Articles Tagged with Case Law

HT to Professor Peter Martin who posts in his blog, Citing Legally, the news that, as of January 1, 2014, “sixty years after the Oklahoma Supreme Court designated the West Publishing Company as the ‘official publisher’ of its decisions, it [has] revoked that designation.”  Going forward, the electronic versions of Oklahoma appellate court decisions rendered after January 1st and posted on the State’s Court Network are now deemed “official.”  Read more of Professor Martin’s post here.  Way to go Oklahoma — You’re O-K!

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.

The Administrative Office of the US Courts issued a press release last week announcing that a “New Pilot Project Will Enhance Public Access to Federal Court Opinions.” According to the statement, select federal appellate and district courts will make their published opinions available on FDSys, as “FDSys can provide the public with a robust search engine that can search common threads across opinions and courts.” FDSys is run by the Government Printing Office (GPO), which issued a similar statement.

Let me start by saying I think this is a good thing. PACER has a lot of limitations, and moving opinions into a better search engine that is free to use and search is quite helpful. I like the idea of putting the bulk of government legal material (cases, codes, memos, etc.) into one database. It helps that the database will have the imprimatur of government on it, which will quiet the concerns about authentication that always pop up in these discussions.

Hi Friends!

Today Cicely and I are pleased to announce Justia’s newest free law offering:   FREE Daily Opinion Summaries of all Federal Circuit Courts of Appeal and select State Supreme Courts!

Our Daily Opinion Summaries deliver clear, concise summaries of breaking court opinions right to your in-box. The summaries are tagged by practice area so that readers can quickly identify which opinions are relevant to their practice. This is a powerful tool for attorneys, journalists, and others looking to keep up with latest developments in the law. All summaries are written by licensed attorneys.

How to subscribe

To subscribe, visit the Justia Subscriptions Page at Daily.Justia.com. If you already have a Justia account, sign in to subscribe right away. If you are not yet registered, it’s fast and free!  Once registered, simply choose the jurisdictions and practice areas of interest to you.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday have come and gone, but there’s still time to get terrific gifts for lawyers and clients.  Here are some of our favs:

• The Apple iPad —  It’s sleek, small, and über cool. It holds nifty free legal apps like Fastcase to find state and federal statutes and cases and Oyez’s PocketJustice that let’s lawyers listen to Supreme Court oral arguments.  When your attorney friend is done raging at opposing counsel’s latest outrageous offer to their client, the attorney can vent his or her anger by playing Angry Birds or Star Wars Falcon Gunner. Plus, it makes them (and everyone they meet) think that they’re a swell lawyer, right?
• Adopt a Volume of the Federal Reporter — No, we’re not crazy (at least not all the time)!  For $1,200, you can actually make a tax-deductible donation to Public.Resource.Org to support scanning a volume or two of the first series of the Federal Reporter of the United States in the name of your favorite lawyer or law firm.  The donation is to help them “adopt” a volume of federal case law  from 1880 – 1924 that is now in the public domain.

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,

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,

As public domain information hero Carl Malamud is working on getting case law online and into the public domain (we have helped a bit :). Carl, donors, and the Public.Resource.org team have done a lot and… more to come…

But in addition to case law, Carl has also been working to get other public legal documents online and into the public domain. These documents include the legislative histories of the laws. So this was interesting… it looks like Thomson-West has signed an exclusive agreement with the GAO to have these legislative histories on WestLaw.

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.