Slaw is proud to say that in the last few days we’ve been joined by John Lawford and Michael Lines, who have agreed to become occasional contributors, and by Heather Acton, who is joining as a core contributor.

John Lawford is counsel with the Public Interest Advocacy Centre in Ottawa. He has experience doing medical-legal research with a large firm; he has been a research director at a major Ottawa firm; and was for a number of years Special Projects Director and Webmaster at Quicklaw.

Michael Lines is the law librarian and information coordinator at the Forum on Civil Justice, . . . [more]

Clarity is the semi-annual journal of “the international movement to simplify legal language,” also Clarity. Since number 50 (Nov. 2003), there has been a pronounced increase in Canadian authors and guest editors. The current editor is Nicole Fernbach of Juricom. Recent authors include our Chief Justice, the Right Honourable Beverly McLachlan in number 51. Back issues are available from the website. . . . [more]

Quick! How many registered political parties are there in Canada?

Answer . . . [more]

The Canadian Library Association has put together this handy Review of Party Platforms . . . . [more]

Google seems to be an idea factory moving in more directions than we can track (unless you set up your own Google Alert) or subscribe to the somewhat perky Google Blog.

That’s why yesterday’s Observer feature on Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience was really helpful. And on Friday, BBC’s Money programme had a web broadcast on her called The World According to Google. . . . [more]

Experience researchers know how valuable legal dictionaries can beAnd if you don’t know why this brief note by Ed Akkawi and me will tell you.
This month with the addition of Bouvier’s Legal Dictionary, the LawyerIntl.com
goes to the front of the competition for free online legal dictionaries.
The announcement is worth reading.
It does seem to be more tuned to the legal user than the law.com’s legal dictionary which is built on Merriam-Webster’s Legal Dictionary

As for Canada, Lloyd Duhaime’s work covers some Canadian terms but isn’t anything like as comprehensive as Daphne Dukelow‘s print version.

Bottom line . . . [more]

This is an important topic, highlighted by the Gonzales v. Google case we mentioned last week.

A couple of very helpful practical guides to what you should be doing to avoid privacy breaches:

Firstly, in today’s Wired a piece by Ryan Singel on How to Foil Search Engine Snoops, which has drawn comments from our friends at Search Engine Watch in the form of a great page on Protecting Your Search Privacy: A Flowchart To Tracks You Leave Behind

Among the topics addressed are
* Why Mozilla Firefox is a smarter choice
* Removing local search histories
* Care . . . [more]

Rob Hyndman wrote yesterday about the illegality of posting election results tonight to any Canadian blogs. And in case you think no one is going to notice if you do slip in the odd comment, CBC’s Tod Maffin is specifically looking for such postings.

So, beware!

(Thanks, Rob.) . . . [more]

In addition to the West Perspectives publication, Slaw readers should also consider monitoring or getting RSS feeds on some of the more interesting blogs on legal writing:

Nancy Soonpaa, at Texas Tech.

Not to mention Scribes – the American Society of Writers on Legal Subjects.

Wayne Schiess at the University of Texas.

Raymond Ward, who’s an appellate lawyer with Adams and Reese LLP in New Orleans.

Many of these blogs touch on subjects of concern to Slaw, and each wrestle with the issue of how to communicate legal ideas more effectively. . . . [more]

One of the Google alerts I run, well, alerted me to the fact that something called Sedna RSS is catching our RSS feed and in effect reposting Slaw. We’re only one of seemingly more than a hundred blogs warmed over by this French site? organization? person? — I can’t seem to penetrate to any explanatory page.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. We run over a Creative Commons license that lets our content be used for non-commercial purposes and in derivative works, so as it stands now there’s probably no copyright beef. (I think I’ll change the . . . [more]

A palimpsest -- one of my favourite words -- is, according to Wikipedia, “a manuscript page, scroll, or book that has been written on, scraped off, and used again,” dating from a time when wax tablets and parchments were bases for writing. Stuff from the past, right?

1. RSS4Lib
2. Techcrunch
3. FeedXs
4. Feedburner
5. RSSxl
6. Tristana
7. FeedTier
8. Seth Lloyd
9. Lloyd, Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos
10. Cool Tools
11. Nova Scotia Statutes
12. Nova Scotia Public Highways Act
13. Nova Scotia Beaches Act
14. Nova Scotia Baby Chick Protection Act
15. Wikipedia: hogshead
16. Nova Scotia Merchandise Inspection Act
17. Nova Scotia Treasure Trove Act
18. Oak Island
19. Karen’s Schneider’s Beyond Algorithms: A Librarian’s Guide to Finding Web Sites You Can Trust
20. Google News search re US Dept. Justice and Google records
21. BBC News: Google defies US over search data
22. Google’s letter to US Dept. Justice re request for search data [pdf]
23. New

. . . [more]