Westlaw China is Now Available at U of T Law

The library has recently purchased a subscription to Westlaw China.  This database is made up of  five sections:

Laws and Regulations more than 10,000 in English and over 700,00 in Chinese
Legal Topics:  full text legislation and commentary which explains and describes 11 major legal topics covering more than 5,773 legal issues
Case Headnotes in English as well as 374,632 cases from the Supreme People’s Court and local courts in 31 provinces, municipalities directly under the Central Government and autonomous regions, as well as special courts such as maritime courts in Chinese
Abstracts of Journal articles in English and full text articles in Chinese
Current Awareness which is updated a number of times daily using information gleaned from legislation, books and journals, commentaries, courts and cases, government policies, law firm bulletin, news, proposed legislation and statistics.

Access is available via computers at the Faculty of Law and the Bora Laskin Law Library only.

Use Google Custom Search to create your own Personalized Search Engine

Anyone with a Google account can create a Google Custom Search Engine. This service  enables you to limit your searches to specific websites or even specific web pages. This makes it much easier to get more precise result while searching in specific subject areas as you can include the sites you want to search and specifically exclude sites as you require. You can also personalize the look and feel of your search engine.  A good set of instructions for setting up a Google Custom Search can be found at O’Reilly’s OnLamp. One really good example of how to use the custom search engine is  Ted Tjaden’s “Search Canadian Law Firm Websites, Blogs & Journals” which will  search 79  selectively chosen Canadian law firm websites, 205 Canadian law blogs and 20 Canadian law journal websites.

New Title: Index to Legal Periodicals Retrospective

Finally, legal researchers can search older journals online using The Index to Legal Periodicals Retrospective.  This new database  provides an index to over 750 legal periodicals from all the major common law jurisdictions including Canada, the UK and the US covering the period from 1908 to 1981. There are links to full text where available including those journals in the HeinOnline

The UK Statute Law Database

Looking for UK Statutes.  Check out the UK Statute Law Database. The UK Statute Law Database  is the official revised edition of the primary  and secondary legislation of the United Kingdom.  The database covers revised statutes that were formerly included in Statutes in Force from 1991 as well as those formerly included in The Northern Ireland Statutes Revised from January 2006.

‘Primary legislation’ includes:

• Acts of the UK Parliament
• Acts of the pre-UK Parliaments
• Acts of the Scottish Parliament
• Measures of the National Assembly for Wales
• Acts of the Northern Ireland Assembly (and other primary legislation for Northern Ireland)
• Church of England Measures (legislation for the established church in England passed by the General Synod of the Church of England)

‘Secondary legislation’  includes

• Statutory Instruments
• Scottish Statutory Instruments
• Welsh Statutory Instruments
• Statutory Rules of Northern Ireland
• Church Instruments
• Bye-laws

The database enables the researcher to:

• View amended legislation as it has changed over time
• See how legislation will be affected by amendments not yet in force
• See how legislation has been amended for different jurisdictions
• Navigate links between affecting and affected legislation
• Search the text of legislation for words and phrases

Google Scholar Adds US Case Law

On November 17 Google Scholar made a large collection of US Federal and State case law available online. See: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/finding-laws-that-govern-us.html

While Google has yet not provided details of the extent of the coverage, it appears as though coverage of US Supreme Court decisions begin with volume 1 of the United States Reports and other Federal and State decisions begin at 1950. (Our test of volume 10 (1810) of the United States Reports found every case we searched).

It is unclear what Google’s sources are for much of this case law (some appears to come from publicresource.org) but all cases have the same pagination as the printed reporters but do not include editorial content such as headnotes and Key Numbers.

At this stage of course the commercial sources’ (Lexis, Westlaw) added editorial content and the ability to note up make them a more complete academic research tool. Still this is an interesting development that could lead to wider access to US case law in the same way that CANLII has increased access to Canadian case law.

In addition to US case law Google Scholar also searches some major online journal collections such as Hein and JSTOR. Searching Google scholar while connected to the UofT network will link you to the full article via the Library’s licensed access to Hein or JSTOR. When not connected to the UofT network, search results are limited to only the first page of a journal article.

We will update this entry as more information comes out.

New Title: Selden Society Publications and the History of Early English Law

Selden Society Publications and the History of Early English Law

This new resource from Hein Online provides U of T students with access to  huge collection of resources. These resources include searchable PDF versions of  publications from the Selden Society and Harvard’s Ames Foundation as well as the English Reports ( 1220-1694), the Statutes of the Realm (1235-1713), and collections of early English legal classics and scholarly law review articles on the subject.

The Selden Society is a ‘learned society devoted to the history of English Law.” Each year the Society publishes a volume of reprints of  original legal sources; including early law reports, courts’ records, judges’ notebooks, legal treatises, precedent and practice books. The source material is accompanied by a modern English translation. The Ames Foundation, has also published a number of reprints including the Year Books of Richard II and Lex mercatoria.

The collection also includes:

• Fitzherbert’s Grand Abridgement of the Law
• Brooke’s Grand Abridgement of the Law
• Bracton’s Laws of England
• Hughes Grand Abridgment of the Law
• Rolle’s Abridgment
• Cowel’s Interpreter
• Matthew Hale’s History & Analysis of the Common Law of England
• Pufendorf’s Law
• Selden’s Opera Omnia
• Viner’s Abridgment  & Supplement
• Blackstone’s Analysis of the Laws of England
• Blackstone’s Commentaries
• Comyns’ Digest – First and Second Editions
• Bacon’s Reading on the Statute of Uses
• Coke’s Institutes – First through the Fourth Parts
• Coke’s Reports
• Joseph Story’s Commentaries on the Conflict of Laws
• Travers Twiss’ Monumena Juridica, The Black Book of Admiralty

The collection can be accessed from the library catalog at  http://main.library.utoronto.ca/eir/EIRdetail.cfm?Resources__ID=889043&T=J&F

Federal Statutes on the Department of Justice Website are now official

From the Department of Justice Website: “As of June 1, 2009, all consolidated Acts and regulations on the Justice Laws Web site are “official”, meaning that they can be used for evidentiary purposes”

Ontario Regulations from 1944 on the Internet Archive

The Bora Laskin Law Library has recently made a significant contribution to historical legal research and to the preservation of historical legal material.

The library has made the Ontario Regulations from 1944 onwards  available for inclusion in the Internet Archives.  Although recent regulations (from 2000)  have been available electronic format on e-laws, this marks first time that the whole set of Regulations has been made freely available in electronic format.

The Internet Archive is an non-profit organization mandated to create a free  digital library of Internet sites  in the form of the WayBackMachine,  as well as  other digital “cultural artifacts” including, moving images, live music, audio, texts, software and educational resources in digital form.

Visit our Compilation of Federal and Provincial Legislation and Parliamentary Material

The Law Library has recently updated its compilation of  Internet Sources of Canadian Federal and Provincial Legislation and Parliamentary Material by adding links to  journals/votes and proceedings. This list provides a single point of access for  legislation, bills,  regulations, debates, committees, gazettes and now  journals/votes and proceedings for all Canadian jurisdictions.

Historical Versions of Statutes and Regulations are now on CanLII

As of March 5, 2009  CanLII will be providing access to older versions of  federal legislation as well as legislation from  Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario and Quebec.  Coverage will go back at least 5 years.  Users can compare different versions of a particular statute, find a statute as it was in force on a particular date,  noteup specific sections of a statute, link to cases that have considered that statute or subscribe to an RSS feed which keeps track of changes to a particular statute.  CanLII has plans to add statutes and regulations for the remaining jurisdictions by  the end of the summer of 2009.