First published by the Society for Computers and Law October 2011 A recent Guardian editorial criticised the status quo in relation to the publication of court judgments and called for more open access. In so doing BAILII came across as the villain of the piece rather than the saviour of free law which most lawyers […]
It is ironic that BAILII, which came into being to free the law, has been called out recently for restricting access to the law. A Guardian editorial in September criticised the status quo in relation to the publication of court judgments and called for more open access. In so doing BAILII came across as the […]
I’ve to date held off commenting on Google+, which is all of 3 weeks old, because it’s in “field trial” which basically means it’s a Beta with a restricted user base. The reason for this is I think that Goog needs to load test it out amongst modest millions before scaling it up. Consequently the […]
The first wave of digital products in the CD era consisted basically of “books on screen” – existing print product repurposed with search and hypertext bells and whistles. This continued online with the advent of the web. More books on screen. Same old product, different medium. But the earth never really moved. However, one of […]
In the run up to the next #LawBlogs meet there have been a few pertinent posts about the state of the blawgosphere. John Bolch asks Has blawging become “establishment”? Well, yes, John, everyone’s at it now – blogging is normal. Lucy Reed of Pink Tape comments on the recent explosion of blawgs in Legal Blogging […]
Who is Stephen Walter Pollak? [No relation to Charon QC’s post on BBC’s Rough Justice] A long time ago in a land far, far away I reported that under the 2006 Cabinet Office “Transformational Government Strategy” at least 550 government websites would be closed, with only 26 certain to be retained (basically, I speculated, one […]
Image: Charon QC (In Blawg Review #292) Unfortunately I missed The future of legal blogging last night – a discussion hosted by a panel of legal bloggers David Allen Green (Jack of Kent / New Statesman), Carl Gardner (Head of Legal) and Adam Wagner (UK Human Rights Blog) and chaired by Catrin Griffiths, editor of […]
First published on VoxPopuLII, February 2011. Also published in Justice Wide Open Working Papers, May 2012. Professor Richard Leiter, on his blog, The Life of Books, poses The 21st Century Law Library Conundrum: Free Law and Paying to Understand It: The digital revolution, that once upon a time promised free access to legal materials, will […]
You can’t have missed the fact that Amazon’s fastest selling product last year was its Kindle ebook reader. Even I bought one. And during the year his Godliness Steve Jobs gave us the iPad tablet. Though the iPad is more than an a e-reader, as such it is of course much more book-like than an […]
With Typography for Lawyers Matthew Butterick – who is a typographer turned lawyer – has performed a service for lawyers that no-one else has done for other professions. Go on, Google “Typography for” and see what you come up with. You have to be a lawyer seriously concerned about the effect of print on page […]
Image: neweurasia.net Apropos my social meeja blues I consulted the web. Turns out I can plot my disillusionment on Gartner’s hype cycle representing the maturity, adoption and social application of specific technologies. Gartner now reckons microblogging is somewhat past the peak of inflated expectations and heading rapidly towards the trough of disillusionment, whereas “consumer-generated media” […]
Image: OLPC Time was when I was a guru of social meeja for lawyers. I was an early adopter with a keen eye for the potential of blogs, feeds and all that followed – and I sang its praises. I had a vibrant blawg with a large(ish) (in the scheme of things) band of followers […]
When I started out in law publishing I joined a young company with a modern approach. A key point in our house style, which I was instrumental in formulating, was “We eschew [nice word that] the use of footnotes.” Why? They don’t help the writer who has to partition their thoughts into mains and asides […]
Jason Wilson is a law publisher with great insights. He has a nice clean minimalist blog with great pics accompanying each post. More importantly, he’s interested in the kind of questions I’m also trying to answer, such as: Can we crowdsource reliable analytical legal content? I have given considerable thought to this problem (and I […]
Published in the Internet Newsletter for Lawyers, September 2010. Since late July we have a shiny new official home of UK legislation at legislation.gov.uk. In due course this will completely replace the two current legislation services at OPSI and the Statute Law Database. At present some functionality currently available on the Statute Law Database is […]
