Law Professor Thomas Smith (University of San Diego School of Law) has finished a law review citation study covering 385,000 law review articles, notes, comments, etc that appear in 726 law reviews and journals. The results are probably not too surprising to many of you. 43% of the articles have never never been cited. 0.898% of articles get more than 100 citations. He has also performed a similar study on 4 million US federal and state cases. Smith finds that “the distributions of cites to law review articles and to cases look the same.”

What is really interesting is how . . . [more]

As I pack up my office at Queens, shred all the evidence, and prepare to move to Osgoode Hall, I pose a question for SLAW readers. By the year 2010, does anyone think any law library will still be subscribing to print law reporters? Myself, I think not – a view I know (and hope) will provoke a few.

I think the writing is clearly on the wall. Few law libraries in Canada now subscribe to foreign print reporters – relying on a combination of free and pay online services. Canadian reporters are the last bastion. In my view it . . . [more]

In July I spent two weeks in Serbia visiting 5 law libraries and 3 court house libraries, evaluating their IT infrastructure for USAID. As part of their Serbian Rule of Law Project, I was preparing a report to help USAID make an effective donation computers, servers and database licences to the libraries. The goal of the donation is to give the law shcools and courts access to a wide variety of European Union legal resources, so that they can be better positioned for entry into the EU somewhere down the road. You can see the blog entries from . . . [more]

Fascinating note on how mainstream blogging has become when the US Supremes cites a blog to locate a Justice Department document.
See the article on the legalaffairs site.

The case is US v. Booker and the blog is cited at page 63. . . . [more]

I find it fascinating just how many of those using this site are using Mozilla as the browser of choice.
Is this the most successful manifestation of open source?
What other open source tools are folks using? . . . [more]

Enough can’t be said about ‘seeding’ a new website with a few links when it’s first getting started. With that in mind, a big thank-you goes out to all the blawgers who pointed us out to their trusted & loyal readers.

The following roundup includes all the welcome messages and recommendations I could find for Slaw during our first 2 weeks of operation.

• Tom Mighell’s Inter Alia
• Lisa Stone’s Legal Blog Watch
• Scott Vine (aka The Information Overlord)
• Joy London’s Excited Utterances
• Monica Bay’s The Common Scold
• Sabrina Pacifici’s be Spacific
• Abbie Bradfield Mulvihill’s AbsTracked
• The Law Librarian Blog
• Peter

. . . [more]

This month’s Wired has an amazing piece by Kevin Kelly entitled We are the Web.

It’s at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.08/tech.html

I find it very provocative in terms of what it says about collaboration and the integration of web-based thinking into everything.

It also underscores my bully-pulpit theme that legal publishers must add value to command a premium on legal information that (ultimately) has been produced (pace Ted Tjaden) as a public good. . . . [more]

Irwin Cotler, Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, today announced his decision to waive solicitor-client privilege and make public the investigative report of the Hon. Fred Kaufman into the murder conviction of Steven Truscott...The Department of Justice's Criminal Conviction Review Group this week provided lawyers for Mr. Truscott and the Ontario Attorney General with a copy of the Kaufman report, edited for privacy purposes. They now have 30 days to notify the Department if they wish to protect additional information contained in the report. Once this process is completed to the satisfaction of parties, the report will be made public.

While the Canadian Bar Association says that they’re unlocking the digital vault on the Bar Review on Monday, the search engine works today.

The content is extraordinarily rich. PDF’s of everything. The historical depth is extraordinary and the scholarship can be excellent.

I was upset when my old firm trashed an entire set of the Bar Review due to space restrictions. Now I’ve got everything on the desktop – and I’m a happy researcher.

The interface is a bit clunky. It’s essentially the old Index volumes to the journal linked to the relevant PDF. No full text searching, although you . . . [more]

My summer project is finally in play!

My law firm in Vancouver, Canada is announcing today the launch of 14 RSS feeds for our firm publications. The feeds will contain the headlines from our various newsletter articles and e-bulletins, and will provide instant notification when we publish to the website.

One of the really interesting aspects of this project (for me) was the use of RSS outside of the blogging world. Too often RSS gets tied to blogs and isn’t valued for the great information delivery tool it is. With more and more email getting caught in spam filters, . . . [more]

In Chapter 4 of my soon-to-be-completed LL.M. thesis on access to law-related information in Canada in the digital age, I argue that the retention in Canada of Crown copyright and Crown prerogative over printing of statutes (and perhaps case law) and other government law-related information is anachronistic and a damper on easy access to law-related information. I claim no orginality in this argument since a number of critics have already made the case. However, in the age of the Internet, it is time for the Canadian federal (and provincial governments) to articulate a clearer information policy that includes that abolition . . . [more]

The federal government’s website MedEffect is officially launched. The site is intended to let consumers and health professionals file adverse reaction reports.

This is a site that health law professionals or litigation departments might find useful.

By the by, there’s a section on the medical uses of “marihuana” (sic). How come it’s spelled with an “h” here — despite the fact that everyone, including the title to the report “Expert Advisory Committee on Marijuana for Medical Purposes” linked on the MedEffect site, uses a “j”? . . . [more]