Articles Tagged with free law

2010 was a busy legal year, especially for free law advocates.  Here are some of Justia’s legal predictions for 2011:

• Lawyers and legal professionals will continue to embrace free law as fast as our Law.gov movement friends can crank it out.  Free law will continue its dramatic growth, and Justia remains proud to support the efforts of Carl Malamud’s work at Public.Resource.Org, along with Google, Fastcase, LII and other friends.
• SCOTUS will grant certiorari after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit renders a decision either affirming or denying a lower court ruling that California’s ban against same-sex marriage is unconstitutional.

2010 is almost gone–it’s been a very eventful year here at Justia. Indulge us while we review this year’s contributions to legal information on the internet. And, we are getting plans ready for 2011–if you have any ideas about things you’d like to see at Justia.com, please let us know in the comments!

Free Law!!

First of all– we have to talk about Law.gov. This movement really took off in 2010, and we are very proud to have been a part of the effort. There have been meetings and conferences across the United States, from which a Principles and Declaration was drafted. Google granted Public.Resource.Org $2M in furtherance of the law.gov effort, and most recently, the Report of Current Opinions was announced. RECOP will distribute current caselaw from the 50 states and the federal courts freely on the internet.

Great news, friends! Starting in 2011, Public.Resource.Org will release a Report of Current Opinions (RECOP) on a weekly basis. The Report will include a FREE HTML feed of ALL slip and final opinions from the appellate courts of the 50 states and the federal government. The feed will be available for reuse under a CC CC-Zero license, and will include page numbers. For more details, read Carl Malamud’s announcement on O’Reilly Radar. This is one of the major projects that Public.Resource.Org has undertaken since being awarded the Google 10^100 Grant in September.

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!)

In light of Justia’s commitment to “free law”, we wanted to make sure to note last week’s announcement that Google, in partnership with the USPTO, now provides bulk access to current US patent applications and grants.  As noted by Richard Jefferson in his “Science as Social Enterprise” blog, until recently the bulk data available to users was incomplete in that it did not contain 2010 materials.  However, users can now download comprehensive 2010 “Redbook” format data for free, considered the “gold standard” of patent data (and previously sold for thousands of dollars).  Check what’s available in USPTO bulk downloads on Google yourself or search the entire image database of U.S. patents from 1790s to the present at Google patents.

Related Press Releases / Articles

“USPTO Teams with Google to Provide Bulk Patent and Trademark Data to the Public”

Part of our work here at Justia is the promotion of  “free law,” through which we’ve had the opportunity to engage in projects and partnerships that support free online access to primary and secondary source legal materials for legal practitioners and lay people alike.  In that regard, we were excited to participate in the many Law.gov work shops put together by Carl Malamud at Public.resource.org held all over the United States earlier in the year.  We have also been introduced to some cool librarians who are increasing open access to legal scholarship by creating and promoting The Durham Statement which, “calls for all law schools to stop publishing their journals in print format and to rely instead on electronic publication coupled with a commitment to keep the electronic versions available in stable, open, digital formats.”

This week, Duke University will host a one-day work shop co-sponsored by the J. Michael Goodson Law Library at Duke Law School, the Center for the Study of the Public Domain and Harvard Law Library titled  Implementing the Durham Statement:  Best Practices for Open Access Law Journals. The work shop, primarily aimed at student law review editors, law librarians, law review advisers, and publishers (but also for anyone interested in open access and legal publishing) will cover issues and best practices for law journals to consider as they migrate to electronic publishing.  While registration for the conference is now closed, we encourage you to watch the free live web cast of the proceedings on Friday, October 22nd.  You can also post comments or questions remotely, some of which moderators will share with the participants.  For those of you unable to catch the live web cast, the proceedings will also be archived and posted online.

Hi Friends,

As many of you know (at least those in the Open Government & Law Groups), Free Public Information Hero Carl Malamud and Public.Resource.org have been working to get state codes, building codes, electrical codes and other state and city codes online for free… sort of a virtual city of free codes.

You can, right now, download these codes here on Public.Resource.org or through the Internet Archive. As a California bonus, you can also download the California Code of Regulations.

Hi Friends,
Oregon’s Legislative Counsel Committee had a meeting this morning to discuss the copyright claim on the Oregon Revised Statutes. After taking legal counsel from Dexter Johnson, talking with Karl Olson, Carl Malamud, three Oregon citizens and myself, they unanimously voted to not to enforce any copyright claims on the Oregon Revised Statutes. This is great!!!

Carl Malamud presents Oregon Senate President Courtney the “Seal of Approval”

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,

Our friend & hero Carl Malamud stopped by the “Justia offices” to talk about his new public interest public information project…. making the case law and codes of the United States of America (state and federal) freely accessible in a public domain archive. See Tim O’Reilly’s blog post on Carl’s project (and read the comments from other big names in the free law space, including Cornell’s Tom Bruce and HyperLaw’s Alan Sugarman 🙂 This archived data can then be used and worked on by the folks at Cornell, Google, Stanford…. and everyone!

Carl’s high energy, amazing track record of success of making government information freely accessible (EDGAR, Patents, Smithsonian, CSPAN, Congressional Hearings…), connections with the technology, educational, political and online information communities will help make free case law happen. We are excited to be helping and we are giving our full support!