Articles Posted in Legal Research

Now that November is in the rear-view mirror, it is time to start planning for the upcoming holiday season. If you are having problems coming up with the perfect gift for your family members or friends, consider the plight of those who have to buy gifts for the man who has everything.

For gifts that are worthy of the Most Powerful Man on Earth, you can browse the lists of gifts received by the President (as well as other federal employees) from foreign government sources for yuletide inspiration: 1993, 1994, 1995, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009.

However, the U.S. Constitution prohibits the President and other persons in office from accepting presents from any King, Prince or foreign State without the consent of Congress. Article I, Section 9, Clause 8. Accordingly, these gifts are disposed of pursuant to the regulations concerning the utilization, donation and disposal of foreign gifts and decorations. 41 C.F.R. § 105-42.5. Most gifts are sent to the Archives, transfered to the General Servies Administration or retained for display or official use.

Writ columnists Vik Amar and Alan Brownstein recently wrote an interesting article on the latest ruling in the litigation regarding Proposition 8, California’s anti-gay-marriage initiative. Using the process known as certification, the Ninth Circuit, in trying to figure out if the the proponents of Prop. 8 had standing to defend the case in federal court, asked the California Supreme Court for their input on “whether, at least as a matter of California law, initiative proponents enjoy some special capacity to represent the state’s electorate when public officials decline to defend a law adopted through direct democracy.”

This wasn’t the only case where the Ninth Circuit requested certification from the California Supreme Court. In fact, the Stanford Law School SCOCAL site has a whole chart about certification issues. This chart was created by attorneys at Hughes Hubbard and Reed (the family firm) and it tracks the questions of certification from the 9th Circuit to the California Supreme Court, with coverage from 1998 to the present, providing the text of the actual question or questions along with the associated 9th Circuit and California Supreme Court decisions. (Links to the full text of the decisions are also provided.)  To learn more about the resource, check out Erika Wayne’s post from Legal Research Plus and also check out the chart, here.

Our friends at CALI [Computer Assisted Legal Instruction] and Cornell LII have issued a series of helpful e-books for lawyers, law students, and anyone else who wants quick and free access to the Federal Rules. The Federal Rules of Evidence, Civil Procedure, and Criminal Procedure are available for free download on CALI’s site. The book’s are based on Cornell LII’s federal rules collection, and are current to December 2010. They include the Advisory Committee’s notes, a functioning Table of Contents, internal links and external links to the LII site. They are “DRM-free” which means you can read them on any device you choose.

This is a great free reference tool–download now!

A hat tip to our friend Ed Walters over at FastCase who alerted us to the news that Colorado has proposed adopting a public domain citation format for its Supreme Court and Court of Appeals published opinions. (Yay!)  By our count, this means there will now be seventeen states using some form of universal / vendor neutral citation for their court opinions.

A link to the proposal (in PDF) is here.  Public comments are welcome on the proposed changes but must be in by December 12, 2011.

Here is a rundown of October’s highest scoring lawyers on Justia Legal Answers, along with a look at which Onward blog and Facebook posts readers viewed the most.

Justia Legal Answers’ Top 10 Legal Answerers for October 2011

1. Dennis Chen, 1,360 points, 28 answers
2. Tanner Woods Pittman, 500 points, 10 answers
3. Rodney John Alberto, 910 points, 21 answers
4. Andrew Bresalier, 475 points, 17 answers
5. David Philip Shapiro Esq., 450 points, 9 answers
6. Paul Stanko, 400 points, 8 answers
7. J. Richard Kulerski Esq., 300 points, 6 answers
8. Evan Guthrie, 250 points, 5 answers
9. Jennifer Doerrie, 200 points, 6 answers
10. Lenore Tsakanikas, 200 points, 4 answers

It’s the fifth anniversary of Open Access Week and I thought I’d pull together some resources to mark the occasion for folks who might be interested in learning more about its impact on legal scholarship and free law. (NB: Hat tips to Sara Glassmeyer, Rob Richards and our peeps at Legal Research Plus!)

Buried in an announcement from the Judicial Conference today on standards and procedures for sealing civil cases comes news of an approved fee increase for PACER access:

The Conference . . . authorized an increase in the Judiciary’s electronic public access fee in response to increasing costs for maintaining and enhancing the electronic public access system. The increase in the electronic public access (EPA) fee, from $.08 to $.10 per page, is needed to continue to support and improve the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) system, and to develop and implement the next generation of the Judiciary’s Case Management/Electronic Case Filing system.

As readers of this blog, you probably already know that we at Justia are big fans of universal citation. With that said, I wanted to give you all a heads up that Courtney, in continuing to fight that good fight, has written a great piece on the topic which is now up  on Cornell’s VoxPopuLII blog. In it, she generally discusses media neutral citation and more specifically provides details of the work we’ve been doing here in applying universal citation to Justia’s corpus of state codes.  Head on over and check it out!

Additional Links & Resources

UniversalCitation.org – current movement 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.  This site also has links to lots of great resources on the history and work that’s been done in the field so far.

As Hurricane Irene moves up the East Coast, we thought it might be useful to pull some resources for those folks living in the projected path of the storm. To all our Justia friends & family in Irene’s way, we hope she weakens, veers off “to the right” and that all you’ll be doing at most during the storm is mixing up a batch of these. Best of luck and batten down the hatches!

Federal Resources

Hurricane Resource Center– from FEMA

• FEMA on Facebook
• FEMA on Twitter

The National Flood Insurance Program

• National Flood Insurance Program Insurance Agent Locator – from Floodsmart.gov
• National Flood Insurance Program Laws & Regulations
  • 42 USC Chapter 50 National Flood Insurance
  • 44 CFR Chapter 1 Emergency Management and Assistance
• FEMA Flood Insurance Library

Ready.gov — Resources and steps to take to protect yourself, your family and property.

NOAA – National Hurricane Center

U.S. Coast Guard

A hat tip to Rob Richards at the Legal Informatics Blog for alerting us that the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform Laws (NCCUSL) will meet on July 7th to consider adopting The Uniform Electronic Materials Act (the Act).  As Rob notes in his post, the Act aims to “establish uniform legal standards for the authentication and preservation of U.S. state legal information in digital formats.” The Act also touches on issues around accessibility, noting its importance in helping create informed citizens.