Legal Research

Turning British and American ? Updates to My LRW Site

By Ted Tjaden

Although I have the benefit of a number of internal online research guides where I work, I occasionally find myself resorting to my free legal research and writing site.

However, in so doing, I realized my site inadvertently emphasized Canadian law to the exclusion of most other foreign law. As such, I have updated the case law, legislation and government pages to include links to more British, American (and other common law) sites. I hope this will be more useful for researchers and I welcome suggestions for improving the site.

I have also added the 3 law-related movies suggested in a recent SLAW post on that topic, resulting in a list of 97 law-related movies on the site (now to get the list to a round 100 . . . .).

Finally, with the permission of Simon Fodden, I have borrowed his coding for the custom Google search on SLAW to my existing Custom Google search of Canadian law firm websites, blogs and journal sites so that my version also allows filtering by date (e.g., “the last month”, as shown in the screenshot below) and to allow up to 100 results per page (with the screenshot below showing “50 results” in the search on the phrase “fiduciary duty”):

The only advantage, I think, of my version of the custom search engine – available on the home page of my free legal research and writing website – is that my search results page is free of advertisements. Also, my search purports to refine on the format of results (publications, blogs or journals) but I don’t think I have done these refinements properly (choosing a refinement produces different results, but the differences are not always obvious or even correct or intended). In addition, I suspect Simon may have better indexed the underlying sites. Regardless, Simon and I have agreed to coordinate and work on improving either or both versions and we will keep SLAW readers up-to-date as we make changes.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on January 19, 2011 (boomark / email).