Search Results for: PACER

It appears that court opinions in FDSys are being indexed by the search engines now. If you’ll recall, the GPO announced last year that it was importing opinions from some federal courts into its centralized database (FDSys). In theory, this means that users would be able to search across a large collection of government documents that will now include published court opinions.

FDSys now contains opinions from 28 federal courts, including 3 Circuit Courts of Appeal (the 2nd, 8th, and 10th). I am happy to see that these are now indexed by Google, so the opinions will appear among search results when individuals search the web. It’s one step closer to aggregating this information in one central location.

Of course, FDSys is still very limited. It’s only pulling opinions from a few courts, and it doesn’t seem to be up to date. I searched for a case from October (Windsor v. United States), and could not find anything. The GPO announced last year that its funding was cut, so this program may be stalled.

Carl Malamud of public.resource.org has a guest post on Boing Boing: Liberating America’s Secret, for-pay Laws. In it, he discusses the problem of laws that incorporate copyrighted technical standards by reference. Because the standards bodies that issue them are in the private sector, anyone who wants to view the standards (to comply with the law) must pay for a copy. Those copies can be very expensive; public.resource.org spent over $7,000 for copies of the corpus.

Here is a rundown of September’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 September 2011

1. Jon Matthew Martinez, 850 points, 17 answers
2. David Philip Shapiro, Esq., 500 points, 10 answers
3. J. Richard Kulerski, Esq., 380 points, 8 answers
4. Brian F. LaBovick Esq., 340 points, 8 answers
5. Herbert G. Farber Esq., 326 points, 10 answers
6. Andrew John Hawes, 280 points, 6 answers
7. Anthony J. Pietrafesa, 280 points, 6 answers
8. Mark A. Siesel, 250 points, 5 answers
9. Robert Neal Katz, 250 points, 5 answers
10. Mark Steven Humphreys, 200 points, 4 answers

It’s a bad week for government documents. OMB Watch recently reported that the House voted to cut funding to the Government Printing Office. This comes as no surprise, given the recent budget drama, and it’s not likely to get a lot of mainstream attention with looming cuts to entitlement programs and the military funding.

It’s important for those of us that advocate for government transparency and open access to take note, however. The GPO is the office tasked with preserving and disseminating federal documents. Cuts to its budget means less access to the law for people who can least afford to pay for it.

Here is a rundown of May’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 May 2011

1. Mark A. Siesel, 3475 points, 70 answers
2. Rodney John Alberto, 2,747 oints, 57 answers
3. Burton A. Padove, 2,680 points, 54 answers
4. Ryan P. Sullivan, 950 points, 22 answers
5. Andrew Bresalier, 701 points, 14 answers
6. Jeffrey D. Heck, 360 points, 8 answers
7. Robert James Reynolds, 350 points, 7 answers
8. J. Richard Kulerski Esq., 300 points, 6 answers
9. Eric M Wiechert, 300 points, 7 answers
10. David Philip Shapiro Esq, 281 points, 6 answers

I’m sure you’ve heard by now: the government is going to run out of money and “shut down” if Congress can’t agree on a budget before midnight tonight. Yes, Courtney, but how will it affect me?

Plenty of outlets are covering how this will affect the general public. Let’s talk about what our readers care about.

Given that some of our favorite Justia supporters and friends are law librarians and to help get us all into the holiday spirit of the season, we thought it might be fun to put together a list of library and legal-themed gifts for those folks who keep us on track and organized when it comes to legal research and information. (And for those of our readers who practice law, fear not. We have a separate list coming out for you this week as well!)

Hi Friends,

A few weeks ago the New York Times floated a rumor/great idea that Carl Malamud, the great hard working free information Internet do-gooder, was being mentioned as a potential candidate for head of the Government Printing Office. Of course, we at Justia cheered this idea on — who better to bring government publishing into the digital age than the man whose will and technology know how has lead millions of court decisions, SEC filings, patents, Congressional videos online and other public domain documents being brough online for all to research and enjoy.

Hi Friends,

JDSupra has officially launched and opened its site to the public today. The JDSupra site allows legal professionals to upload legal documents, memos, forms, filings and briefs and share them with the legal community. On the marketing front, lawyers and law firms can have their own detailed profile page that promotes their practice.

Many great organizations and firms have already started contributing documents, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Morrison & Foerster (my former lawyers at my previous company 🙂 and many many others.

Hi Friends,

We recently added the a FREE database of Federal District Court Opinions since 2004 that are available using the opinion report in the Federal Courts’ ECF. The database is updated daily.

Here is the URL for the Federal District Court Opinions: