America’s chief driving safety regulator effectively told a crowd of telematics executives that the National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration (‘NHTSA’) doesn’t like social media tools in your car.
“I’m not in the business of helping people tweet better. I’m not in the business of helping people post on Facebook better,” NHTSA Administrator David Strickland told attendees at Telematics Detroit 2011.
Nothing like a little convention tension to keep particpants on their toes.
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.
So, pretend you’re from Ann Arbor. Ever since you were a little boy (and we’re talking the Dark Ages . . . you know, the 1970s) you stood tall in your bell bottoms and Bobby Brady striped t-shirt against the surrounding swarm of Detroit Red Wings fans, forever dreaming of a Stanley Cup win by your favorite team, the Vancouver Canucks. You spent years in the wilderness and suffered through Game 7 of the 1994 Stanley Cup Finals. Recently, you’ve experienced the raised eyebrows of work colleagues as you amassed a collection of Canucks’ swag and made friendly t-shirt wagers with our resident San Jose Sharks super-fan @caminick.
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.
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
36 U.S. Code § 116 requests that the President issue a proclamation calling on the people of the United States to observe Memorial Day by praying for permanent peace. Here are some photos and videos of how various Presidents and the people of the United States have observed Memorial Day / Decoration Day over the ages.
Memorial Day 2010: President Barack Obama laying a wreath at the Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery.
Credit: Pete Souza.
Who doesn’t like puppies? They are cute, adorable, and have a way of helping folks part with hard-earned cash in their wallets. Thankfully, more states are enacting stricter laws to regulate commercial puppy mills that breed dogs for profit, but often raise and house them in deplorable conditions.
Federal laws like the Animal Welfare Act (7 U.S.C. § 2131, et seq.) regulate some aspects of commercial dog and cat breeding, but they don’t go far enough.
Last week, Justia had the distinct pleasure of helping the Massachusetts Bar Association celebrate its centennial year during the Bar’s two-day annual meeting in Boston. A variety of events took place to highlight the Bar’s century of commitment to public service and the legal profession. I was lucky enough to be able to attend the Centennial Ball, which included a keynote speech by US Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.
The Justia Latinoamerica project seeks to provide legal research tools for persons interested in laws and legal issues throughout Latin America. Today, I want to share with you Justia Cuba, our website that compiles most of Cuba’s legal resources. This project posed some unique challenges in that some of the material was hard to find, Cuban web servers were frequently down, and access to these servers were further constrained by the limited bandwidth connecting Cuba to the outside world.
The folks at Justia traveled from Silicon Valley, California to New York City this past weekend to meet with clients and get a taste of the Big Apple.
We came to see our friends Tom Bruce and Paul Miller from Cornell’s Legal Information Institute:
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