
Ejan . . . [more]

Le Ministère de la Justice du Canada vient de signer une entente de services de sept ans (quatre ans plus trois années d’option) avec la compagnie montréalaise Irosoft. Dans le cadre de cette entente, Irosoft a pour mandat d’assurer la maintenance et l’évolution des modules du système AGIL, un système permettant notamment d’améliorer l’accès aux lois et aux règlements du Canada pour le public et les autres ministères.

Here is a more detailed article on the topic in ITBusiness.

Merci à Marco Rivard d’Obiter2 pour la référence. . . . [more]

Congratulations Simon!!!

It almost went unnoticed! Thanks to DK for his post referring to CityTech’s list. This list is a recognition of pionneers for their contribution to the world of technology in the legal industry. It is based on the choices of 2,000 people involved in legal technology.

Once again, congrats!! . . . [more]

I had a conversation recently with a young person who was in a state of wonder and scepticism about evolution and natural selection: how could mammals have come about, what about eyeballs, etc.? Now don’t worry: I’m not about to step in front of anyone’s religious bus; we don’t go there on Slaw. No, it’s just that, as I explained to him, one source of our puzzlement is that we can’t easily imagine the effects wrought by small changes taking place an immensely large number of times. What’s a billion? to paraphrase someone whom I can’t recall at the moment. . . . [more]

If any of you have ever visited Fredericton, NB you might be familiar with the Beaverbrook Art Gallery. Located across the street from the provincial legislature it is a small gallery of international repute. Over the past couple of years a dispute has arisen between the gallery and the heirs of the estate of Lord Beaverbrook – Sir Max Aitken. If you have spent any time in NB you are probably familar with the name, as much of the province is named after him. From buildings to parks, rinks and scholarships, you name it, there is a good . . . [more]