Articles Posted in 2011

Note: I wrote this post to help explain the concept of metadata and how it can be used to improve free primary law sources. This post focuses on statutes, next week I will discuss applying these principles to opinions.

The simplest way to explain metadata is “data about the data.” Metadata can describe, among other things, the purpose, date of creation, location, means of creation, and standards used in the data. For example, when you take a picture with a digital camera, the image also contains information about the camera used to take the picture, the time and date, image resolution, etc. When you upload that picture to, say, Picasa, you’ll see this information. Picasa knows what type of camera you used because that data is embedded in the image itself.

The Dewey Decimal System is an example of metadata. Along the spine of a book is a number. That number is associated with a classification system – placing it within a catalog of records that contains “data about the data” (subject, author, title, number of pages, publisher, ISBN number, etc.) which in turn helps patrons find what they’re looking for.

In an enlightening decision, a federal judge ruled this week that Las Vegas-based copyright litigation enterprise Righthaven had no legal basis to sue one defendant, Democratic Underground, because it didn’t even own the copyright it was suing over.

Chief U.S. District Court Judge Roger Hunt was particularly peeved to learn that Righthaven was trying to engage in legal slight-of-hand by purportedly having publisher Stephens Media, LLC assign it any right to sue for copyright infringement. This was impossible, the court concluded, because copyright law forbids assigning the right to sue over alleged infringement; “only the owner of an exclusive right under a copyright may bring suit.”

On Monday, the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Central District of California, in Los Angeles, made an unusual ruling for a bankruptcy court: it declared Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) unconstitutional. In that case, a legally married same-sex couple in California tried to file a joint petition for Chapter 13 bankruptcy. The U.S. trustee filed a motion to dismiss on the grounds that the two men were ineligible to file a joint petition because the federal government did not recognize them as married, and the bankruptcy code allows only married couples to file joint petitions. The court denied the motion to dismiss, concluding that no “valid governmental interest is advanced by DOMA as applied to the Debtors.”

Ballot initiatives in California run the gamut and ask the electorate to cast their vote, yea or nay, on a wide range of issues.  Recently, there has been a lot of press about one specific initiative we went to the polls to vote on (and passed) in 2008 – Proposition 11 — the Voters FIRST Act (“the Act’).  The Act authorized the creation of a fourteen-member Citizens Redistricting Commission that is now responsible, rather than elected law makers, for re-drawing the district lines for the State Senate, Assembly, and U.S. Congress.   The Commission is made up of five Republicans, five Democrats and four other members not affiliated with either of those two parties and will attempt to take some of the politics out of redistricting we’ve seen of late in states like Texas and Illinois.

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.