This to Slaw from Sharon Wang, a new reference librarian at Osgoode Hall Law School:

How many of us read the printed newspapers everyday and how many read the electronic ones only? Although I prefer to read the E versions, I do not have choices when I’m away from my computer. The good news is we may soon be able to read newspapers through “cheap digital screens that can be rolled up and stuffed into a back pocket”. According to the Epoch Times, this new form of electronic newspaper is just around the corner. Developed by Sony Corp. and

The court adjourned early yesterday. Apparently the court gave Crown counsel a tough time.

Some additional observations from questioning and comments:

Justice Louis LeBel said that “Public safety may be important, but it’s not the whole of the law. If we don’t have the rest we’ll be living in North Korea.” “The bar for procedural fairness must be even higher when deportation to face torture is at stake”.

Justice Morris Fish stated that the true task of the law is to balance the competing interests of the state and the individual, not to give absolute priority to one or the . . . [more]

Chers Slawyers, je suis très heureux d’annoncer que nous avons un nouveau membre, Vincent Gautrais. Il est professeur à la Faculté de droit de l’Université de Montréal et titulaire de la Chaire en droit des affaires et de la sécurité électronique. Il a son propre blogue juridique pour objet de montrer les activités qui sont effectuées autour de cette Chaire.

I’m happy to announce that Slaw has a new core contributor. Vincent Gautrais is a professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Montréal and holds the Chair in Business Law and Electronic Security. He has his own . . . [more]

Thanks to Mark Tamminga for a lead to Google’s Shakespeare project.

While Project Gutenberg has had flat text for ever, it’s nice to have these antique digitized editions publicly available.

Though there is still a strange bias in the language of the texts. Go looking for Molière on Gutenberg, and the plays are available – 19 in English, 5 (only) in French, and one in Finnish. Racine is even more pitiful – 2 in English, one in French and one in Dutch.

Best to go to the motherlode at the Universal Library – ABU: la Bibliothèque Universelle. . . . [more]

In one of my day jobs, I chair the Editorial Board of the American Bar Association’s Law Practice magazineLet me know if this is behind a firewall – cookies tend to get forgotten.

This morning we’re pretty chuffed to realize that we’ve won the blawgreview award for Best Print on Law Blogs.

The prize went to Law|Practice Magazine, published by the American Bar Association for the July/August 2005 issue, Behind the Blogs.

Of course, being MSM it took us almost six months to wake up to the posting of the awards which happened at the end of . . . [more]

I hesitate before introducing you to yet more browser-based applications, for fear of sharing my feeeling of being overwhelmed. But some people were caught short by Google’s snapping up and shutting down of Writely, so here are two online wordprocessors that seem competitive.

ThinkFree Online is a Java app that offers you a simple and a complex word processor. The complex version is remarkably like Microsoft Word. You can “share” the document by email invitation, and you can publish the document to their server and make it publicly available that way. Of course, you can also download the documents in . . . [more]

As cutbacks in legal aid budgets continue to reduce services, it’s refreshing to see today’s news release from Wellington:

Improving access to justice focus of legal aid survey
Tuesday, 13 June 2006, 2:19 pm Press Release: New Zealand Government
13 June 2006

A nationwide survey on access to legal services, which is currently underway, will ultimately help improve public access to justice, Minister of Justice Mark Burton said today.

The survey, which is being conducted on behalf of the Legal Services Agency, will help define the extent and impact of unmet legal needs.

“When completed the survey will provide . . . [more]

The House of Lords today allowed an appeal by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia against a Court of Appeal decision in October 2004 allowing four men (including Canadian William Sampson) who claim that they were tortured in Saudi Arabian prisons to sue for damages. The kingdom, backed by the UK Government, had argued that its officials were protected by the 1978 State Immunity Act from proceedings brought in Britain.

This was the first time that the Lords had considered whether a foreign country could claim state immunity over civil proceedings brought against its officials for damages for personal injuries caused . . . [more]

Slaw readers may be interested in this new open access electronic journal, as well as the call for submissions in the “Innovations in Practice” and “Theory and Research” sections. (This came to my attention via a posting to the University of Alberta SLIS alumni list, cross-posted elsewhere also.)

Partnership: the Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research

The first issue is scheduled for the fall of 2006 and we are now calling for submissions for the peer-reviewed sections: Innovations in Practice and Theory and Research. Deadline for submissions is July 15, 2006.

Scope:

This electronic journal is a

Remember the roles of your public library, and their importance to the broader community.

This morning the Americans for Libraries Council released a major report funded by the Gates Foundation.

The report argues that public libraries are poised to lead the way to solutions to today’s pressing community problems, including providing a safe and engaging place for teens; building a strong and literate workforce; and extending access to technology. Taking on such challenges is also the best bet for libraries to strengthen their communities and their own funding futures.

There is a future for public libraries in the Internet age.

A useful piece in this week’s Business Week.

What’s different about this survey is that it’s not just another Zoomerang link asking people to self-report. This time, they actually watched people through an entire business day.

A few interesting bites:

People are spending a lot more time during the day on the Web, too — on average about 120 minutes.

People in different age groups, and men and women, are spending approximately the same number of hours on the Web. Specifically, men aged 35 to 49 are spending roughly the same amount of time browsing the Web as men

The world’ media is focussed on how the Supreme Court of Canada is addressing the use of security certificates in terror trials. The BBC, the Chicago Tribune, NDTV in India, and even a Korean wire service have all covered the case.

There doesn’t seem to have been a lot of commentary in the blogosphere – though an interesting take was that the appellants’ counsel were apparently setting up a media spin that the court was insufficiently independent from the government.

Here is what the reporters in the court are saying about the questioning:

Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin . . . [more]