I’m uneasy about the creeping commercialization of Google results, and its privacy policy revisions since Larry Page took over directing the company. That impression seems to be confirmed by this widely read description of the new culture at Google by James Whittaker.

Under Eric Schmidt ads were always in the background. Google was run like an innovation factory, empowering employees to be entrepreneurial through founder’s awards, peer bonuses and 20% time. Our advertising revenue gave us the headroom to think, innovate and create. Forums like App Engine, Google Labs and open source served as staging grounds for our inventions.

[…] . . . [more]

First, the “listen.” And for that, there’s no one better in the world than Canadian composer and soundscape maven R. Murray Shafer. All his life he’s been working to have us pay attention to the sounds around us. Here he is in a short film from the NFB entitled — what else? — “Listen”:

Then, take your ears over to the British Library’s online Sounds division, where you’ll find a quantity of aural candy (and potatoes, and brussel sprouts) for your delectation. I’d recommend that you start with Touch Radio, and perhaps program #41, “The Honey Bees of . . . [more]

This is a post in a series appearing each Friday, setting out some articles, videos, podcasts and the like that contributors at Slaw are enjoying and that you might find interesting. The articles tend to be longer than blog posts and shorter than books, just right for that stolen half hour on the weekend. It’s also likely that most of them won’t be about law — just right for etc.

Please let us have your recommendations for what we and our readers might like.

These are ominous days for law librarians in the United States. On Thursday, February 23, I spoke at the sixth annual ARK conference on law libraries in New York City. The conference was attended almost exclusively by law firm librarians, with a sprinkling of academic law librarians and vendors sprinkled in. Jean O’Grady of the law firm DLA Piper was the lead organizer. I have known Jean for a long time; she is smart, funny and business-savvy. Her firm made news by signing on to the new Bloomberg Law service, making her even more interesting. For details check out Jean’s . . . [more]

GPO Access, the online disseminator of official U.S. government publications, is shutting down permanently tomorrow, March 16th. It has gradually been replaced over the past two years by the new FDsys or Federal Digital System.

FDsys offers authentic, digitally signed PDF documents from dozens of different collections of U.S. Federal Government information (Congressional, Presidential, judicial and federal agency materials)

Some of the new system’s highlights:

• Information is preserved for permanent public access
• Search multiple publications at once
• Conduct complex searches
• Narrow, sort, and filter search results
• Access documents in multiple file formats
• Access metadata in standard XML formats

In an unprecedented move that reflects a climate of judicial concern over the BC Justice Reform initiative, the three Chief Justices of BC’s courts issued a five page statement on judicial independence today. The statement was issued by Chief Justice of BC Lance Finch, Chief Justice Robert Bauman of the Supreme Court of BC and Chief Judge Thomas Crabtree of the Provincial Court of BC. The statement is entitled “Judicial Independence (And What Everyone Should Know About It).” In a previous post, I reviewed the BC Government’s launch of the Justice Reform Initiative which includes a Green Paper on . . . [more]

Here are the three most-consulted English-language cases on CanLII for the week of March 7 – 14.

♨ 1. Bedford v. Canada 2010 ONSC 4264

[1] There has been a long-standing debate in this country and elsewhere about the subject of prostitution. The only consensus that exists is that there is no consensus on the issue. Governments in Canada, as well as internationally, have studied the topic and produced recommendations ranging from creating laws aimed at protecting individuals, families and communities by promulgating tough criminal laws to decriminalizing or legalizing prostitution. Other legal solutions look at the reasons for the

If you have an iPhone 4S and have interacted with the voice control personality “Siri”, then you likely already know about its limited functionality outside the US market. So when the news came out a few days ago about Siri’s improved responses for queries about weather and time, it still left me feeling a bit underwhelmed.

Voice recognition technologies have been around for many many years now. In the legal space, because of lawyer dictation technologies, we know better than most about the slow rates of adoption. For 20+ years, there’s been a small community of lawyers dedicated to . . . [more]

Sarah Glassmeyer, Faculty Services and Outreach Librarian & Assistant Professor of Law, Valparaiso University School of Law, has made available her Legal Research Flowchart, which you see below. Though it’s a process for discovering U.S. law, it’s got a lot to recommend it universally.

You can follow Professor Glassmeyer (“Information liberator. Coffee achiever.”) on Twitter @sglassmeyer.

Click on the image to enlarge it. . . . [more]

I was relating to a BigLaw colleague how I had recently spent a weekend at a CLE event in rural Australia where it was a 53 year tradition. Again I learnt a lot from my audience some of whom had probably attended each year.

A striking fact was that 85% of the 134 attendees were male. This was to be contrasted with a colleagues recent experience where her legal team and their client met with the other side. It was an all female event. She suggested that the reason there are so few female practising lawyers outside large cities was . . . [more]

Statistics Canada released a report today, Legal Aid in Canada: Resource and Caseload Statistics, detailing information from 2010-2011.

The highlights of the report state that the federal government provided $112 million for criminal legal aid during this period, a decrease of 2% when adjusted for inflation, whereas provinces and territories increased their criminal and civil legal aid by 1% to $563 million.

A pdf version of the entire report is available here. . . . [more]

Much has been written on SLAW about the fairly recent 7th edition of the Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation (known as the McGill Guide, red in colour, and published by Carswell), including a lengthy 21 September 2010 post by John Davis that includes links to prior posts.

Although I was initially against the “radical” change to remove periods from most citations, I have since come to prefer the simplicity of removing periods on citations to legal documents over which I have editorial control.

However, the focus of the guide (understandably) is on citation style for your footnotes . . . [more]