Hi Friends,

The team at FastCase has announced the largest free online US case law database at The Public Library of Law at plol.org. The site is GREAT! The database of cases includes all of the Supreme Court cases and US Court of Appeals cases since 1950 (the same data FastCase recently presented to the Legal Commons project) AND US state case law since 1997 for all 50 states in nice standardized searchable, and usable html format for all states (not the random state by state format many other sites have collected the data in).

Hi Friends,

Here comes the Legal Commons.

Carl Malamud and the team at Public.Resource.org with Larry Lessig and the Creative Commons gang got the FastCase deal done and the case law online. The cases include all of the Federal Court of Appeals decisions since 1950, and all of the US Supreme Court decisions.

Hi Friends,

More free case law has come online. PreCYdent has added 300,000 Federal cases to their database at http://www.PreCYdent.com. They have built in some nice community tools for commenting and rating the cases. And they have a new search engine that is focused on the link structure of cases. Bob Ambrogi’s initial take was that it is pretty good. They are calling their site a “true Alpha” and they are taking comments from all interested parties to improve it. I will test it out over the weekend before the Superbowl :).

It will all be and continue to be free. PreCYdent will support the company with advertising sales.

I found this photo of the U.S. Supreme Court on flickr, the photo-sharing website owned by Yahoo!. Sure, there are a lot of photos on flickr. However, this photo was uploaded by the Library of Congress. Is this the federal government’s entrée into social networking? What next? Barack, Hillary, John, Mitt and Mike “friending” us on Facebook? 😉 In all seriousness, this is a great step towards increasing the accessibility of our government resources. I find it so much easier to find photos on flickr than using the boolean search on the Library of Congress website. And, if you look very closely, you’ll only see 48 stars on the U.S. flag.

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Hi Friends,

Carl Malamud and Public.Resource.org have gotten together with Ed Walters CEO of FastCase and are happy to announce that they will be putting online an archive of US Appeal Court decisions since 1950 and all of the US Supreme Court cases since 1754. Here is their announcement.

We are waiting… but will not wait too long.

Hi Friends,

The new Stanford Copyright & Fair Use site is up 🙂 And I have not even gotten on the plane…

Hi Friends,

One of the biggest forces in free online legal information, Tom Bruce, Director of the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School stopped by to meet with the gang at Justia. It was great talking through ideas about the future of legal information. We are going to do some work together on new fun projects which will benefit the populations of the Internets 🙂 It is going to be fantastic!!!

Hi Friends,

Last night I had a good “trip” to the cage to add a new fast Web server for the Jurist Community and News Website run by Professor Bernard Hibbitts and his team. Ok… well technically I just watched my friend – Jurist’s Technical Director Jeremiah Lee put it into the cage. The switch to the new machine will happen in the next month or so… Here Jeremiah finishes configuring the Jurist machine (the top one on the right-hand side rack) in record time. The easiest install ever. And now Jeremiah can start programming away all the new kewl Jurist features to come 🙂

Peace,