Legal research news from an Ottawa law librarian
Members of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL) can get up to $5000 in funding to help with the costs of a research project - apply by February 24, 2025!
Questions about the application can be directed to either Dominique Garingan or Beth Galbraith (Co-Chairs of the CALL Committee to Promote Research).
Labels: awards, library associations
Arrêt sur le droit is a French-language podcast whose goal is to help people better understand decisions by the Supreme Court of Canada.
It is co-produced by the Bar Association of Montreal and CAIJ (the free legal information portal of the Quebec Bar Association) in collaboration with the Supreme Court of Canada.
The most recent episode deals with the case R. v. Bissonnette, a 2022 Supreme Court of Canada criminal law decision that looked into the constitutionality of a specific sub-section of the Criminal Code that allowed for consecutive life sentences.
The case arose out of the 2017 mass shooting in a mosque in a Quebec City suburb. 6 worshippers were murdered and five seriously injured by the accused.
Arrêt sur le droit is hosted by Michel Désautels who for years was one of the top current affairs hosts of the public broadcaster Société Radio-Canada.
Labels: criminal law, podcasts, Supreme Court of Canada
The Governance and Recordkeeping Around the World newsletter, published by Library and Archives Canada, highlights issues pertaining to government and recordkeeping practices in the public and private sectors around the world.
The January 2025 issue has just been published.
It includes:
Labels: conferences, digital collections, digitization, government documents, information management, IT trends, Library and Archives Canada, preservation
The Supreme Court of Canada has redesigned its website.
Content has been streamlined and reorganized to make it easy to navigate and enhance accessibility.
Labels: Supreme Court of Canada, web design
The International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) recently published a report on Learning to Lead: A Scan of Global Library Field Practice:
"A major focus for IFLA is ensuring that emerging leaders have opportunities to gain experience and recognition. As a result, IFLA is keen to provide its members with a reference document that outlines the types of leadership programmes available, highlighting their commonalities, differences, and evidence of impacts where possible."
"The Learning to Lead: A Scan of Global Library Field Practice is the first of-its-kind IFLA publication, aiming to provide a representative and comprehensive overview of leadership programmes run by library associations, libraries, museums, archives, and related organisations. It identifies their objectives, methods, and impact data, as well as key features and commonalities. It also aims to support library associations and libraries in their own decision-making about leadership programmes, and enable IFLA to make strategic decisions regarding its future leadership initiatives."
"This report employed a survey methodology as the primary research tool for collecting data for analysis over the period from October to November 2024. The web-based questionnaire was sent to 143 active IFLA Associations and 1129 IFLA volunteers/individuals. To boost the number of programmes surveyed and reviewed, the team also selected leadership programmes from the Arabella Advisors report that was released in January 2015, the total number of programmes reviewed were 66. It is worth mentioning that several criteria were applied in selecting the leadership programmes."
IFLA is an international, non-governmental organization that advances the interests of library and information associations, as well as those of librarians and the communities they serve throughout the world.
Formed in 1927, the Federation has its headquarters in The Hague, Netherlands.
Labels: library associations, library management
The Arxiv.org website has published a pre-print by a team of Canadian academics that examines the publishing output of information studies faculty members and academic librarians:
"Canada's research productivity in Library and Information Science (LIS) is significant: studies have found that Canada ranks third globally in terms of output. As the LIS field continues to grow, the pace of output accelerates, and the scope of this work expands. The recently launched Canadian Publications in Library and Information Science Database compiles all Canadian scientific publications, including those authored by faculty members and academic librarians. This database offers the advantage of encompassing articles and librarian publications that may not be typically included in traditional bibliometric surveys, such as those conducted using databases like Web of Science, Scopus, and Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA). Using this data, this study maps the scholarly contributions of Canadian LIS scholars and academic librarians to the field of LIS and examines whether Canadian LIS research is characterized by silos. This paper examines the similarities and differences in research output, impact, topics, and publication venues between academic librarians and scholars in Canada, as well as the extent to which academics and practitioners engage in research collaborations or reference each other's work. We find that while there is some degree of overlap in research topics and publication venues between LIS academics and academic librarians, the two groups appear to act as distinct research communities with distinct topical foci and publishing habits. The two groups also do not appear to engage with each other strongly, either through collaboration or citing each other's work."
Labels: libraries
Lawyers from law firm Norton Rose Fulbright LLP have put together a primer on tariffs.
"On November 25th, President-elect Trump pronounced via social media that he plans to impose a 25% tariff on all products imported into the United States from Canada and Mexico, among other countries, as one of his first executive orders on January 20, 2025. This would have a significant impact on the Canadian economy, as the US accounts for about 75% of all Canadian exports. This announcement came after a number of campaign promises by President-elect Trump that he would impose trade measures and tariffs on goods entering the US if he was elected."
"In response to these potential measures, Norton Rose Fulbright has established a US/Canada cross-border trade law task force made up of trade lawyers in its Canadian and US offices to advise on current and future international trade measures adopted in Canada and the US that will have an important impact on our clients’ supply chains and business models."
"At the time of publication, President-elect Trump has not announced any details on the potential tariffs being imposed on Canada or any other country. While we wait for details, the cross-border trade law task force provides the following primer on tariffs and how they work based on how tariffs have been imposed by the US and Canada in the past."
The primer covers questions such as:
I certainly plan on reading the whole thing.
Because we all know the topic is going to come up in conversations over the next months with colleagues, family, friends, random acquaintances at the coffee shop and Costco and the dog park and the skating rink, your letter carrier, your doctor, your pharmacist, the bus driver, the car mechanic, etc.
Labels: trade law
Newly inaugurated American President Donald Trump yesterday signed dozens of what are known as executive orders which are forms of presidential decisions that do not require approval of the American Congress.
Here are a few sites that explain what executive orders are and how they fit into the American legal system:
Labels: government_USA
The deadlines for a number of Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL) awards and scholarships are approaching:
Labels: awards, library associations
The Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL) is hosting a webinar on the new Canadian Open Access Legal Citation Guide on January 23, 2025 at 1:00-2:00 EST:
"Canada’s new – and free – legal citation guide, the Canadian Open Access Legal Citation Guide, was recently published in June 2024 and is available on CanLII at 2024 CanLIIDocs 830. Hear from several of its creators and learn more about the COAL Guide, including why the guide was created, the benefits of the guide, the details of some of its citation rules, and the reasoning behind some of the many decisions that were made in the process of creating these rules."
The speakers are:
Labels: continuing education, legal research and writing, library associations
The Canadian Bar Association's publication CBA National recently provided an overview of the 2024 activities of the Supreme Court of Canada:
"The Supreme Court of Canada’s 2024 workload was not quite back up to pre-pandemic levels, but it has been getting closer. And because the Court will mark its 150th anniversary this year, it will take on additional functions to mark the occasion."
"The Court granted 35 leaves in 2024, fewer than the 41 granted in 2023 and down from the high of about 50 in the early 2010s. Eugene Meehan, a partner with Supreme Advocacy LLP in Ottawa, says those numbers have been consistent over the past few years."
"Drawing on his tracking of the Court's statistics, he says that the percentage of leaves granted remains low at about 6.5 per cent in 2024, though up from six per cent in 2023, which was the lowest in the past ten years. The high rates were ten per cent in 2014 and 2017. Those leaves do not include mandatory as-of-right appeals."
Labels: Supreme Court of Canada
The Government of Canada's Weekly Acquisitions List is a list of publications by various public bodies and agencies of the federal government that were catalogued in the previous week.
Among other documents, the most recent list features Canada's action plan on combatting hate:
The Acquisitions List also includes links to many of the recent Departmental Results Reports (DRRs). These are annual performance reports by individual federal government departments and agencies. The reports measure their performance as against the plans, priorities and expected results in their annual plans.
The Treasury Board Secretariat has gathered the various DRRs on one page for ease of consultation.
Labels: government accountability, government documents, government of Canada, human rights
OCLC, an international library services company, organized a webinar in November 2024 that showcased a chatbot project of the University of Calgary Library:
"In 2021, the University of Calgary Libraries launched a multilingual reference chatbot by leveraging a commercial product that combines a large language model (LLM) with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) technology. The chatbot is trained on the library’s own web content, including LibGuides and operating hours, and is accessed from the library’s website."
"In a Works in Progress webinar hosted by the OCLC Research Library Partnership (RLP) on 20 November 2024, University of Calgary Library staff discussed the creation and implementation of the AI reference chatbot and shared lessons learned."
Labels: IT trends
Statistics Canada today published an article on Monetary penalties in adult criminal courts:
"Fines were the most frequently ordered monetary penalty for guilty offenders, accounting for 23% of penalties in adult criminal court cases completed during the period from April 1, 2019, to March 31, 2023. These were followed by victim surcharge orders (16%) and restitution orders (4%)."
"In the Canadian criminal justice system, restitution, victim surcharges and fines are among the penalties judges can consider when selecting an appropriate sentence for an offender found guilty of the charges laid against them. These monetary penalties require that the offender pay a sum of money to the state or the victim as part of the imposed sentence."
Labels: courts, criminal law, statistics
Partnership: The Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research has just published an article called Libraries On the Hill: An Exploratory Study of Canadian Library Associations Advocacy Initiatives.
It takes a look at the areas of advocacy of three major Canadian associations, the Canadian Association of Research Libraries, the Canadian Urban Libraries Council, and the Canadian Federation of Library Associations (CFLA):
"Data was collected from a variety of sources, including the associations’ websites, records of federal government consultations and lobbying activities. A thematic analysis was conducted using open coding and visual theme mapping, and the results analyzed using Schein’s model for understanding organizational culture. The results provide important insights into publicly available advocacy work by these associations since 2016. By providing the first step of quantifying advocacy work by Canadian library associations, this study lays the groundwork for further investigation to explore the impact of library association advocacy and to identify successful patterns and strategies for advocacy initiatives in the future."
The Canadian Association of Law Libraries is a member organization of the CFLA.
Labels: activism, library associations
The Law Library of Congress in Washington has recently published a report on Access to Information for Persons with Disabilities in Selected Jurisdictions:
"This multinational report covers the right of access to information for persons with disabilities in the selected jurisdictions of Brazil, Canada, China, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Denmark, Egypt, El Salvador, England, France, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Malta, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Russia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, and Taiwan."
(...)
"This report surveys how the rights of persons with disabilities are protected, notably, if a jurisdiction’s constitution (written or unwritten) specifically protects persons with disabilities. It describes the rights to information, in particular legal information, access to justice, and culture, and includes current legislative proposals as they concern persons with disabilities. The report also surveys which jurisdictions offer publicly funded libraries that specifically serve the blind and visually impaired. The report does not comprehensibly address legislation on other issues related to persons with disabilities, including the right to work and antidiscrimination legislation."
The Law Library of Congress is the world’s largest law library, with a collection of over 2 and a half million volumes from all ages of history and virtually every jurisdiction in the world.
Over the years, it has published dozens of comparative law reports which are a treasure trove for legal research on a huge variety of issues.
The winners of the 2024 Canadian Law Blog Awards (known as the Clawbies) were announced recently.
The Clawbies exist to reward the best and most innovative Canadian blogs, podcasts, videos, legal newsletters, and other forms of online commentary.
The 2024 Fodden Award recognizing a single, outstanding publication went to Kyla Lee of Acumen Law Corporation in Vancouver:
"At a time when people need courageous voices amplifying their rights and defending their interests, no voice has been stronger or more reliable than criminal defence lawyer Kyla Lee of Acumen Law Corporation in Vancouver. An extraordinarily prolific author and broadcaster year after year, Kyla surpassed even her own high standards in 2024: more than 300 written blog posts, 50 episodes of her “Driving Law” podcast, and 41 editions of her vlog “Cases That Should Have Gone to the Supreme Court of Canada, But Didn’t.” There are well-funded legal media organizations in this country that struggle to match that output. Kyla is the face and voice of legal matters on mainstream radio and TV in British Columbia, speaking directly, accessibly, and informatively to everyday Canadians about the law."
There are awards in many categories.
The Clawbies are organized by Stem Legal, a B.C.-based strategy firm.
Law library blogaliciousness from Ottawa since 2005. Accept no substitutes.
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As Michel de Montaigne would say, "Je vais au change indiscrètement et tumultuairement - mon style et mon esprit vont vagabondant de même" (Essais, III, 9, De la vanité): I go where my fancy leads me, but my fancy always leads back to the law