It’s election day and all of us here at Justia hope you get out and vote! Given that we’ll have a new Congress at the beginning of the year, we’d like to point you to some iPhone apps you can download to keep informed on what’s going on in the U.S. Senate and House. Note: All of these apps are FREE.
C-Span Radio – Listen to Congressional hearings along with audio streams of public affairs programming from C-SPAN Radio, C-SPAN and C-SPAN2.
Recently, I had the chance to look through the online videos available at FedFlix. For those of you unfamiliar with FedFlix, it’s a joint venture between the folks at Public.Resource.Org and the National Technical Information Service (NTIS), a bureau within the Department of Commerce. Pursuant to their agreement, NTIS and other agencies, such as the National Archives, send public domain videotapes to Public.Resource.Org, which in turns digitizes the videos and uploads them to the Internet Archive, YouTube , and the Public.Resource.Org public domain stock footage video library. Public.Resource.Org then sends the videotapes back to the government along with a disc of the digitized video. At this point, the collection includes more than 1,500 videos from over 100 federal and state agencies and covers a wide-range of topics. For purposes of this post, I thought it might be interesting to browse through the available videos related to law, in particular the offerings from the Department of Justice, the Federal Judicial Center and the National Archives. What follows are just a few of the highlights from my search – check out more for yourself when you have time!
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.
Do you like free, quick access to case law and codes? Of course you do. What’s not to like?
With an iPad or iPhone, you can download the free Fastcase app to research state and federal court opinions, as well as find state and federal codes.
That’s right, it costs you and your firm nothing. Nada. Rien. Zilch. You pay nothing to get it, and nothing to use it. No other legal app out there gives lawyers and legal professionals this much portable legal research, convenience, and speed for virtually nothing.
Part of our work here at Justia is the promotion of “free law,” through which we’ve had the opportunity to engage in projects and partnerships that support free online access to primary and secondary source legal materials for legal practitioners and lay people alike. In that regard, we were excited to participate in the many Law.gov work shops put together by Carl Malamud at Public.resource.org held all over the United States earlier in the year. We have also been introduced to some cool librarians who are increasing open access to legal scholarship by creating and promoting The Durham Statement which, “calls for all law schools to stop publishing their journals in print format and to rely instead on electronic publication coupled with a commitment to keep the electronic versions available in stable, open, digital formats.”
This week, Duke University will host a one-day work shop co-sponsored by the J. Michael Goodson Law Library at Duke Law School, the Center for the Study of the Public Domain and Harvard Law Library titled Implementing the Durham Statement: Best Practices for Open Access Law Journals. The work shop, primarily aimed at student law review editors, law librarians, law review advisers, and publishers (but also for anyone interested in open access and legal publishing) will cover issues and best practices for law journals to consider as they migrate to electronic publishing. While registration for the conference is now closed, we encourage you to watch the free live web cast of the proceedings on Friday, October 22nd. You can also post comments or questions remotely, some of which moderators will share with the participants. For those of you unable to catch the live web cast, the proceedings will also be archived and posted online.
Most of us are probably familiar with The Library of Congress THOMAS web site – a terrific resource where you can find a wealth of federal legislative information dating back to the 104th Congress. While THOMAS is a great place to find current legislative resources, the Library of Congress (LOC) also has some really interesting online collections consisting of primary and secondary source legal materials relating to the formation of the United States. As well, the LOC provides an entire century of US Congressional documents, statutes, journals and debates in their Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation collection, which covers Congress from 1774 – 1875. Below are some links to help get you started on an exploration of these incredible archives.
This LOC exhibition and collection consists of the founding papers and documents of the United States. Browse through the various sections to see such things as a rough draft of the Declaration of Independence, James Madison’s notes on “the great compromise”, or the letter notifying George Washington of his unanimous election to the be the first President of the United States. The Exhibit is broken up into three main sections: Creating the Declaration of Independence, Creating the United States Constitution, and Creating the Bill of Rights.
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.
The 2010-2011 term of the U.S. Supreme Court begins this week. Below are some our favorite (and free!) online Supreme Court resources which can help you track cases, find opinions, locate news, analysis and other resources such as briefs and recordings of oral arguments.
United States Supreme Court Web Site
The official site of the U.S. Supreme Court provides docket information, an interactive Court calendar, a case citation finder, information on bar admissions, court rules and official opinions from United States Reports, 1991 – present, and much more.
Find free full text opinions of the court from 1791 – present at Justia’s Supreme Court Center as well as links to other Supreme Court resources and news.
The first Monday in October marks the opening of the 2010 term for the United States Supreme Court. During this week, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a number of cases, including one that examines the boundaries of the First Amendment.
In Snyder v. Phelps, Albert Snyder, the father of a deceased Marine had sued Pastor Fred W. Phelps, Sr., the Westboro Baptist Church and some of its members for defamation, invasion of privacy, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Plaintiff Snyder had lost his son, Marine Lance Corporal Matthew A. Snyder, on March 3, 2006, while his son was serving in the line of duty in Iraq.
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