Nicholas Moline

Anyone who has ever searched the uspto.gov website has surely thought that the private sector could offer a better system.  Google agreed, and nearly a year ago struck a deal with the United States Patent and Trademark Office to make all of the data on patents and trademarks available not only to their own search engine, but in bulk format to other companies so that they could take the data and work with it.

We’ve been impressed with the work of Robb Shector on OregonLaws.org and WebLaws.org. Now, he’s made excellent use of the trademark data to create Quisitive, an iPhone app for searching trademarks in a new and very innovative way.

While Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows—Part 2 is the eighth and final film in the Harry Potter Series, its theatrical release does not signal the end of Pottermania. Instead, fans can continue enjoying the magical world of Harry Potter through Pottermore, an online interactive reading experience by J.K. Rowling.

Last week, Potter fans, such as myself, scrambled at all hours of the night to get one of the coveted 1 million early access slots to the new site, which is due to open in October.

Last November, I wrote Introduction to Wizarding Law to celebrate the arrival of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows—Part 1. I had fun writing the article and received some great comments (including some from a professor teaching a college class on the very topic), so I decided to write a follow-up now as the movie series winds down and Pottermore begins.

Warning: This article contains SPOILERS. If you are waiting to read the book or see the movie, don’t read on.

John Mayer, Executive Director of CALI

For the third year in a row, I’ve had the pleasure of being part of a delegation that represented Justia and the Free Law Coalition at CALICon, the annual Conference for Law School Computing^® from CALI (The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction).

This year’s conference was themed “Unbound,” which to CALI meant both the idea that boundaries to technology in legal education are falling away, and that the binding of books are becoming “electronically unbound,” which is certainly a theme we here at Justia can get behind.

Twice, I’ve reviewed PocketJustice by our friends at Oyez: a great app for the iPhone, iPad, and Android devices for researching US Supreme Court Cases. Despite the strengths of PocketJustice, it lacked an easy way to follow current Supreme Court developments. It seems our friends at Oyez were aware of that, and have decided to release another app called OyezToday. This app for the iPhone and iPod touch is completely free through a sponsorship from IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law.

Much of the app works just like PocketJustice in that it shares the same features: bios of Supreme Court Judges, an archive of cases, and oral arguments with transcripts that follow along with playback. Unlike PocketJustice, however, this app is limited to much more current cases.

In October, I wrote about the PocketJustice iPhone app from our friends at Oyez.  Since then they’ve released an iPad version (called PocketJustice HD) which takes advantage of the larger screen real estate to make researching faster.

Friday, they released both PocketJustice and PocketJustice Full for the Android Marketplace.  The Android version is much like the iPhone version, although thanks to Android phones having dedicated search and menu buttons, the Android version doesn’t waste as much screen real estate for a menu on the bottom of the screen.

Legal researchers in a hurry are also benefitted on the Android version by having access to Android’s voice search which allows you to say the name of a case and have your phone do the typing for you.

Today is Valentine’s Day, and we’d like to take this opportunity to write our valentine to the free legal information projects we love. We’ve talked about all of these projects before, but on this day that celebrates love, it seems a perfect time to praise them again.

Law.gov and Public.Resource.Org

All who love free legal information as much as we do, owe a great deal of gratitude to Carl Malamud of public.resource.org and to the many people working with him on the Law.gov movement. Even before creating the Law.gov project, Malamud had begun gathering free cases and codes and getting them online in a free public archive. We first blogged about his work back in September of 2007, but he has been working to make public domain resources truly public for years.

Over the last couple of years, he has spearheaded a movement to get the federal government to put all primary legal materials online in bulk on a suggested domain name of law.gov, following the similar federal project known as data.gov which contains bulk data from a variety of government resources. With funding from Google as part of their 10^100 project and the support of many including others listed here, we look forward to the day soon that all primary legal materials are truly free and available to all.

My friends and coworkers know that I’m a big fan of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. This year, interest in the boy wizard and his world was heightened by the spring opening of the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Orlando. (That’s me and my wife with the Conductor of the Hogwarts Express). Dozens of new Harry Potter toys and trinkets are available for purchase this holiday season. And, Harry Potter fans will be lining up tonight at their local cineplex to attend the midnight opening of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I.

In Deathly Hallows, Harry Potter finds himself Undesirable No. 1, a fugitive of the law, as the government of the Wizarding World has been taken over by the evil Lord Voldemort. This is not the first time that Harry has found himself at odds with Wizarding Law. In honor of the movie, I am going to look at the laws and legal system of Harry’s world. So, let’s hop aboard the Hogwarts Express to take our introductory course in Wizarding Law at Hogwarts.

Sometimes people mistake Justia’s mission, “To advance the availability of legal resources for the benefit of society,” as being only about advancing the availability of legal resources for lawyers, but society is much larger then the legal community. This week’s App of the week is free for the iPhone and iPad from our friends at Nolo, and it’s geared at making the often confusing landscape of legal terms easier to understand for everyone.

I am not a lawyer myself, nor have I gone to law school.  I came to Justia as a programmer.  While I have learned much about the law since I started working here in 2006, I still find myself constantly coming up against legal terms that I don’t know.  There are a few places I turn to find out what those words and phrases mean discreetly so when the lawyers in my midst say them I can pretend I knew what it was all along, and one of the best sources I’ve found is Nolo’s Plain English Legal Dictionary available for free at nolo.com/dictionary.

Today, the Justia Law, Technology & Legal Marketing Blog will begin a new series of articles focused on useful legal-related smartphone applications.  As my colleagues have mentioned, the United States Supreme Court is back in session this week, and as such it seems fitting to begin our App of the Week series with an application that’s all about the Supreme Court: PocketJustice by our friends at Oyez.

PocketJustice is currently available in both a free “Top 100 Cases” edition and a “Full Set” edition for $4.99 for the iPhone and iPod touch mobile devices. An iPad optimized version will be coming soon.

Both the free and full editions make it easy to find information about constitutional law cases decided by the US Supreme Court.