Here are some useful nuggets in my meandering journey across the vast frontiers of Canadian tech-law research. “Tech” is, of course, an umbrella term. Given my focus, I will primarily discuss resources relating to AI and computing moreso than other topics like biotech or aerospace engineering.

These resources are primarily aimed at early-stage academics in their graduate studies and job hunt. I hope you find this useful, and please reach out if you have other suggestions. This page is a living document, and will grow ever more resource-ful as I either find more resources or get so fed up with an impoverished landscape that I make more myself.

Career Planning Resources

• Discussions of the Legal Scholar Colloquium
  • What is scholarly legal writing?
  • The Law School Research-Track Job Markets: Advice for PhDs and LLMs

Tech-Law Publishing

Tech (ACM and IEEE)

• ACM Citation Format
• ACM Template

Law

More to be added here…

Relevant Venues for the Aspiring Tech-Law Scholar

Conferences

Conferences are a great way to network and practice speaking skills, but beware that the scope of conference papers are limited, so decide on the trajectory of the paper early.

You also need to decide whether the conference publication is archival or not. In other words, is this a work that fits into a bigger journal article? In which case, pick a non-archival route like workshop, poster, or work-in-progress – these are generally less competitive. Otherwise, you will be gunning for the archival publication with most other applicants. If there is interest, I will file some resources for dealing with conference reviews here.

Here are some tech-law conferences, primarily ACM.

• ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency: January CFPs, workshop and other non-archival publication options always available
• ACM Symposium on Computer Science and Law: September CFPs workshop and other non-archival publication options available sometimes
• ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI): September CFPs, workshop and other non-archival publication options always available. Highly competitive.
• WeRobot: CFPs generally in the fall, with some workshop and other non-archival publication options. Archival publication opportunities vary from year to year.

As a practical consideration, do note that ACM conferences generally cost several hundred American dollars to attend, and at least one author must attend. Some ACM conferences provide travel fundings and/or waive registration fees for volunteers, but volunteering positions are both often random and competitive so they’re not a sure bet.

Journals

Journal publications are the primary currency of modern scholarship. Note that different journals have their own rules on publishing timelines, simultaneous submissions to other journals (also known as a “dual submission policy”), review process, and whether the resulting journal is open-access or requires paid access. Therefore, please make sure the journal you aim to publish in aligns with your objectives.

Journals generally accept manuscripts on a rolling-basis (i.e. no deadline, will be published in the next upcoming issue if accepted) by online portal or email.

• TechReg: EU, accepts manuscripts of 8,000-12,000 words (including footnotes)
• Canadian Journal of Law and Technology at Dalhousie Law: Canadian, accepts full articles of 6000 to 12,500 words as well as comment pieces and book reviews
• ScriptED at University of Edinburgh: UK, accepts articles up to 10,000 words (including footnotes) as well as smaller pieces, including but not limited to case comments and book reviews
• Georgetown Law Technology Review: US, accepts articles and legal notes; is unique in its acceptance of “Tech Explainers”, which are short pieces summarizing legal implications of some piece of novel technology

Workflow and Productivity

No.1 Tip of Graduate Productivity: Have a balanced diet including plenty of water, exercise regularly, and get 8 hours of sleep every day.

Positionality Statement: I’m fairly privacy conscious and like the idea of open-source tools, but I much prefer things that work out of the box. I’m not against AI tools for research, but I limit my personal use and thus don’t know much about how they compare. I also have the unusual affliction that makes me immune to doomscrolling, so you won’t find anti-doomscroll apps here.

Now that we have all that out of the way, we can look at some fun productivity tools to optimize your work as little or as much as you want to.

Citation Manager

• ReadCube Papers: Pretty solid if you want a document organizer and citation generator all in one platform. $60USD per year.
• Zotero: Slightly complicated to use but open-source and free to use. I’m thinking of switching over from ReadCube myself.

Document Manager

• Obsidian: Infinitely customizable text platform with a massive international open-source community. Free to use and fairly straightforward, but requires a teeny tiny bit of tech savviness.

Time Tracking

• Toggl: For people that get a cold sweat at 3PM because, all of the sudden, the day’s mostly over and you’ve barely done anything. This will help become more conscious of your time use. Free to use with upgrades available.

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