Articles Tagged with Google

Last month, the Black Economic Council, Latino Business Chamber of Greater Los Angeles and National Asian American Coalition staged a protest at Google, demanding data on the racial make-up of its employees.

The specific dataset sought by the protesters was the EEO-1 Report, which is filed by all employers with 100 or more employees or certain federal government contractors with 50 or more employees. This report collects the race/ethnic, gender and job categories of employees, and is confidential. The EEOC estimates that this reporting requirement impacts about 45,000 private employers and imposes “599,000 burden hours,” costing respondents $11.4 million and the federal government another $2.1 million–that’s bureaucratese for time and money sink.

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.

Lately, I’ve been playing around with the Books Ngram Viewer from Google Labs. This experimental site displays how often searched phrases appear in publications scanned by the Google Books project over time.

For example, open government really jumped in the 1970s.

And, as you may have deduced, it correlates with the rise and fall of Nixon.

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”

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,

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,

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.

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Hi Friends,

We recently added the a FREE database of Federal District Court Opinions since 2004 that are available using the opinion report in the Federal Courts’ ECF. The database is updated daily.

Here is the URL for the Federal District Court Opinions: