Lawbore is The City Law School's legal portal. Since 2002 it's been making law research easier for students, encouraging the use of a wide range of sites to complement specific subjects in the directory.
In September 2007 we re-launched with a new look, a more structured site-map and new RSS feed capabilities. Lawbore still has the directory part of the site, but now other parts are just as prominent - the forum, the City Hub and Learnmore, the skills wiki.
Lawbore is tailored to City students but we hope it will be useful to anyone with a legal interest. Our mission has always been to make as much of its content available for everyone, as freely as possible. We aim to present resources selected for their quality rather than quantity, and to avoid presenting long meaningless lists of links.
If you are interested in reading more on the philosophy and development of Lawbore, please see our list of academic references.
Lawbore has for many years attracted a lot of interest from both law students and those working within the field of legal information. Emily has been lucky enough to have been asked to spread the Lawbore word by giving papers at various conferences, seminars and events, both in the UK and the US.
If you're interested in finding out more about Lawbore's origins, its development or indeed its creator then check out the following articles:
Emily gave a paper at the BIALL Annual Study Conference in Manchester (18th-20th June 2009) - find more information here. Slides from the presentation are also available online.
If you have any questions or comments about the site or want to request an account on our forum, please write to .
Lawbore is the vision of Emily Allbon, City's Law Librarian and Head of Information Literacy. She hand-picks and describes all the materials in the directory and creates many of the resources in Learnmore.
Proudest moment? A few... being named Best Legal Information Professional in an Academic Environment at the 2005 BIALL / Lexis Nexis Awards for Excellence, managing to complete the GDL whilst working full-time, and becoming a mum to Maisy in 2006.
How you got to be here? BA (Hons) Literature (1998), MSc Information Science (2000), Dip Law (2005), AHEA, MCLI
Who comes under B on your ipod? Babybird, Bad Religion, Badly Drawn Boy, Beach Boys, Beatles, Bee Gees (!), Belle & Sebastian, Belly, The Beloved, Ben Folds, Ben Kweller, Beyonce, Biffy Clyro, Billie Holiday, BRMC, Bloc Party, Blondie, The Bluetones, Blur, Bob Dylan, Brendan Benson, Bright Eyes, British Sea Power, Broken Social Scene and The Buzzcocks...phew.
Mode of transport? My commute is a very tedious walk - train - tube - walk. But outside of work I drive a chocolate (OK brown!) Mini Clubman.
What couldn't I live without? new trainers, sushi, mini milks, the colour orange, Jean-Pierre Jeunet films, Guinness, gardening, bright autumn days, shiny new books, Maisy giggling, my camera
Lawbore is designed and programmed by Howard Richardson, an ex-City staff member, who now runs his own company, Sequential IT, specialising in web applications for the educational sector.
Proudest moment? The day my novel gets published... okay, that's yet to come ;-) That, and getting the Lawbore relaunch done exactly on schedule to the hour!
How you got to be here? BA (Hons) Computer Science & German from Queen Mary's, then working at City and Bristol Universities, before going it alone and starting my own business
Who comes under B on your ipod? Barenaked Ladies, Beach Mercer, Beck, Beethoven, Ben Folds and Kweller, Billy Talent, Black Crowes, Bjork, Bloc Party, Bon Jovi, Brandtson, Brendan Benson, Bryan Adams, Burt Bacharach and of course... Busted!
Mode of transport? Feet and pedals!
What couldn't I live without? My MP3 player, audiobooks, my PC, bittorrents, my camera, my mobile, money, German beers, friends, woods, lakes.
Thanks to the following sources for their Creative Commons/LGPL images: Wiki Commons (international criminal law, legal ethics and constitutional topic icons), James Cridland on Flickr (media), Sloth Rider on Flickr (antitrust), Joseph D Angelo on Flickr (official publications), Unloveable on Flickr (evidence), I See Modern Britain on Flickr (property), Scott Feldstein on Flickr (other legal careers), John Linwood on Flickr (barrister), Everaldo for a crystal icon (default ejournal). Additional images licenced from 123rf.com and istockphoto.com.
Lawbore makes use of the following superb open-source software to work its magic: Smarty for templating, NiftyCube for the nice rounded boxes, Calendar Class for the calendars (please contact us if you want to see our improvements to the source, as per the licence), Sphider for the searching and JQuery and Coda-Slider for the cool visual effects.
Our gratitude goes to everyone at the City Law School, ISL and Marketing departments for their continued support of Lawbore over the last five years.