Verdict – In mid-2011, we launched our new legal commentary and analysis web site, Verdict. Each weekday, one of our team of ten columnists provides original and informed analysis of breaking news and developments in the law. Articles from Verdict this year included John Dean’s look at The Tea Party, Neil Buchanan’s piece on tax cuts for the wealthy, Sherry Colb’s examination of whether strip searches by jail officials are constitutional, and Vik Amar and Alan Brownstein’s analysis of the recent Proposition 8 ruling by the California Supreme Court. Other great pieces covered a wide variety of topics including immigration, criminal law, civil rights, constitutional law, health care, new technologies, and U.S. politics.
Free Daily & Weekly Opinion Summaries – In 2011, we also launched Justia’s opinion summaries. The summaries are written by licensed attorneys and cover published opinions from the United State Supreme Court, the Federal Circuit Courts of Appeal and all 50 state supreme (or highest appellate) courts. You can sign up to receive daily summary newsletters by jurisdiction or, if you prefer, receive weekly summary newsletters grouped by practice area. We also created a variety of feeds which allow you to track new summaries via individual blogs, Facebook and Twitter. And announced just today, the summaries are now also available to all users of the Fastcase online caselaw database.
Facebook – This year we continued to launch more law practice and state law Facebook pages which combine links to breaking legal news, opinion summaries, legal commentary and more. To see a full list of all our Facebook pages, click here.
Google + – Justia set-up its very own Google+ page this year! You can check it out here.
Tech Law News – We recently launched our Tech Law News blog. In it, we highlight tech law stories of interest, as well as give readers a heads up on interesting new tech lawsuits and filings coming through Justia Dockets.
Universal Citation – In the Summer of 2011, we met up in Philadelphia with some of our Free Law heroes (including Peter Martin, Tom Bruce, John Joergenson, Ed Walters, John Mayer and Sarah Glassmeyer) for the first meeting of UniversalCitation.org. The group aims “to provide the organizational infrastructure needed to facilitate the adoption and use of a uniform set of media and vendor neutral citations that can be used for all American court decisions.” Courtney and I were so inspired, we began working with Justia’s engineers to insert media-neutral citation into Justia’s state codes. Courtney also wrote a post for VoxPopuLII describing our efforts.
Other 2011 Justia Highlights. . .
- Our Justia Mexico teammates moved into new offices which of course means one thing: more room for bean bag chairs. . .
- Justia’s Pugs, Sheba and Rio, continued to make new friends all over the world (over 150,000 and going strong!) connecting up via their Facebook page.
And now, it’s on to 2012 during which we’ll continue to work on cool new projects. Stay tuned and Happy New Year!