BlawgSearch is Justia’s law blog directory and search engine. While BlawgSearch can be used to explore new legal blogs, it really shines as a current awareness tool to keep you up-to-date on news and legal developments in your areas of practice or interest.

To take advantage of this feature, you can subscribe to one of our many category-based RSS feeds (e.g., criminal law or bankruptcy). These RSS feeds aggregate blog posts from numerous law blogs and can be read from your favorite RSS reader. Additionally, BlawgSearch allows you to create custom RSS feeds based on legal keywords or phrases, or citations to specific statutes, regulations or cases. This post will show you how to access these feeds to develop a collection of content relevant to your areas of interest and focus.

But, before we show you how to customize your feeds, let’s first make sure you know how to sign up for the general category feeds, and also explain some of your other options when viewing these feeds. From the Blawgsearch home page, select a category that is of interest to you. For example, if you are interested in civil rights law, click on the Civil Rights link.

Justia has launched a new legal portal for Mexico!

Justia Mexico provides legal information and resources for lawyers and consumers in Mexico. In keeping with Justia’s mission, these resources are all free, open, and shared.

The Justia Mexico portal provides access to Mexican Federal and State laws, including the Constitution of the United Mexican States, Codes, Laws, and Regulations.  The site also hosts legal information about the 32 Mexican States including State Constitutions, Codes, and additional government resources, such as demographic information. Justia Mexico allows pinpoint citations to the state codes. Currently, the Government only provides one PDF file for all of the laws in Mexico. Justia programmers have extracted the information from this PDF and broken it up into HTML text on our site. Now, users can quickly find and cite the specific section of code they need.

¡Justia ha lanzado un nuevo portal para México!

Justia México es un sitio web de recursos legales diseñado especialmente para los interesados en la legislación mexicana. Ofrece toda la legislación federal como la constitución, códigos, leyes, reglamentos entre otros documentos. También cuenta con recursos legales de nivel estatal, como las constituciones estatales, leyes y códigos, así como información estadística de cada entidad y links de interés hacia sitios gubernamentales.

Lo que hace al sitio de Justia México diferente de otros sitios, incluso los mismos sitios de gobierno, es la capacidad de navegar entre las leyes sin necesidad de descargar todo un archivo PDF. Esto es particularmente útil para investigaciones, o mejor aún para citar partes de la ley en blogs u otras paginas web, cosa que antes era imposible. Previo al trabajo realizado por Justia Mexico, la única forma consistía en hacer referencia al archivo de la ley completo (en formato PDF), en lugar de ir directo al punto del que se quiere hablar  con un link directo al artículo o sección de la ley.

Hi Friends,

Thanks Google for supporting free law … again 🙂 Last year Google Scholar gave the world free USA case law (with internal page numbers) and now Google has announced the first recipients of its Project 10^100 grants, including Public.Resource.Org.

To quote the Google announcement 🙂

Hi Friends,

The Virtual Chase, an online legal research website founded by law librarian Genie Tyburski, is now powered by Justia. The re-launched Virtual Chase features a new design, as well as additional online legal research and community resources for law librarians and other legal professionals.

Last week, the United States District Court for the Northern District of California unsealed the indictment in the United States of America v. Paul Shin Devine and Andrew Ang. The indictment alleged that defendants violated 18 U.S.C. §§ 1343, 1346 (wire fraud), 18 U.S.C. § 1349 (wire fraud conspiracy), 18 U.S.C. § 1956(a)(1)(B)(i) (money laundering), 18 U.S.C. § 1957 (monetary transactions in criminally derived property), 18 U.S.C. § 2 (aiding and abetting), and 18 U.S.C. § 981(a)(1)(C) (criminal forfeiture).

The indictment alleged that defendant Paul Shin Devine, a Global Supply Manager at Apple, used his position to obtain confidential Apple information, which he then transmitted to suppliers and manufacturers of Apple parts, including defendant Andrew Ang. In return, the suppliers and manufacturers allegedly agreed to pay Devine kickbacks, including payments determined as a percenage of the business they did with Apple. Devine then shared a portion of the kickbacks with Ang.

US v. Paul Devine and Andrew Ang

Hi Friends,

Thanks Google! Google has put FREE US case law online in Google Scholar 🙂 The US Federal case law database includes US Supreme Court opinions since 1 US 1 (pre – 1776), Federal Appeals opinions since 1 F 2d 1 (1924+), and many Federal District Court opinions from F Supp. Opinions from all 50 states are included since 1950. Internal page numbers are included, and cases are hyperlinked to other cases within each case. When observing a particular case, you can quickly see how the observed case has been cited (with the quote from the observed case) with links to the cases using the particular quote, in addition to a list of all cases citing the observed case.

Here are a few screen shots, but check it out yourself, and you may never return to this blog post 🙂

Hi Friends,

Tom Bruce, Dan Nagy and Deborah Schaaf from the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School stopped on by for some meetings with folks on new free information projects. The LII gang met with us, Nolo, Stanford and FreeGovInfo.info 🙂 And there was a talk on privacy on the Internet with David Schellhase & Michael Blum moderated by Kevin Haroff. Here are some pictures of Tom in action making things happen…

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.