Proctor in Admiralty

Wiki legal dictionary and encyclopedia

Thanks to Tom Mighell at Inter Alia, for pointing out Wex, a new collaborative legal dictionary/encyclopedia from the Cornell University Law School Legal Information Institute, in and of itself, one of the greatest free legal research tools available.

As the folks at Cornell describe it, Wex is:

an ambitious effort to construct a collaboratively-created, public-access law dictionary and encyclopedia. It is sponsored and hosted by the Legal Information Institute at the Cornell Law School. Much of the material that appears in Wex was originally developed for the LII's "Law about..." pages, to which Wex is the successor.

As Mighell points out, the contents are currently small, but this has the potential to become a great resource to the legal community.  The site is not open to editing by the public, as Wikipedia is, but they are looking for editors.

I tried out a few different searches, and got this nice summary under Admiralty. 

 

Defense of the Legal Profession

There was a very interesting Letter to the Editor in the October issue of the Georgia Bar Journal, the magazine of the State Bar of Georgia.  In the letter, attorney Alvin Leaphart defends against attacks on the legal profession and comments on the need that the world has for lawyers while simultaneously attacking the profession.  Leaphart summarizes stating:

If you want to be popular, be a doctor, a preacher, or the village idiot.  If you want to make a difference and walk a long, lonely road, be a good lawyer.

The letter appears on page 5 of the issue, accessible here.

New Mediation Blog

I saw my former partner Bobby Glenn, of Hunter Maclean at the Welcome Reception for the Maritime Law Association of the United States fall meeting in Scottsdale, Arizona.  He advised that he had started An Advocate for Mediation, a blog devoted to mediation and other forms of alternative dispute resolution.

Bobby is well suited to be blogging on this topic.  He has been heavily involved in the development of ADR usage and has served as the Chairman of the ADR committees of the State Bar of Georgia and the MLA.  He is often called upon to mediate complex cases and has developed an excellent reputation for getting the parties to resolution. 

I highly recommend checking out An Advocate for Mediation.