Words have meaning. The context, tone, and interplay give rise to nuances that is the basis for statutory and case law interpretation. But sometimes the iteration of words have meaning too. The frequency and repetitiveness of certain words can at times given insight into a culture or society.

At Jurix: The 24th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems in Vienna, Austria earlier this week, Daniel Martin Katz, Michael J. Bommarito II, Julie Seaman, Adam Candeub & Eugene Agichtei proposed the idea of Legal N-Grams in conjunction with a beta pre-release of Legal Language Explorer, a new web . . . [more]

CanLII has presented us with an early Christmas present. They are offering up their new hyperlinking tool. As the linking page (found under Tools) states:

This tool automatically adds hyperlinks in your document to legislative and case law citations corresponding to materials posted on the CanLII website. This functionality is powered by Lexum’s LexHub, the same technology that is used to add hyperlinks within CanLII’s decisions.

I know, this is just a new version of their Reflex API that Simon wrote about in 2008. I covered the previous source of the API, the CanLex site in 2009. CanLex . . . [more]

What does the Byzantine musical symbol kai apothes look like? Unicode knows. Because we human beings do love to “scribble, scribble, scribble” that computer industry standard boasts “more than 109,000 characters covering 93 scripts,” according to the Wikipedia entry. Fear not, however: I’m not about to regale you with tens of thousands of squiggles. No, I’m going to let you do it yourself.

Actually, I’m pointing you to Shapecatcher, a modest little website that invites you to draw any shape you like and promises to find you the unicode character nearest in outline. So, for example, I gave . . . [more]

On December 15, 2011, Quebec's Minister of Justice and Attorney General Jean-Marc Fournier announced the filing of a draft regulation aimed at making the Gazette officielle du Québec available free of charge on the Internet.

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.

. . . [more]

Access to justice issues in the Canadian civil justice system are often framed around affordability, geography, and the quality of service provision. Affordability is most often linked to the high costs of privately provided legal services and the underfunding of legal aid. Geography has recently been shown to be relevant in major studies in Alberta and Ontario, one by the Canadian Forum on Civil Justice, the other by the Ontario Civil Legal Needs Project. Both emphasized that lawyers and paralegals are overwhelming concentrated in large urban centres. The quality of public service provision has been an issue in the case . . . [more]

The public library is a wonderful spot for information, entertainment, socializing, technology, education and more. Have you ever wondered about the actual value of your library to you? Perhaps impossible to translate into dollars and cents, however I recommend you try the library use value calculator to see how much it predicts you would be paying out -of-pocket for your library services. It would be interesting to see a similar calculator for law libraries. . . . [more]

I have always loved law reform commission reports. They are great sources for legal research. Many of the reports provide historical background on an issue and you can often find comparative information about how other jurisdictions have responded to a legal problem.

My highlights from the fall of 2011:

• Of course, the great news is that all of the reports of the former Ontario Law Reform Commission have been digitized (as reported December 12 right here on Slaw)
• The British Columbia Law Institute (BCLI) is launching a two-year project to consider reforms to judge-made rules governing when a person is

. . . [more]

Site news for those who read Slaw only via RSS or email

1. Comment Watch:

In the last week there were 44 comments. You might be particularly interested in these:

• The exchange between Gary Rodrigues and Simon Chester concerning Geneviève Lay’s post, “Language Rights Issues Returning to the Supreme Court?”
• the comment by CanLII President, Colin Lachance, expanding a little on what sort of numbers it takes to be a popular case on CanLII.

You can subscribe to the comments on Slaw either as a separate matter (RSS, email) or as part of a subscription combining . . . [more]

We have discussed Arizona’s controversial new anti-immigration measures several times on Slaw (e.g., here, here and here). Besides appearing to discriminate against various groups, the measures conflict with federal immigration laws and policies. Well, the saga is not yet over. On December 12, 2011, the New York Times announced that the United States Supreme Court agreed to decide whether Arizona may impose such tough anti-immigration measures. The measures include:

• Requiring police officers to determine the immigration status of people they stop for a violation of any law if the officers think the persons are in the country illegally

. . . [more]

On December 7, 2011, Bill 28, The Registered Human Resources Professionals Association Act, 2011 was reintroduced in the Ontario Legislature (formerly Bill 138). This time, by representatives from all three political parties: David Zimmer, MPP, Christine Elliott, MPP and Michael Prue, MPP. The aim of the Bill remains to create a new public act governing HRPA and its members making the HRPA a true regulatory body much like those governing accountants and lawyers. We examined the previous Bill (which is similar to the new Bill) on Slaw here.

The Bill would repeal the Human Resources Professionals Association of Ontario . . . [more]

This scenario will be familiar to any marketing staffer in a large law firm: the phone rings and it’s someone asking why you haven’t sent them the firm logo for their program. You have no idea what they’re talking about, but apparently your firm is sponsoring their upcoming event and if you want your contribution acknowledged, they need your logo ASAP.

After wasting your morning trying to track down who initiated this sponsorship, you discover that it was booked three months ago by a partner in the firm. Many of the benefits in the sponsorship package have passed, except for . . . [more]