Monthly Archives: May 2009

Helium Pricing

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Helium is lighter than air, so a balloon filled with it will obviously keep floating upwards.  Not that it’s a publishing industry strategy, but if you look at the Consumer Price Index as the air, the cost of legal publications is a helium balloon by comparison.

The American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) just released its latest edition of the Price Index for Legal Publications (PDF – requires AALL membership).  The index — actually indexes, there are several publication categories, with an index for each — measures price changes since 2005, the baseline year.  One caveat to the indexes: a few categories, such as Reporters, index only 1 to 3 titles.  This makes little sense in my opinion. You wouldn’t follow IBM’s stock price and call it an “index” that represents the market.  Most categories have a sample of 30 or more titles, though, and here are some of the standout numbers in those categories:

  • Serials (including periodicals) prices have gone up 30.9% since 2005.
  • Academic periodicals (i.e. journals) alone have gone up 34.6%.
  • State and federal codes are up 16%.
  • Supplemental treatises (those kept up to date by pocket parts, supplements, revised volumes, or replacement pages) have gone up 37.7% since 2005.
  • 2007, for whatever reasons, was a particularly inflationary year.  Many of the legal publication categories had double-digit increases, and several went up over 20% in that year alone.

Meanwhile, the Consumer Price Index (CPI) has looked like this since 2005:

year CPI % change
2005 195.3
2006 201.6 3.2
2007 207.3 2.8
2008 215.3 3.8

(Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics)

The CPI increase is even more mellow when you remove food and energy, two of the more volatile factors, from the equation:

CPI – All items less food and energy
year CPI % change
2005 200.9
2006 205.9 2.5
2007 210.7 2.3
2008 215.56 2.3

(Source: BLS)

It’s hard to see how these increases are going to be sustainable, especially when seen against a more standard measure of inflation in the CPI.  If legal publication prices were indeed like helium balloons, they’d be closing in on the altitude where they’d burst.

Measure DHS – demographic and health surveys

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Measure DHS offers demographic and health indicators by country. Some statistics are freely available, while registration is required to access some of the other data sets. Many of the datasets provide not only national figures, but also regional or state data.  Measure DHS is a useful supplement to the World Health Organization, UNICEF and World Bank statistics Web sites.

The two principle free databases are STATcompiler and  the HIV/AIDS Survey Indicators Databases.

Measure DHS http://www.measuredhs.com/start.cfm

The MEASURE DHS project (www.measuredhs.com) helps implement survey research, dissemination of data and capacity building in the areas of health and population. MEASURE DHS provides technical assistance for the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS), the Service Provision Assessment Survey (SPA) and the AIDS Indicator Survey (AIS).

MEASURE DHS is funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development and is implemented byORC Macro.

New journal: European Labour Law Journal

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Intersentia Publishing will release the inaugural voluem of European Labour Law Journal later in 2009. No word on subscription price yet. The first issue will publish papers presented at the Future of Labour Law in Europe Conference in June, 2009.

European Labour Law Journal  http://www.intersentia.com/upload/aankondiging%20ELLJ.pdf

About the European Labour Law Journal

The European Labour Law Journal is set to increase and foster the debate on the future of labour law in Europe and to increase the knowledge of labour law.

It aims to better define the role of labour law in Europe and in light of a European Social Model which can provide solutions for the challenges facing the EU and its Member States, requiring a good combination of economic market performance and quality of life, good work and social justice.

In order to contribute to this, the Journal is set to study European labour law in its national, EU and international contexts. Current and future developments in Europe and the world necessitate a fundamental investigation of labour law in the EU and its Member States, and of the basic principles of labour law in Europe.

The Journal fills an existing gap in the academic community. Although there are many national and some internationally oriented labour law journals, none of them specifically addresses the EU as a central focus of attention, including developments of labour law in the EU at the level of the Member States.

Concept

The European Labour Law Journal aims to be a leading academic journal in the area of European labour law and social policy. European labour law is viewed in a wide sense. It includes labour law at the European Union level as well as labour law in the Member States. It also pays attention to developments of labour law at a more global level and its relevance for the EU and its Member States. These various levels are seen as intrinsically connected and mutually interdependent.

The scope of the Journal is confined with:

 

EU labour law and social policy taken in its internal and external dimension;

 

The interaction between EU labour law and Member States’ labour law, including relevant national developments of labour law;

 

Developments of labour law in doctrine and policy at a global level and their relevance for labour law in Europe;

 

Cross-disciplinary developments relating to social policy and industrial relations and their relevance for labour law in Europe.

Attention is paid to developments at the level of policy, legislation, case law as well as academic doctrine.

Long titles of Chinese statutes

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The International Energy Agency book “Cleaner Coal in China” has posted its annexes online. Annex III includes a list of Chinese  statutes related to renewable energy and environmental law. The Annex provides the full title of each statute in English and Chinese, in addition to information on the date of passage, entry into force, and the government organ that issued the law.  Because uniform translations of statutes are uncommon, having the dates and the decree numbers of the government bodies helps locate the full-text in English or Chinese of these laws in databases, such as LexisNexis China Law Database, IsinoLaw, LawInfoChina and Westlaw China. Let’s hope that all publications will provide such complete and useful bibliographic references to Chinese legislation.

Cleaner Coal in China http://www.iea.org/w/bookshop/add.aspx?id=355

Book Annexes: http://www.iea.org/Textbase/nppdf/free/2009/Coal_china2009_annexes.pdf

Corporate Social Responsibility in China

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China CSR Map provides information on organizations, corporations and individuals involved in corporate social responsibility. Information is available in English and Chinese. The site also provides links to international CSR codes and organizations.

China CSR Map

http://www.chinacsrmap.org/E_Default.asp

http://www.chinacsrmap.org/

Responses to climate change among Indian Ocean nations

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The May/June 2009 issue of Aramco World, the magazine of Saudi Arabia’s national oil company, reports on two approaches that developing countries are taking to counter the effects of climate change and rising sea levels.

“Bangladesh’s Audacity of Hope” by Richard Covington covers plans by Fazle Hasan Abed, chairperson of a NGO in Bangladesh to train Bangladeshis to live and work overseas.

“But,” warns Abed, “global warming will create havoc in our country unless we can send more people abroad as emigrants.”… Abed opens a folder on his desk to show me an agreement signed only a few hours earlier with officials from Ryukyu University in Okinawa for an exchange of Bangladeshi and Japanese students and researchers. “Japan is rapidly losing population, so our proposal is to create Japanese-speaking Bangladeshi entrepreneurs who will eventually send workers to Japan,” he explains. “We could do the same for Korea, Spain, Italy and other countries that are facing aging societies—or even thinly populated places like Namibia,” he adds, calmly taking another puff.

“Rising the Maldives” by Larry Luxner discusses the raisied artificial island of Hulhumalé in the Maldives.

Yet man-made Hulhumalé neither looks nor feels anything like its natural sister islands. From its conception only eight years ago, in 1997, to its official inauguration on May 12, 2004, this work-in-progress is being meticulously planned to boost the country’s economic fortunes while staving off the rising seas that may one day wipe much of the world’s smallest Muslim nation off the map.

Both articles are available online with photos at: http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/200903/

Report on the legal and constitutional powers of the Privy Council

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Justice, a UK human rights NGO, has published a report on the legal and constitutional powers of the UK’s Privy Council.

The Constitutional Role of the Privy Council and the Prerogative

Patrick O’Connor QC, Doughty Street Chambers

http://www.justice.org.uk/inthenews/index.html

Excerpts from the Report and Summary Conclusions

Tracing its origin back to the twelfth or thirteen century, its continued existence, if considered at

all, is regarded as vaguely charming and largely formal. But, as the vehicle that dispossessed

those living on or near Diego Garcia, the Privy Council can still display the power that once it

had more widely as an instrument of feudal rule.

 

This paper examines the history, development and current role of the Privy Council. It will try to

throw light upon its procedures and practices and ask what role can be played in a modern

21st century constitution by such a body. Constitutional reform is in the air. Can a new spirit of

transparency and democratic accountability penetrate even as far as the Privy Council? Is the

Privy Council robust enough to safeguard the real public interest in a national emergency? On

the other hand, is it a weak point, a tempting resource for evading democracy in a crisis? Is such

a body necessary at all? What role should the ‘prerogative powers’ play? Are they controlled, or

even controllable?

The Privy Council matters. It provides an avenue by which the executive can evade the scrutiny of

Parliament and create immediately effective laws. It perpetuates fictions which conceal the reality of the

exercises of power. It is at the heart of our outdated culture of deference.

 

The Privy Council is a dysfunctional body. There is no rationale which can justify the eclectic range of

its work. It currently ranges from being in part ‘synonymous with government’, to an independent court: from

a forum for the monarch’s real remaining personal prerogative powers, to a theatre for benign historic

ceremonial. This has all arisen by historical accident, and has never been analysed rationally. The repeated

reference to an ‘advisory’ role, and the absence of any acknowledgement that the PC is a vehicle for the

direct exercise of constitutional powers is less than transparent. This is the most important of the many

fictions surrounding the PC, cloaked in a fog of outdated language

Cooler Cool-er?

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An item with the headline “Electronic Books” on page 8 of today’s Financial Times points to an entry in the Financial Times’s Techblog by Chris Nuttall, “Cool-er e-reader takes on the Kindle.”

The item reports on an e-reader called the Cool-er that “is the brainchild of Neil Jones.”

According to the piece:

The result is the Cool-er and Coolerbooks.com, an online store for the US with 260,000 paid-for titles at launch from all the major publishers, compared to around 250,000 on Amazon. Around 60,000 titles will be available in the UK and Europe initially.

Coolerbooks will sell titles in the open EPub standard, compared to Amazon’s proprietary .azw format,

There are . . .  eight different languages available for the device, giving the Cool-er more international appeal.

. . .

The Cool-er is also similar to the $280 BeBook, the $350 Cybook and iRex’s Iliad Book Edition, all of whom use the Mobipocket Reader software.

Minnesota Law Review Headnotes

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We blogged about the Legal Workshop here.  Now this new law journal development from Minnesota Law Review.  The Minnesota Law Review has just launched their new e-journal, Minnesota Law Review Headnotes.

Headnotes will  be an on-line, PDF based, archive of the Minnesota Law Review’s articles.  Headnotes will contain new content, too;  it will publish  online-only responses to the articles that appear in the Minnesota aw Review.  And, Headnotes will also allow readers to comment on the works, too.

Hat tip to Concurring Opinions.

Where Have All Our Cowboys Gone? Authentication of Online Legal Resources

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John Joergensen, a reference librarian at Rutgers-Camden, writes about the on-going issue of authentication of digital legal resources on Cornell’s VoxPopuLII.  His discussion touches on several different issues entwined in the authentication bundle, including the idea of reputation and “perceived trustworthiness” that the all too few commercial vendors enjoy and how to gain similar ground for free resources.  His post reminded me of a lecture that Bob Berring gave to our Advanced Legal Research in which he likened these veteran vendors to Tinkerbell.  The legal community believes in their veracity and authenticity and so they continue to dominate the digital landscape.  It’s high time we created room for more Tinkerbells to spread their online legal resource dust.

At present, AALL’s Electronic Legal Information Access and Citation Committee (ELIACC) is working on an update to their 2007 State-by-State Report on Authentication of Online Legal Resources.  As a participant in the update, I was asked to re-evaluate that state of West Virginia’s online primary legal materials.  In their case, while the courts and legislature provide free access to their decisions and bills/laws, they also explicitly state these versions are unofficial and no overt steps toward authentication are apparent.  I am interested to see how the terrain may have changed for other states.  Stay tuned…..