Articles Posted in June, 2011

Continuing and growing our effort to provide legal research tools for people interested in laws and legal issues throughout Latin America, I’d like to introduce Justia Brasil (or “Brazil” para los norteamericanos). This is Justia’s first website in Brasilian Portuguese.

Folks, it’s pledge week here at the Justia Blog. Want to support free law? Donate to the Cornell Legal Information Institute!

The LII was the first law site on the Internet. It is dedicated to educating citizens and providing them with access to the laws that govern the United States. The LII provides federal law, editorial materials that help interpret and explain it, and technological support and innovation to help expand access. You have probably used the LII to look at the US Code–it presents a much easier, cleaner interface than the official government site. It also provides the Constitution,  C.F.R., Federal Rules, the U.C.C., and access to World Law. The site is well designed and organized, with excellent search features and true ease of use. It is both consumer and lawyer friendly.

America’s chief driving safety regulator effectively told a crowd of telematics executives that the National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration (‘NHTSA’) doesn’t like social media tools in your car.

“I’m not in the business of helping people tweet better. I’m not in the business of helping people post on Facebook better,” NHTSA Administrator David Strickland told attendees at Telematics Detroit 2011.

Nothing like a little convention tension to keep particpants on their toes.

The Bluebook is one of those fixtures—dare I say institutions—that professors, judges, and practitioners love to hate. Judge Posner recently (and famously, as his article “went viral” as much as one can among the online legal community) criticized The Bluebook as “a monstrous growth, remote from the functional need for legal citation forms, that serves obscure needs of the legal culture and its student subculture.” As someone who served as an executive editor of a top law review and whose job encompassed editing every footnote to conform to Bluebook rules, I was simultaneously amused and annoyed upon reading Judge Posner’s scathing diatribe. In my view, The Bluebook is on par with everything else about the law in its current and historic form: an ivory tower of “heretofores” and “thereins” inaccessible to most of those whose will it purports to embody. But more than merely perpetuating that characterization, The Bluebook actually achieves what the rest of the legal world has thus far failed to find—cohesion.

So, pretend you’re from Ann Arbor. Ever since you were a little boy (and we’re talking the Dark Ages . . . you know, the 1970s) you stood tall in your bell bottoms and Bobby Brady striped t-shirt against the surrounding swarm of Detroit Red Wings fans, forever dreaming of a Stanley Cup win by your favorite team, the Vancouver Canucks.  You spent years in the wilderness and suffered through Game 7 of the 1994 Stanley Cup Finals.  Recently, you’ve experienced the raised eyebrows of work colleagues as you amassed a collection of Canucks’ swag and made friendly t-shirt wagers with our resident San Jose Sharks super-fan @caminick.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court of Illinois announced that it will adopt a vendor-neutral citation system. According to the press release, the official citation of Illinois Supreme Court and Appellate Court opinions will change to a public-domain numbering and paragraph scheme.

Concurrently, the Illinois Supreme Court will also be discontinuing official printed volumes for Illinois state case law. “The official body of Illinois court opinions will now reside on the website of the Illinois Supreme Court, readily available  to lawyers, judges and law clerks for official citation and to any member of the public who wishes to read them.” This will save private lawyers as well as the court system quite a fair amount of money now that judges, law libraries and law firms will no longer have to purchase and store hundreds of printed volumes. For those concerned about authentication issues surrounding online case law, this should quiet your fears since the opinions will come directly from the courts themselves.

Here is a rundown of May’s highest scoring lawyers on Justia Legal Answers, along with a look at which Onward blog and Facebook posts readers viewed the most.

Justia Legal Answers’ Top 10 Legal Answerers for May 2011

1. Mark A. Siesel, 3475 points, 70 answers
2. Rodney John Alberto, 2,747 oints, 57 answers
3. Burton A. Padove, 2,680 points, 54 answers
4. Ryan P. Sullivan, 950 points, 22 answers
5. Andrew Bresalier, 701 points, 14 answers
6. Jeffrey D. Heck, 360 points, 8 answers
7. Robert James Reynolds, 350 points, 7 answers
8. J. Richard Kulerski Esq., 300 points, 6 answers
9. Eric M Wiechert, 300 points, 7 answers
10. David Philip Shapiro Esq, 281 points, 6 answers