We told you about our nice free case law summaries. Then we blogged that we were adding more. Well, today, my friends, we are done. We have all fifty states!
Now you can sign up and receive free summaries of court opinions for all state supreme courts, the US Supreme Court and all Federal appellate courts. Just go to http://daily.justia.com to register and sign up!
We also have over 60 practice area digests to choose from.
Tomorrow is national Take Your Dog to Work Day®, a phrase trademarked by a pet sitters’ industry group.
At Justia, however, every day is take your dog to work day, where the in-house dogs keep hounding us for more free law.
They:
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Administrative Office of the US Courts issued a press release last week announcing that a “New Pilot Project Will Enhance Public Access to Federal Court Opinions.” According to the statement, select federal appellate and district courts will make their published opinions available on FDSys, as “FDSys can provide the public with a robust search engine that can search common threads across opinions and courts.” FDSys is run by the Government Printing Office (GPO), which issued a similar statement.
Let me start by saying I think this is a good thing. PACER has a lot of limitations, and moving opinions into a better search engine that is free to use and search is quite helpful. I like the idea of putting the bulk of government legal material (cases, codes, memos, etc.) into one database. It helps that the database will have the imprimatur of government on it, which will quiet the concerns about authentication that always pop up in these discussions.
It’s that time, dear Justia readers, when we review some monthly lists. Here’s the scoop on April’s highest scoring lawyers on Justia Answers, along with a look at which Onward blog and Facebook posts readers viewed the most.
Justia’s Top 10 Legal Answerers for April 2011
CALI (Computer Assisted Legal Instruction) introduced the Free Law Reporter this week. The FLR is a database housing published (official) legal opinions that provides a simple search interface for research. According to CALI, “The goal of FLR is to develop a freely available, unencumbered law reporter that is capable of serving as a resource for education, research, and practice.”
The FLR is populated with opinions from the RECOP service. There’s been a little bit of controversy over whether the opinions are being used or adopted. The archive itself is not designed for caselaw research, it’s just a repository. The goal is to make the data freely accessible in bulk access. RECOP is not a research tool, in other words. It’s where sites that run research tools get the opinions.
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