Courtney Minick

Great news, friends! Starting in 2011, Public.Resource.Org will release a Report of Current Opinions (RECOP) on a weekly basis. The Report will include a FREE HTML feed of ALL slip and final opinions from the appellate courts of the 50 states and the federal government. The feed will be available for reuse under a CC CC-Zero license, and will include page numbers. For more details, read Carl Malamud’s announcement on O’Reilly Radar. This is one of the major projects that Public.Resource.Org has undertaken since being awarded the Google 10^100 Grant in September.

I was researching case law on state court websites recently and surveying what’s out there and who’s publishing what, when I encountered something totally surprising: public domain citation formats. I thought I was pretty up-to-date on free law and access to public information, but I had never heard of this. I turned to my colleague Cicely, the Citation Geek, and asked her if she had heard of it. She was surprised, too.

It turns out that starting in 1996, state courts began creating their own citation systems, adding paragraph numbers to their opinions, and requiring citation to these opinions in their rules.  The formats are called by various names: vendor neutral, universal, media neutral, and public domain. The citations are “vendor neutral” because they do not cite to a commercial reporter. They are “media neutral” because they can be used to cite electronic material (electronic access to public information was just ramping up in the late 90’s). They are “universal” and “public domain” because you do not need to rely on commercial publishers to get the official citation.

It’s been a fun month at Justia. We launched our new Justia Legal Answers service, and we’ve been hard at work adding free law (shhh, we’ll tell you all about it soon). And of course, we’re still blogging and Facebooking [ed: not a word] away.

Here’s a sampling of the content that generated the most buzz on our Facebook page and this blog.

The highest number of page views and comments this month was for Nick’s Introduction to Wizarding Law. Everyone loves Harry Potter–and who knew there was a legal angle there? Great stuff!

These presents aren’t going to wrap themselves, folks.

You’re at work, but you’re on Amazon and Overstock searching for deals, right? It’s Cyber Monday–the online equivalent of Black Friday, where the web stores are jammed with consumers distracted at work. Amazon and Target even have special sales on this day and advertise with the adwords “Cyber Monday.”

I guess I’m a scrooge [ed: Ebeneezer Scrooge was a banker, not a lawyer], but the first thing I thought of was how much tax money the state governments were going to get screwed out of today. And thus, a blog post was born.

It turns out that a 1992 US Supreme Court Case, Quill Corp. v. North Dakota 504 U.S. 298 (1992) held that retailers are exempt from collecting sales taxes in states where they have no physical presence (nexus), such as a store, office, or warehouse. The case dealt with a catalog/mail order business, but it has since been applied to Internet retailers. The Court felt that requiring businesses to collect sales tax from 50 states with different rules would amount to an undue burden on interstate commerce.

The New York Times ran a fascinating story this week about third-party financiers of lawsuits. The Times, together with the Center for Public Integrity, reported that third-party financing of contingency lawsuits is on rise. Specialized lending firms that cater to law firms have emerged, charging premium interest rates (from 15-24%). The funds are used to pay for increasingly complex and costly plaintiffs’ litigation. The Times reports that total investment in this arena now exceeds $1 billion.

Yeah–you read that right. $1B. This factoid in the article that really caught my attention–litigation financing is a big business, and how many of us really knew it existed? When I first read the article, I didn’t really know how I felt about this–except that it seemed like an ethical minefield, but appears to be above board in most states. The article is accompanied by commentary from a panel of law professors, who discuss some of these ethical issues.

OK, I know I totally missed the boat on this post–National Pro Bono Week was two weeks ago.  I was too distracted by Halloween to notice, but I have been thinking about writing this post for awhile. Better late than never, so here we go!

Doing pro bono work is good for the community and your bottom line. Law school taught us that we have a professional responsibility to give back and to promote professional goodwill toward lawyers. But, this post is not about the warm fuzzy feeling you get from helping people. Instead, I want to explain how volunteering can help your practice in substantial ways.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog or follow Justia on Facebook or Twitter, you may have noticed that in October we really picked up the pace on the Justia Law, Technology & Legal Marketing Blog. In the past, we used the blog to make announcements, cheer on fellow free law advocates, and occasionally talk about legal issues. This month, with a concerted effort and lots of whining about deadlines [me], we have been blogging daily, and covering a pretty wide range of issues and ideas. We’ve reviewed apps, movies, and judicial decisions. We’ve gone from Dora to DADT. We even got shout-outs from the Library of Congress and the ABA Journal.

Halloween is almost here–time to resurrect the ghosts of First Year Property Law past. . . with Stambovsky v. Ackley. This was my favorite case in law school, and I think about it every time I watch Ghost Hunters or Paranormal State. In a professional context, of course–don’t these people know what they are doing to their property values?! Who wants to disclose that their house was on a ghost reality show?

Stambovsky, as you may remember, attempted to rescind a housing sale contract on the grounds that the defendant seller failed to disclose to plaintiff buyer that the house was haunted. Because the seller publicized the “hauntings,” the house had a negative reputation in the community which affected the value of the home. Plaintiff, who did not live in the area, had no way to discover this reputation and the Court found an exception to the general rule of caveat emptor in real property contracts. It held that “as a matter of law, the house was haunted.” Stambovsky v. Ackley, 169 AD 2d. 254, 256 (New York App. Div. Dept. 1 1991). The opinion is full of colorful language:

On this day in 1966, the Supremes became the first all-female music group to attain a No. 1 selling album: The Supremes A’ Go-Go.

This little piece of trivia made us think of the “Supremes” of the legal world: the Justices on the Supreme Court of the United States. This term, for the first time ever, female justices compose one-third of the bench, and have the potential to contribute significantly to the Court’s jurisprudence. Many reporters have already speculated on how these female justices may shift the direction of the court and affect certain decisions.

Yesterday, we discussed some of the evidence presented at trial in Log Cabin Republicans v. United States of America et al., a case heard in the United States District Court Central District of California by Judge Virginia A. Phillips. Today, we continue with the court’s analysis and conclusion.

Analysis of Evidence and Findings of Fact

Based on the evidence presented, the Court found the following negative impacts from DADT:

Discharge of qualified servicemembers despite troop shortages

From 1993-2009, the Government discharged 7,856 servicemembers under the Act. Troop shortages in the midst of two wars are a pressing issue for the Armed Forces.