Legislation Bill Passes

The House today passed a bill to modernise and improve the law regarding publication of legislation, Attorney-General Christopher Finlayson announced.
 

The Legislation Bill is intended to modernise and improve the law regarding the publication, availability, reprinting, revision, and official versions of legislation, and bring it together into one piece of legislation.

The bill forms part of the Government’s response to recommendations made in two reports by the Law Commission, and also responds to recommendations made by the previous Regulations Review Committees on inquiries relating to incorporating material by reference, and the principles to be followed in determining whether delegated legislation is given the status of regulations...

http://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/legislation-bill-passes

Community law manual

The 2012/13 version of the Community law manual is now available online.
What a beautiful, user-friendly thing it is! The more so as it is backed up by the Community Law Centre service.

Australasian colonial legal history library

The Australasian colonial legal history library  is an AUSTLII project.
It is chiefly legislation and case law.
There is also a section for Law journals and legal scholarship concerning the colonial period. This seems to be based on the most relevant 5% of results of a pre-set search. You get the search summary at the top of the results list - always good to know where your results come from.
Here's a tip: if you can't see where your search results come from, don't trust them. Search results are essentially the answer to a question, so you need to know what the question is in order to understand the answer. I'm really aiming this comment at Westlaw NZ, whose new site does not yet give you an adequate summary of your search strategy. But something similar happens here: within the Law journals and legal scholarship section you can click a link to limit results to New Zealand journals; you get an appropriate reduction of hits (from 382 down to 27), but the search summary does not tell you that it has applied a limit. My inner control freak can't cope with this, so I'm probably better off searching AustLII or NZLII myself and building up my own criteria.

WestlawNZ

Brookers, bless them, have completely revamped and rebranded their database platform.
It is now called WestlawNZ, and you'll find it in the Law Subject guide, under Quick Links.
Have a go.
Come and see us with your questions - you'll have a few!
Formal training will be provided later in the year.

LawTalk now available online

That's according to my.lawsociety's news service.
Cool.