Dumpling in a Hanky

I had a few minutes of fun today checking my reading speed on this site . Probably a not very accurate test, but it does check your understanding of the text you've just read, by questioning you on aspects of it at the end of your reading time. I got 100% accuracy each time I tried it, and a very fast reading speed each time. I wanted to average out my speed, but there were only 3 sample texts, and repeating them wouldn't be very accurate, so I had to settle for the average of the 3 texts: 754 words per minute.That seems to put me above "college professors", and below "high-scoring college students" (ok - that seems slightly back-to-front, but hey-ho!) on their scale.  Now, although I'm actually generally a very fast reader anyway, I think that years of doing legal research has actually trained me to be a more accurate skim reader. I may not necessarily understand the details of what I get asked to research (I'm not a lawyer, so the esoteric point...

Ah, FindLaw UK , a shiny new website, for general public access to law, and solicitors. Sounds like a good thing, and in principle, it is. But I have to go back to a traditional moan: Scots law differs in many areas from English/Welsh law. The Findlaw UK website almost exclusively refers to E/W law, but doesn't actually state this. There are a few references to where there are differences, but these can be deep in the articles e.g the core section on divorce procedure refers entirely to E/W law, with only a related article alongside outlining that there are different procedures in different jurisdictions. The Personal Injury section refers you to the website of Community Legal Advice , which offers "free, confidential and independent legal advice for resident of England and Wales" . Buying and Selling Property is purely about E/W law, I can't find even a hint of the Scottish differences. Bankruptcy? Alcohol and Crime? Dispute Resolution Law? Criminal Law...

Iain Nisbet of the Govan Law Centre (and excellent, and entertaining Absolvitor blog) has referred to a (somewhat snarky) blog post I did back in October about the UK Supreme Court website in the Journal of the Law Society of Scotland (JLSS – not to be confused with a terrible manufactured boy band) While it’s great to see from Iain's review that things on the site have improved (and I’m blushing at the thought of having any sort of influence other than what craft class to run in the evenings), it did remind me to double check an issue with the cases that was still outstanding in November 2009, when I looked at the site again. Case [2009] UKSC 1 E, R (on the application of) v Governing Body of JFS & Anor (Rev 3) doesn’t actually exist on the Supreme Court site. You can find it via BAILLI , which shows the 3 cases the court decided in October. Searching for “[2009] UKSC 1” on the Decided Cases area doesn’t bring it up, nor does using the name. The only way to find it is a...

Something @infobunny was trying to find out this morning...she was looking for what she believed to be the 2 cases decided so far. Where would they be? Well, any sane person would think "Ah, the Decided Cases section, that's where they'll be". But no, sanity does not prevail here! Obviously, where you should be looking for decided cases is in the News and Publications section, where you'll find a link to a topic called Judgments . Here, you'll find a case. Just one case. The other is mysterious, and not to be accessed by the likes of us. It may be real, it may not. There's no way of confirming that from the mish-mash of the website. Although @johnhalton has suggested that the delay in judgments going where they're meant to be is due to the fact that it takes a while to transcribe from the vellum onto computer... And of course, why would anyone want to be able to pick up an RSS feed of any important areas, like, ohhh, News? Judgements? Anything? Sil...

The lovely Scots Law News blog has pointed out a few teensy issues on the website of the new UK Supreme Court. I particularly like the thought of judges being tried in their very own court...wonder if there's specific crimes for judges? Other than the usual crossdressing (only a fashion crime) and frequenting "saunas" (sometimes a crime, depending on the activity indulged in...). Any suggestions for judge-specific crimes?

I think in this case, the badgers win ... Apparently they're asking for a solution for their badger problem. I do happen to know that, although it's illegal to move a badger without a proper licence, or "interfere" with it and its sett, if a young badger does happen to move in somewhere inconvenient (say...under a joiners workshop), and try and establish its home there, that a period of full-volume dance music / cheesy local radio, played through speakers in that workshop while in the course of using it for the established business seems to be a good encouragement to those wandering young badgers to move along to a more serene location to establish themselves in... ;)

CaseCheck issued this press release a few days ago, and it's a great service, so I thought it was worth popping on here: CaseCheck Launches UK-wide Service – Free Access to over 5000 legal case summaries and more Scotland ’s leading online legal information provider, CaseCheck, has linked up with Law Brief Publishing. This collaboration with the English legal publisher will give users free access to a database of more than 5,000 case summaries. The resource is popular with the Scottish legal community and has ambitious plans for the rest of the UK and beyond. The free web-based resource now covers all major areas of law across the UK and EU, and includes expert opinions covering a wide variety of specialist subjects. Visit www.casecheck.co.uk to find out more. CaseCheck is the brainchild of legal geek, Stephen Moore, who gave up practicing law for a career in legal information technology. Moore combines his work as a technology consultant with a number of leadi...

The current Big Idea in the legal / library blog world is the Free Legal Web (FLW). Originally mooted by Nick Holmes, the idea is to pull all of the content currently floating about the ether (legal professionals blog posts, Government information etc) into one portal. That in itself is a big enough task, but what doesn't seem to be clear yet is...who is this Free Legal Web for? The people involved so far seem to be legal professionals and IT specialists. The legal professionals will be working out some way of getting the useful materials together, and persuading other legal professionals that giving up their valuable time and work (such as blog postings) for this enterprise will be a worthwhile investment, and will reap them rewards in the end. The IT professionals job will be to write the scripts and programmes that will get everything together in the one place, and working well with all the other bits and pieces. That's all lovely (although it's hard to tell what's...

Yay! As emailed out over lis-law last week, the Copyright Licensing Agency have developed a CLA licence just for law firms . Body of the press release below: New licence for law firms 15th October 2008 CLA have announced the launch of a new licence designed specifically for UK law firms. From 1 November 2008, the new Law Licence will offer law firms additional benefits to the existing photocopying rights. The Law Licence now enables articles and clippings from law reports, journals and press cuttings (magazines, journals, legal and other periodicals, but not newspapers) to be scanned, stored electronically and distributed externally to clients. The new licence has been developed in consultation with The Law Society of England and Wales and the City of London Law Society so that it meets the needs of law firms that wish to copy from law reports and journals, business titles and other published media. Chris Holland, Librarian & Head of Information Services at the Law So...

So, last week I did a firewalk for charity, at Edinburgh Zoo. Due to the 'delightful' roadworks going on in Edinburgh for, ohhh, eternity, I arrived at the event at 7pm just as the briefing started, instead of the planned 6.30pm for registration. Apparently, in the few minutes before the briefing officially started, it was announced that a daily news show crew were there to film us, and if anyone objected to being filmed, could they make themselves known. It seems like nobody did, because we were all filmed by the crew at various points, usually in the background to the presenter. I have absolutely no desire to be on TV, particularly during a stressful event, so I was not best chuffed to find out by questioning other firewalkers that what I thought was perhaps going to be a promotional clip for the company organising the firewalk, or for the Zoo itself was actually going to end up on national telly. Added to this was the fact that I had not been asked about my agreement to the...

I was looking at some Bills on the Parliament website, and I wanted to find out more info about what some of the stages abbreviations meant. So I clicked on the link to take me to this page. And I was delighted to learn that 'ping pong' is a proper term, when discussing the progress of legislation through Parliament. PP - Ping Pong, where the bill passes back and forth between the two Houses debating amendments to the bill L - Commons' Amendments considered in the House of Lords C - Lords' Amendments considered in the House of Commons Brilliant -the mental images of members of the House of Lords and House of Commons playing Ping Pong in Parliament will keep me amused all day!! :-) Off to have flashbacks to Pong now!

So, after you hit retiral age, if there's nothing else for you to do at a law firm, you get to become a librarian? And what does an 88 year old DO in terms of library work? Is it just an honourary title, which allows him to potter around the office, or is he regularly asked to do research? Did he use online resources, or work mainly with the printed texts? Actually, I'm genuinely interested - I would love to think he was whizzing about in Westlaw, digging up stuff from LexisNexis Butterworths Direct, looking up the Statute Law Database, shattering preconceptions about older people and technology!! Although sadly, I think it's more likely that 'librarian' was just a job title they gave him to keep him happy, rather than because he was a great researcher, and helped keep his service users on top of the rapid changes in their profession...

Belatedly writing up the SWOP meeting, which I posted info about here. Links to available presentations here . This turned out to be a really useful and interesting event, even though it may have been aimed more at academics and researchers than anything else (it was only me and someone from a Council who weren't academic staff). "Parliament’s past online : a review of sources" Paul Seaward Director – History of Parliament Trust. This part was full of interesting historical information, and background on UK Parliamentary materials development e.g House of Lords and House of Commons records were stored in different buildings, so a fire in 1834 that destroyed HofC records prior to that date had no effect on HofL records. Parliament Rolls and Statute Rolls are separate. Parliament Rolls of Medieval England (subscription service) and BOPCRIS (an HE and FE academics access only site). So, there's sources, but you have to be an academic to view them, from the looks of it...

A judge in Canterbury's certainly spoken his mind about the behaviour of a trio of women who robbed and assualted a 31 year old man. Can't say I disagree with his assessment of them though! Link via Arbroath

JK Rowling has won her appeal against the use by a newspaper of a photograph of her young son, taken while he was being pushed by her in a buggy on a street in Edinburgh in 2004. And frankly, I don't blame her. Regardless of what she does or doesn't do in her professional life, that should not have any effect on her personal life. If she's at a professional event, she knows she's going to get photographed, and she prepares herself for that. She shouldn't have to worry about photos being taken of her and her family while they are enjoying private, family time together, or even, as in this case, just going down the street. And her children shouldn't have to grow up worrying about being pursued by photographers, when their personal life has nothing to do with their mothers job.

Ah, so the member of the Royal Family that we all know this is about won’t have to appear in court, as the Crown Prosecution service has allegedly blocked moves for him to give evidence, from the looks of it, by his own request. Erm…why? We all know who he is, ‘cos the gagging order doesn’t apply overseas, and the US press has been having lots of fun, naming him and speculating. Surely it does him more harm than good to be able to stand up for himself in court? If he’s denied the allegations, and been questioned 3 times by police with no charges being brought, what more is there to it? Honestly, it’s REALLY not as if we don’t know who he is !!!! *Thanks again to the Inner Temple Library Current Awareness for story source*

This is interesting news , that the University of Dundee will offer a British Law degree , allowing students to pick and choose modules that will meet the qualification requirements of all Law Societies: Englsih, Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish. Since our staff are mostly Scottish qualified, but work in England too, there's now an overwhelming majority of them who have qualified in English law by taking the LLB. Now, while the LLB is essential and useful, there's only so much information you can cram into a conversion course, and there's still gaps in knowledge. I wonder if this will help sort out the problems we often have, with people not knowing what law applies where, if they have a better grounding in both jurisdictions? Will British qualified lawyers have a headstart in any way on single jurisdiction qualifieds? Also, I wish they'd do it as a distance learning degree - currently, the library staff have a problem. My boss has a law degree, I have a science degre...

And when is it a cake? According to a recent ruling by the ECJ , it is confirmed that Marks and Spencers Teacakes are indeed cakes , not biscuits, and therefore zero rated for VAT, meaning the taxman may potentially have to repay M&S £3.5 million in VAT payments from the last 20 years. Of course, if you bought a M&S teacake within the last 20 years, it's pretty unlikely you'll be seeing any of that repayment money! So, does that mean that Tunnocks Teacakes will be having a shot at reclaiming VAT too, now that teacakes are officially cakes? Oh yes - Jaffa Cakes have always been cakes too, apparently (I would have loved to have had a bit of that 12 inch Jaffa Cake!!).

Apparently, the normal slight smoothing of minor things in the Hansard reports may have gone too far this time, as reported in the Register and picked up from the original story in the I deal Government blog. Slightly worrying - the change to the text makes for some major change in meaning! The Hansard site iself states: " Hansard is: "a full report, in the first person, of all speakers alike, a full report being defined as one 'which, though not strictly verbatim, is substantially the verbatim report, with repetitions and redundancies omitted and with obvious mistakes corrected, but which on the other hand leaves out nothing that adds to the meaning of the speech or illustrates the argument.'"" Did they think they were correcting an "obvious mistake" when they changed "hack-proof, not connected to the Internet" to "secure database; it will not be accessible online"?

Independent MSP Margo McDonald has claimed in a Scottish Parliament debate that the terminally ill should be allowed the right to "assisted death" at a time of their choosing. Although the law is not likely to change, the Scottish Parliament does have the devolved power of healthcare...I wonder if it extends to allowing euthanasia? And would that start a cross-border trek for those who wanted to die with dignity but needed help, travelling from other parts of the UK to Scotland?