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Showing posts from May, 2014

The UK Supreme Court and a Yes vote

The House of Lords Constitution Committee has published its eigth report, " Scottish independence: constitutional implications of the referendum ". Within that, Sections 79 to 83 discuss the effect of a potential "Yes" vote in the upcoming referendum, with the following result: If an independent Scotland were to have its own supreme court, justices with experience of Scots law would no longer be appointed to the UK Supreme Court. However, given their UK-wide remit, serving justices with this experience should continue to sit on the Supreme Court until their scheduled date of retirement.

Open Access and the law librarian

                                                                              Unofficial Open Access logo Last year, I sector hopped a bit, going from a law library, to the academic sector, and on to a public body. During my academic sector interlude, I was working with Open Access publications, sourcing academic materials in the appropriate formats and versions, and uploading them to the institutional repository. Now, to anyone working in academic libraries, that sentence probably needs no further explanation, as they know exactly what it relates to. However, outside the academic sector, the topic of Open Access and the institutional repositories holding OA materials isn’t something that’s very familiar. In the special libraries catering for sectors such as law and health, library staff are used to having to pay (usually huge sums!) to access materials behind paywalls, and although there are some good initiatives to give wider public access to certain materials (e.g. www.legis