The Lawbore Site
What is Lawbore™?
Lawbore™ is The City Law School's legal portal. Since 2002 it's been making law research easier for students, encouraging wider reading, and getting its users excited about law.
Lawbore™ prides itself on its innovation, and each year adds more functionality and content and 2010-11 has been no different, with our popular skills wiki Learnmore getting a complete overhaul in content and design.
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.
Rundown of key areas of Lawbore™:
Topic Guides - Links to key commentary, websites and published information arranged by the area of law. Ideal as a starting point for research when you come out of a lecture/tutorial.
Hub - The place to come for the Events Calendar (what's going on at City and in the wider world), access to e-resources, news and Emily's twitter feed.
Learnmore - Skills wiki for learning legal skills split into the areas of Writing, Research, Mooting, Newbies, Exams and Careers.
Blog - Future Lawyer is the place to go for everything careers-related; featuring news and regular pieces written by our columnists, alumni and current students, as well as the very popular video interviews with City Law School alumni.
Lawbore Academic Papers
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:
- Allbon, E. & Bromley, A. Lawbore™: a legal gateway for City University (2003) 3:2 Legal Information Management 86-89
- Allbon, E. Internet for Law seminar - Presenting national resources locally: Lawbore™ - the ultimate student guide to the web (2004) 21:4 Assignation
- Allbon, E. IT'S ALIVE! The birth of Lawbore™ and the Indispensability of the Law Librarian (2005) 5:4 Legal Information Management 211-215
- Miskin, C The BIALL/Lexis Nexis Awards for Excellence (2006) 6:2 Legal Information Management 76-89
- Wakefield, N & Allbon, E Staying vital to the virtual learner: what role for future academic law librarians? (2008) 8(1) Legal Information Management 18
- Internet Librarian International 2008 (17th October) Getting down with the kids; satisfying the 'google generation' without compromising quality for cool (both possible!) (slides)
- LILAC 2009 (31st March) Lawbore™ rocks! .
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.
Contact Us
If you have any questions or comments about the site or want to request an account on our forum, please write to .
The Lawbore Creators
Emily Allbon
Lawbore™ is the vision of Emily Allbon, City's Law Librarian. She hand-picks and describes all the materials in the topic guides, writes the blog alongside her contributors and creates 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), FHEA, MCLIP.
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 2 hour marathon door-to-door from Wiltshire. Walk - train - tube - walk. But outside of work I drive a chocolate (OK brown!) Mini Clubman.
What couldn't I live without?
New shoes, sushi, mini milks, the colour orange, Jean-Pierre Jeunet films, 6Music, Mojitos, gardening, bright autumn days, shiny new books, Maisy giggling, my camera.
Howard Richardson
Lawbore™ is designed and programmed by Howard Richardson, an ex-City staff member who now runs his own IT business, Sequential, specialising in web applications, mostly 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, books, PC, bittorrents, camera, mobile, money, German beers, friends, family, woods, the sea.
Acknowledgements
Images
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.
Software
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.
Thanks
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.